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  Ballad of the Green Beret - The...

  Marc Leepson

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  The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn't The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" or the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine"—it was "The Ballad of the Green Berets," a hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam veteran, US Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. But Sadler's clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, and guns. Unable to score another hit song, he wrote a string of popular pulp fiction paperbacks that made "Rambo look like a stroll through Disneyland." He killed a lover's ex-boyfriend in Tennessee. Settling in Central America, Sadler ran guns, allegedly trained guerrillas, provided medical care to residents, and caroused at his villa. In 1988 he was shot in the head in Guatemala and died a year later. This life-and-times biography of an American pop culture phenomenon recounts the sensational details of Sadler's life vividly but soberly, setting his meteoric rise and tragic fall against the big picture of American society and culture during and after the Vietnam War.

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  SAS with the Maquis - In Action...

  Ian Wellsted

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  On the night of 5/6 June 1944, D-Day, a Lockheed Hudson dropped a small group of parachutists into the mountainous Morvan area of central France. Their mission was to operate as an advance reconnaissance party 400 miles behind the German lines and to make contact with the French Resistance.One of the team, later to become its commander, was Ian Wellsted, known by his nom-de-guerrre of Gremlin. During the next three months No.1 Troop of the 1st Special Air Service Regiment relayed vital information about enemy troop locations and movements, sabotaged bridges and supply lines, skirmished with German columns and harried the occupying forces as they retreated eastwards in the face of the Allied invasion.Camped deep in the woods of the Montsaughe region, the small force worked alongside the local groups of Maquis, forging strong links of mutual respect and friendship.Ian Wellsteds exciting first-hand account of his operations behind enemy lines is a tale of gallantry and daring, of comradeship and cooperation, full of humour and perceptive insight  revealing one of the most significant chapters in the history of the SAS.

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  Leadership - Lessons From My...

  Eddie Jones

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  What does it take to become one of the most successful coaches in the world?Eddie Jones is one of the most successful sports coaches of all time. From coaching three different nations to Rugby World Cup Finals and with a winning record with England of nearly 80%, Eddie Jones knows what it takes to lead and manage high performance teams. What can sport teach us about leadership?  For the first time, Eddie Jones shows just what it takes to be a leader in a high performance and high pressure environment and how these lessons can be applied to every walk of life, from coaching the U9 rugby team to leading a multinational organization to simply doing your job better.Have a voracious ambition to improve every day  As he explains the High Performance Cycle of Success at the heart of his philosophy, Eddie Jones reveals the lessons he has learnt from Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Pep Guardiola as well as from the founder of Uniqlo and Ron Adams from the NBA. He also gives a detailed analysis of his own performance as a coach as well as how he gets the best out of the players and coaches around him and what he saw in Tom Curry that no one else saw, which makes him think that he could be the next Richie McCaw.  Always start with the end in mindDrawing on stories of nearly thirty years of coaching, including the 2003, 2007, 2015 and 2019 World Rugby campaigns, the full story of England's 2021 Six Nations campaign as well as why it takes humour, humility and relentless curiosity to lead an eclectic mix of superstars from Maro Itoje to James Haskell, George Smith to Kyle Sinckler, to create teams that are relentlessly hungry to win, Leadership is the ultimate rugby book about what it takes to be the best.Written with Donald McRae, two-time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, Leadership is the book for anyone who wants to learn how to build and lead a team to success.

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  D-Days in the Pacific With the...

  Ken Wiley

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  An award-winning, personal account of US amphibious operations in WWII by a veteran Coast Guardsman—illustrated with photographs and drawings. 
   
  During World War II, Ken Wiley was a Coast Guardsman on an attack transport in the Pacific. In this work of historical memoir, Wiley relates the complex and often nerve-wracking story of how the United States projected its power across six thousand miles of ocean. Each invasion was a swirl of moving parts, from frogmen to fire support, transport mother ships to attack transports. In this vivid account, Wiley “brings the reader close to the experiences of another band of brothers,” from the camaraderie of young men facing unimaginable circumstances to the last terrifying stage when courageous soldiers stormed the beaches (Military Illustrated). 
   
  Wiley participated in the campaigns for the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, the Philippines, and Okinawa. He recounts each with a precise eye for detail, relating numerous aspects of landing craft operations, such as ferrying wounded, that are often overlooked. 
   
  Winner of the 2008 Foundation for Coast Guard History Book Award.

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  The Spy in Moscow Station - A...

  Eric Haseltine

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  The thrilling true story of the race to find a leak in the US embassy in Moscow — before more American assets are rounded up and killed.Foreword by Gen. Michael V. Hayden (Retd.), former director of NSA and CIA.In the late 1970s, the National Security Agency still did not officially exist — those in the know referred to it dryly as the No Such Agency. So why, when NSA engineer Charles Gandy filed for a visa to visit Moscow, did the Russian Foreign Ministry assert with confidence that he was a spy?Outsmarting honey traps and encroaching deep enough into enemy territory to perform complicated technical investigations, Gandy accomplished his mission in Russia but discovered more than State and CIA wanted him to know.Eric Haseltine's The Spy in Moscow Station tells of a time when — much like today — Russian spycraft had proven itself far beyond the best technology the United States had to offer. The perils of American arrogance mixed with bureaucratic infighting left the country unspeakably vulnerable to ultra-sophisticated Russian electronic surveillance and espionage.This is the true story of unorthodox underdog intelligence officers who fought an uphill battle against their own government to prove that the KGB had pulled off the most devastating penetration of US national security in history. If you think The Americans isn't riveting enough, you'll love this toe-curling nonfiction thriller.

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  Journeys and Explorations in the...

  Frederick Law Olmsted

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  "My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave States, gave me ... an impression that the cotton monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and although the written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth, upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression has become a conviction."
  He argued that slavery had made the slave states inefficient (a set amount of work took 4 times as long in Virginia as in the North) and backward both economically and socially.
  Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom was published during the first six months of the American Civil War at the suggestion of Olmsted's English publisher. To this he wrote a new introduction in which he stated explicitly his views on the effect of slavery on the economy and social conditions of the southern states.

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