True War

On November 23, 1942, German U-Boats torpedoed the British ship Benlomond, and it sank in the Atlantic in two minutes. The sole survivor was a second steward named Poon Lim, who, with no knowledge of the sea, managed to stay alive for 133 days on a small wooden raft.

Based on nearly 10 years of research in Italy, France, and Israel, including interviews with Gino Bartali's family, former teammates, a Holocaust survivor Bartali saved, and many others, Road to Valor is the first book ever written about the Italian cycling legend in English and the only book written in any language to fully explore the scope of Bartali's wartime work. An epic tale of courage, comeback, and redemption, it is the untold story of one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century.

Mayhem goes a long way toward answering questions that still linger about the notorious Boston Marathon bombing, such as: Where were the bombs made? And what had been Tamerlan Tsarnaev's relationship to the FBI? This engaging narrative casts a spotlight on the US government's relationship with the older Tsarnaev brother as his younger brother, Dzhokhar, continues his efforts to have his death sentence commuted.

In the boot were six homemade pipe bombs, all linked to detonate at the same time from a single call on a brand-new pay-as-you-go phone found on the target. Special Branch also found Chinese Type 56 assault rifles with eight full magazines of ammunition. His target was a local school. He planned to attack two coaches of teenagers returning home after a school trip to France. Approximately 60 children, their accompanying teachers and their waiting parents. He was going to kill them all.

In Double Crossed, historian Matthew Avery Sutton tells the extraordinary story of the entwined roles of spy-craft and faith in a world at war. Missionaries, priests, and rabbis, acutely aware of how their actions seemingly conflicted with their spiritual calling, carried out covert operations, bombings, and assassinations within the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine.

There was one submarine that outfought all other boats in the Silent Service in World War II: the USS Tang. Captain Richard Hetherington O’Kane commanded the attack submarine that sunk more tonnage, rescued more downed aviators, and successfully completed more surface attacks than any other American submarine. These undersea predators were the first to lead the offensive rebound against the Japanese, but at great cost: Submariners would have six times the mortality rate as the sailors who manned surface ships.

Today’s follower of Jesus exists at a moment when our desires, longings, and wants are being weaponized against us by cultural, spiritual, and relational forces. “Follow your heart” and “You do you” have become our moment's mantras. The Gift of Thorns, by A. J. Swoboda, addresses the core human problem: What in the world do I do with my desire?

Want the true facts of the '20s, '30s, and '40s? This is not just a book by historians, but by real people who lived in the best of times, the worst of times, and the most tragic times. I assigned my students to interview people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and the stories were so incredible, intoxicating, and captivating that I promised them I would write the best US history book using their great grandparents, relatives, and neighbors who lived during those crucial periods of United States history.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution.

The riveting true story of America’s first homegrown Muslim terror attack, the 1977 Hanafi siege of Washington, DC.

In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.

Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was a devoted family man and a psychopathic killer; a terrible enemy, yet a wonderful friend. While donating millions to the poor, he bombed and tortured his enemies - some had their eyeballs removed with hot spoons. Through ruthless cunning and America's insatiable appetite for cocaine, he became a multi-billionaire, who lived in a $100-million house with its own zoo.

Michal Goleniewski, cover name Sniper, was one of the most important spies of the early Cold War. For two and a half years at the end of the 1950s, as a Lt. Colonel at the top of Poland’s espionage service, he smuggled more than 5,000 top-secret Soviet bloc intelligence and military documents, as well as 160 rolls of microfilm, out from behind the Iron Curtain. In January 1961, he abandoned his wife and children and made a dramatic defection across divided Berlin with his East German mistress to the safety of American territory.

Lilia is a gripping, cinematic true story of resilience and survival set against the backdrop of Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s brutal occupation. Amidst war-torn chaos, a young girl and her family fight to endure unthinkable loss, betrayal, and the daily terror of Nazi rule. Stripped of childhood and forced to navigate an unforgiving world, Lilia clings to the only thing that cannot be taken from her—hope.

Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 to follow a dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. After watching Hitler roll over Poland and France, she enlisted to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret espionage and sabotage organization. She was soon deployed to occupied France where, if captured, imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Gestapo was all but assured.

Best-selling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul Child's experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II. She also details the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is a fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare.

By 1931, Anna Essinger had read Mein Kampf and knew that Hitler’s world view was violent, utterly destructive, and that many of her pupils in her small progressive school in Herrlingen, Germany were in terrible danger. She decided that in order to offer them a refuge, and a future, she must first move her school entirely out of the Nazis’ reach. So, she did just that, creating a safe haven in Kent, England.

Chief Warrant Officer Gary O'Neal is no ordinary soldier. For nearly 40 years, he has fought America's enemies, becoming one of the greatest Warriors this nation has ever known. Part Native American, O'Neal was trained in both military combat and the ways of his Native people, combining his commitment to freedom with his respect for the enemy, his technical fighting skills with his fierce warrior spirit.

David Burnett takes listeners into a unique world of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. His journey starts in a conventional army unit where he feels unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment drives David to pursue his dream of becoming an MH-47G Chinook helicopter crew chief in the best and most secretive aviation unit in the world. David faces hurdles and set backs trying to achieve, but he is more determined than ever. He is trained and ready to deploy with the 160th, and it is nothing short of intense.

In the early morning of February 10, 1962, James B. Donovan began his walk toward the center of the Glienicke Bridge, the famous "Bridge of Spies" that then linked West Berlin to East. With him walked Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, master spy and for years the chief of Soviet espionage in the United States. Approaching them from the other side, under equally heavy guard, was Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 spy plane pilot famously shot down by the Soviets, whose exchange for Abel Donovan had negotiated.