Western Wars

Raised by the Shawnee, Jamie Ian MacCallister fought his way to manhood on an odyssey that took him from the Alamo to Colorado to the goldfields of California. Now, the United States is divided against itself—North against South, brother against brother, father against son. With his own sons fighting on opposing sides, MacCallister leads his Confederate Marauders into battle from Georgia to Tennessee, from Bull Run to Shiloh. When the guns of war finally fall silent, a vengeful enemy vows to add another chapter to the bloodstained pages of history.

History called on Harry Truman to unite the Western world against Soviet communism, but first he had to rally Republicans and Democrats behind America’s most dramatic foreign policy shift since George Washington delivered his farewell address. How did one of the least prepared presidents to walk into the Oval Office become one of its most successful?

A harrowing tale of camaraderie, loss, and the dehumanizing brutality of war, All Quiet on the Western Front follows young German soldier Paul Bäumer as he endures the horrors of World War I. Erich Maria Remarque's timeless masterpiece exposes the devastating impact of conflict on the human soul.

From July 10, 1943, the date of the Allied landing in Sicily, to May 8, 1945, when victory in Europe was declared - the entire time it took to liberate Europe - no regiment saw more action, and no single platoon, company, or battalion endured worse, than the ones commanded by Felix Sparks, who had entered the war as a greenhorn second lieutenant of the 157th "Eager for Duty" Infantry Regiment of the 45th "Thunderbird" Division. Sparks and his fellow Thunderbirds fought longest and hardest to defeat Hitler.

In 1870s New Mexico, the territory is at a crossroads. The indigenous population is being driven out—and driven down—by the white settlers migrating west after the Civil War. The center of power isn’t the governor but rather the Santa Fe Ring, a group of wealthy politicians, businessman, and landowners who exercise power through organized crime, theft, graft, and murder. Their main source of income is a mercantile store in Lincoln known as the House.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6:45 a.m., Sunday, June 4th, 1944. He was 20 years old, un-blooded, fresh from a public-school background, and officer cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk; he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction.

It is the 20th century’s unrivaled epic: At a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his best-selling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted the history of how the American-led coalition fought its way from North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now he tells the most dramatic story of all - the titanic battle in Western Europe. D-Day marked the commencement of the war’s final campaign, and Atkinson’s astonishingly fresh account of that enormous gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows.

King George V predicted that his son, Edward VIII, would destroy himself within a year of succeeding to the throne. In December 1936 he was proved right, and the world’s press revealed the king was abandoning his throne to marry Wallis Simpson. A life spent in the shadow of his charismatic elder brother left the new king, George VI, magnificently unprepared for the demands of ruling the kingdom and empire. Drawing on personal accounts from the royal archives, Deborah Cadbury uncovers the very private conflict.

David Kilcullen was one of the architects of America's strategy in the late phases of the second Gulf War, and also spent time in Afghanistan and other hotspots. In Blood Year, he provides a view of the current situation in the Middle East and analyzes how America and the West ended up in such dire circumstances. This is an essential book for anyone interested in understanding not only why the region has collapsed into utter chaos, but also what the US can do to alleviate the grim situation.

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.

Almost 10 years ago, 18-year-old Colt McCrae was sent to jail for a crime he didn't commit. When his estranged father is murdered, he is released, and returns to Whiskey Hill, Wyoming. He's not welcome by everyone. Colt means trouble - because he knows who killed his father. Ruthless range baron Frank Drummond wants the land and will bury anyone who dares oppose him. But Colt is no longer a kid with a chip on his shoulder. He's a prison-hardened man with a mind for justice?

"A Trail to the West": Riding under an alias, Bowdrie joins up with Queen’s ruthless gang to rescue the pretty niece of a powerful Texas judge. "Love and the Cactus Kid": Folks far and wide know that the Cactus Kid can handle a pistol with the best of them. But for all his skill and coolness under fire, there’s just one small weakness he can’t seem to overcome.... "Medicine Ground": The Cactus Kid is on his way to the spring dance to meet his best girl, Bess O’Neal. As the Kid ambles through the lonely mountain trail toward town, two men emerge from the darkness - Miguel and Lobo Fernandez, of the menacing Fernandez brothers.

The Battle of Dunkirk, in May/June 1940, is remembered as a stunning defeat yet a major victory as well. The Nazis had beaten back the Allies and pushed them across France to the northern port of Dunkirk. In the ultimate race against time, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers were daringly evacuated across the Channel. This moment of German aggression was used by Winston Churchill as a call to Franklin Roosevelt to enter the war.

William Shakespeare's gripping play showed Caesar's assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, a generals' plot put together by Caesar's disaffected officers and designed with precision. Brutus and Cassius were indeed key players, but they had the help of a third man - Decimus. He was the mole in Caesar's entourage, one of Caesar's leading generals, and a lifelong friend.

Badger Kershaw was becoming a familiar figure on the frontier after the War between the States. Riding an Appaloosa with Lobo, his dog-wolf hybrid, often by his side, he was feared by most outlaws on the dodge on whom there was a bounty. It was not a savory profession, perhaps, but Kershaw was honest about what he did. Frontier lawmen for the most part were accustomed to dealing with Kershaw. When the fugitive was willing to surrender, Kershaw would bring in an outlaw alive, but it was not an option he encountered very often.

In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany's leading historian of the 20th century's first great catastrophe explains the war's origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora's Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the everyday tactics of dynamic movement and slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers.

Big Max Higgins ran the outlaw town of Hell's Creek up in the north Montana Rockies...and he decided to include the nearby town of Barlow in his cutthroat operation. What he didn't know was that Smoke Jensen was there with his wife, visiting relatives. It didn't take Smoke long to rout out the lot of them with angry fists and blazing guns...but Smoke didn't count on Big Max doing something as daring, desperate, and stupid as kidnapping his wife - and demanding the town of Barlow itself as ransom.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

History offers few records of war as vivid, haunting, and evocative as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. As enthralling to twenty-first century audiences as it was to those who first encountered the book in 1928, Remarque’s landmark tells the story of a young German volunteer who, with his comrades, moves from idealism to fatalism witnessing the horrors of mass killing and the intimate deaths of friends or the disfiguring survival of young men languishing in field hospitals.

Novelist and prizewinning historian Winston Groom's gripping history of the four-year battle for Ypres in Belgian Flanders, the pivotal engagement of World War I that would forever change the way the world fought - and thought about - war. This is Groom's account of what would become the most dreaded place on Earth.