Military Nonfiction

Argentina, 1960. A car speeds through the streets of Buenos Aires. Inside are four Israeli secret agents and their prisoner: Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals of Nazi Germany. In this detailed memoir, Rafi Eitan tells the story of his remarkable life and career. He describes how as a teenager, he smuggled Jewish refugees into Palestine, and how, as a spy in the newly established Mossad, he swam through sewers to blow up a British radar station. He goes on to describe in detail his involvement in the extraordinary hunt for the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

In the early morning of 20th April 1949, HMS Amethyst was fulfilling orders to travel to Nanking to stand guard for the British Embassy during the height of the Chinese Civil War when she was fired upon by guns from the riverbank. Shells pounded into the ship, killing the commanding officer and destroyed the bridge before the ship grounded on the bank. How did the Amethyst escape the battering of Chinese Communist guns?

Caren Stelson brings Sachiko Yasui's story of surviving the atomic bombing of Nagasaki to a young audience. Sachiko's family home was about half a mile from where the atomic bomb fell on August 9, 1945. Her family experienced devastating loss. When they returned to the rubble where their home once stood, her father miraculously found their serving bowl fully intact. This delicate, green, leaf-shaped bowl—which once held their daily meals—now holds memories of the past and serves as a vessel of hope, peace, and new traditions for Sachiko and the surviving members of her family.

September 11, 2001, did not represent the first aerial assault against the American mainland. The first came on July 17,1996, with the downing of TWA Flight 800. This book looks in detail at what people saw and heard on this fateful night. First Strike explains how a determined corps of ordinary...

Understanding the origins of civil wars and their trajectories therefore demands some appreciation of the economic, political, social, cultural, and geographic order of societies. If there is one factor that best predicts why a civil war erupts, it is a prior civil war. That is why knowledge of a country's history of political violence, and associated narratives about who is to blame and why, are critical to understanding where a civil war might next occur.

During Vietnam, the basic role of the USMC gunship squadrons was to protect the transport helicopters during medevac missions, troop insertions and extractions, resupply missions, and supporting the Marines on the ground during operations and patrols. Basically, whenever the Marines or South Vietnam friendlies got in trouble the gunships were dispatched to assist them.

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

In a gripping, moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of recently declassified documents and in-depth interviews, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin tell the remarkable drama that unfolded over the final, heroic hours of the Vietnam War. This closing chapter of the war would become the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out, as improvised by a small unit of Marines, a vast fleet of helicopter pilots flying nonstop missions beyond regulation, and a Marine general who vowed to arrest any officer who ordered his choppers grounded while his men were still on the ground.

From the jaws of defeat, incredible victories. AT ALL COSTS! transports you to the battlefront for over two centuries of astonishing military confrontations. From the Battle of Minden in 1795 to dramatic second world war stories and the Battle for Goose Green in the Falklands, Bryan Perrett...

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year The dramatic story of a South Carolina heiress who joined the OSS and became the first American woman in uniform taken prisoner on the Western front—until her escape from Nazi Germany. Gertrude “Gertie” Legendre was a big-game hunter from a...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A powerful selection of the letters Tom Brokaw received in response to his towering #1 bestseller The Greatest Generation. “When I wrote about the men and women who came out of the Depression, who won great victories and made lasting sacrifices in World War...

The bestselling author of The Limits of Power critically examines the Washington consensus on national security and why it must change For the last half century, as administrations have come and gone, the fundamental assumptions about America's military policy have remained unchanged: American...

An inside look at today's special operations sniper and an in depth look at the career of Chris Kyle from those who knew him and fought alongside him. Most people think of snipers as shooters perched in urban hides, dealing out death unseen from a considerable distance. But this description...

The abolitionist legacies of Orville Brown and his son, Spencer, live on in this historic and daring 19th-century account. Journeying apart from each other, but with similar passion, Orville and Spencer's stories span virtually every major abolitionist event: from the battles of Bleeding Kansas and the establishment of the free-soil movement to the river wars of Memphis, Vicksburg, and Shiloh. Listeners will follow Orville west as he strikes out for Kansas Territory to help ensure its entry as a free state.

This riveting memoir follows a Lebanese-Muslim-American and thirty-year US Marine veteran who suffered a six-month ordeal at the hands of a brutal regime in Yemen—and remained loyal to his country through it all. As air strikes carpeted Yemen's capital, Sam Farran was one of only a few...

Now available in paperback, this fourth book in the action-packed Guts & Glory series takes readers through the exciting and fascinating history of the American Revolution. Perfect for history buffs, reluctant readers, and fans of Hamilton! From George Washington crossing the icy Delaware, to...

John S.D. Eisenhower modestly explains General Ike as “a son's view of a great military leader—highly intelligent, strong, forceful, kind, yet as human as the rest of us.” It is that, and more: a portrait of the greatest Allied military leader of the Second World War, by the man who knew...

The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was Europe's most destructive conflict prior to the two world wars. Two of European history's greatest generals faced each other at Lutzen in November 1632, midway through this terrible war. This book is the first to combine analysis of the battle itself with an assessment of its cultural, political, and military legacy, and the first to incorporate recent archaeological research within a reappraisal of the events and their significance.

Dovey Johnson Roundtree was most famous for her successful defense of an indigent Black man accused of the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a prominent White Washington, DC, socialite, in 1965. Despite her triumph in this high-profile case, Roundtree continued to represent the poor and the underserved. She was the first lawyer to bring a bus-desegregation case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, clinching the ruling that enabled Robert F. Kennedy to enforce bus integration. She was also among the first Black women to enter the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

The captivating account of how Clint Lorance, a soldier who became a scapegoat for a corrupt military hierarchy, was falsely charged with war crimes, imprisoned, and eventually pardoned by President Trump. While out on patrol in Afghanistan, Clint Lorance learned that two men, both suspected...