Other books that might interest you

• 

  Common Sense

  Thomas Paine

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir,” wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had.

  Show book

• 

  The French at...

  Andrew W. Field

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This invaluable record presents newly translated, firsthand accounts of Waterloo from French soldiers who fought on the frontline. 
   
  With this volume, Andrew Field completes his pioneering work on the French experience in this decisive battle. Readers can now engage with these vivid, ground-level accounts and compare them to the narratives based largely on the British perspective. They will also gain new insight into the trauma that the French experienced on the battlefield and afterward. 
   
  This volume follows The French at Waterloo—Eyewitness Accounts: Napoleon, Imperial Headquarters, and 1st Corps. It features graphic descriptions of the battle as remembered by men of the 2nd and 6th corps, cavalry, artillery and Imperial Guard and medical services of Napoleon’s army. Their words give us not only an inside view their actions, but they also record in graphic detail what they saw and how they reacted to Napoleon’s historic defeat.

  Show book

• 

  Barrel of a Gun - A War...

  Al J. Venter

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A colorful, wide-ranging memoir of danger and adventure in wars around the world. 
   
  Anybody who says that the pen is mightier than the sword hasn’t spent time in Somalia . . . 
   
  So begins this memoir of a career spent examining warfare—on the ground and as the bullets are flying. While many are intrigued by these violent conflicts, Al Venter feels compelled to see them in person, preferably at the center of the action. 
   
  Born in South Africa, Venter has found no shortage of horrific battles on his own continent, from Rhodesia to Biafra and Angola to Somalia. He has ridden with the legendary mercenary group Executive Outcomes; jumped into combat with South Africa’s crack Parachute Regiment, the Parabats; and traipsed through jungles with both guerrillas and national troops. During Sierra Leone’s civil war, he flew in the government’s lone Mi-24 helicopter gunship as it blasted apart rebel villages and convoys, complaining that the Soviet-made craft leaked when it rained. 
   
  In the Mideast, he went into Lebanon with the Israeli army as it encountered resistance from multiple militant groups, including the newly formed Hezbollah. Curious about the other side of the hill, he joined up with General Aoun’s Christian militias while that conflict was at its height. Touching down in Croatia during the Balkan wars, and in Congo during their perpetual one, as well as the Uganda of Idi Amin, Venter never lost his lust for action, even as he sometimes had to put down his camera or notebook to pick up an AK-47. 
   
  In his journeys, Venter associated with an array of similarly daring soldiers and journalists, from “Mad Mike” Hoare to Danny Pearl, as well as elite soldiers from around the world, many of whom, he sadly relates, never emerged from the war zones they entered. A renowned journalist and documentarian who has worked with the BBC, PBS, Jane’s, and other outlets, Al Venter here offers the reader his own personal experiences with combat.

  Show book

• 

  Bones of Belonging - Finding...

  Annahid Dashtgard

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In this exceptional book, inclusion leader Annahid Dashtgard shares her experiences looking for and teaching about belonging in our divided world. Through moving and deft interlocking stories, Dashtgard examines what it means to belong—to a country, in a marriage, and in our skin—and the price we pay when that belonging is absent.

  Show book

• 

  The Road to Unafraid

  Dean Merrill, Jeff Struecker

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Jeff Struecker, a "Black Hawk Down" hero, the Army's Top Ranger, now an Army Chaplain, relates his own tales from the frontlines of every U.S. initiative since Panama, and tells how God taught him faith from the front in fear-soaked times. As readers go on-mission with Struecker through his harrowing tales, they will learn how to face their own fears with faith in a mighty God. Just as he told one of his charges in Mogadishu: "The difference between being a coward and a hero is not whether you're scared, it's what you do while you're scared."

  Show book

• 

  Forward from Here - Leaving...

  Reeve Lindbergh

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  In her funny and wistful new book, Reeve Lindbergh contemplates entering a new stage in life, turning sixty, the period her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, once described as "the youth of old age." It is a time of life, she writes, that produces some unexpected surprises. Age brings loss, but also love; disaster, but also delight. The second-graders Reeve taught many years ago are now middle-aged; her own children grow, marry, have children themselves. "Time flies," she observes, "but if I am willing to fly with it, then I can be airborne, too." A milestone birthday is also an opportunity to take stock of oneself, although such self-reflection may lead to nothing more than the realization, as Reeve puts it, "that I just seem to continue being me, the same person I was at twelve and at fifty." At sixty, as she observes, "all I really can do with the rest of my life is to...feel all of it, every bit of it, as much as I can for as long as I can."  Age is only one of many subjects that Reeve writes about with perception and insight. In northern Vermont, nature is an integral part of daily life, especially on a farm. Whether it is the arrival and departure of certain birds in spring and fall, wandering turtles, or the springtime ritual of lambing, the natural world is a constant revelation.  With a wry sense of humor, Reeve contemplates the infirmities of the aging body, as well as the many new drugs that treat these maladies. Briefly considering the risks of drug dependency, she writes that "the least we [the "Sixties Generation"] can do for ourselves is live up to our mythology, and take lots of drugs." Legal drugs, that is -- although what sustains us as we grow older is not drugs but an appreciation for life, augmented by compassion, a sense of humor, and common sense.  And of course there is family -- especially with the Lindberghs. Reeve writes about discovering, thirty years after her father's death and two and a half years after her mother's, that her father had three secret families in Europe. She travels to meet them, learning to expand her self-understanding: "daughter of," "mother of," "sister of" -- sister of many more siblings than she'd known, in a family more complicated than even she had imagined. Forward from Here is a brave book, a reflective book, a funny book -- a book that will charm and fascinate anyone on the journey from middle age to the uncertain future that lies ahead.

  Show book