Riveting, first-person accounts that put the reader in the cockpit Dozens of photographs of the planes and the pilots that flew and fought in the skies from Tokyo to Berlin Find out what it was like to fly some of the all-time classic aircraft of World War II, including the P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, P-47 Thunderbolt, P-38 Lightning, P-40 Kittyhawk, and many more!

Robin Higham is a veteran of the Royal Air Force and professor emeritus of history at Kansas State University. Former editor of Aerospace Historian, he has written or edited numerous works on aviation history.

Flying American Combat Aircraft of WW II: 1939-1945 (Stackpole Military History Series) ...

Peter Connolly is renowned for his scholarship of the ancient world as well as being a highly respected artist. He is the author of The Greek Armies, The Roman Army, The Roman Cavalry and The Ancient City.

A revised edition of this guide to twelve centuries of military development. Connolly combines a detailed account of the arms and armies of Greece and Rome with full color artwork.Greece and Rome at War

Early Roman Warrior 753-321 BC

“I wholeheartedly recommend this title as indispensable to all Ancient wargamers” — Miniature Wargames

Osprey’s survey of early Roman warriors from 753 to 321 BC. The prototypical ‘Roman Legionnaire’ often seen on television and in movies is actually the product of nearly a millennium of military development. Far back in the Bronze Age, before the city of Rome existed, a loose collection of independent hamlets eventually formed into a village. From this base, the earliest Roman warriors launched cattle raids and ambushes against their enemies. At some point during this time, the Romans began a period of expansion, conquering land and absorbing peoples. Soon, they had adopted classical Greek fighting methods with militia forming in phalanxes. This book covers the evolution of the earliest Roman warriors and their development into an army that would eventually conquer the known world.

Early Roman Warrior 753-321 BC ...

A New York Times Bestseller

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition. But in autumn 2002, one semester short of graduating and newly married, he was called to active duty on the front lines in Iraq. In a voice at once raw and immediate, Crawford vividly chronicles the daily life of a young soldier in Iraq and the transformation of innocent young men into something entirely different.

Having joined the National Guard for the tuition benefits, Crawford, like many of his contemporaries, never expected to do any heavy lifting. Early on, he admits his is “the story of a group of college students… who wanted nothing to do with someone else’s war.” But when his Florida National Guard unit was activated, he was shipped to Kuwait shortly before the invasion of Iraq. Armed with shoddy equipment, led by incompetent officers and finding release in the occasional indulgence in pharmaceuticals, Crawford cared little for the mission and less for the Iraqis. “Mostly we were guarding gas stations and running patrols,” he explains. As for Iraqi civilians, “I didn’t give a shit what happened to any of them,” he confesses after inadvertently saving an Iraqi boy from a mob beating. Crawford’s disdain grows with each extension of his tour, and he leaves Iraq broke, rudderless and embittered. Unfortunately, Crawford dresses up his story in strained metaphors and tired clichés such as “truth engulfed me like a storm cloud” and “you can never go back home.” Despite its pretensions, Crawford’s story is not the classic foot soldier’s memoir and should provide enough gristle to please military memoir fans.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“A savage, gritty, and compelling work that reveals the true cost of the Iraqi adventure.”
– James Crumley –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“A savage, gritty, and compelling work that reveals the true cost of the Iraqi adventure.”
– James Crumley –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier’s Account of the War in Iraq...

As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger’s Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man’s mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art. ...

Jack Todd made a fateful decision in 1969. A farm boy from a time and place where the obligation to serve in the military was taken for granted, Todd had just completed basic training at an army post near Seattle when he opted to take a Vietnam-veteran friend’s advice and slip across the border into British Columbia rather than risk his life fighting in an unpopular war. His life in Canada was by no means easy; he spent time on Skid Row among fellow deserters and draft evaders, many of them parasitical criminals, and, although he was a veteran journalist, he had to start from scratch at a Vancouver paper, slowly winning the acceptance of his colleagues.

Todd renounced his American citizenship, which made him one of a handful of Vietnam-era deserters to have been ineligible for the general amnesty offered during Jimmy Carter’s presidency–he could not even return to the United States for his mother’s funeral. In this graceful memoir, Todd revisits what he calls his “absurd decision” to leave his country. Absurd, in part, because he later discovered he would not have been sent to Vietnam at all, but was instead slated to serve as a military journalist in Germany. For that decision he has many regrets, although he has clearly made a good life for himself in his adopted country. The cost was perhaps too great, though: “The effect of forced exile is felt not in any sudden tearing away but in the corrosive loss, over a period of time, of too many of the things that make you who you are.” –Gregory McNamee

“The effect of forced exile is felt not in any sudden tearing away but in corrosive loss, over a period of time, of too many of the things that make you what you are.” The experience of exile is at the heart of this honest and very moving memoir by an award-winning columnist for the Montreal Gazette. Born into a poor farming family who sacrificed to send him to college, Todd left the University of Nebraska a semester before graduation in order to work as a reporter with the Miami Herald. He was happy with a new job and in love with his girlfriend, Mariela, but his world was torn apart when he was drafted in 1969. Although he had been an antiwar activist in college, he couldn’t bear the idea of going into exile to avoid the war and decided that he would serve, against the advice of his mother and his closest friend, Sonny, who had been traumatized by combat duty in Vietnam. A breakup with Mariela and his strong feelings against the war finally caused Todd to desert just as his basic training was ending. He spent the next several years wandering from job to job in Canada, unable to cope with his feelings of loss. In a rage against Nixon, he renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1973, a decision he now regrets. Although he considers his decision to desert the “hardest, bravest thing I ever did,” the author candidly depicts himself during that period as immature and unable to make thoughtful decisions or to sustain relationships with the women who loved him. Through his personal story, Todd conveys, in a voice that haunts and sings, the impact of an unpopular war on a generation of young Americans.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In 1969, Jack Todd was twenty-three and happy beyond his dreams. He had left behind a hardscrabble youth in a small Nebraska town, had an exciting and enviable job as a reporter on the Miami Herald, and was wildly in love with his beautiful Cuban-American girlfriend. As the war in Vietnam drew closer, he assumed that he would fight, as the men in his family had always fought, though he was increasingly troubled by Americas role there. His oldest friend had just returned from Vietnam and was already showing signs of the war-caused trauma that would destroy him; he had seen and done things too terrible to describe. He begged Jack to dodge the draft, to go to Canada. Nevertheless Jack entered the army and completed basic training. On leave before his departure for Vietnam, he agonized over a momentous decision. By now deeply opposed to the war, he crossed the border into Canada, leaving behind his family, the girl he loved and his beloved homeland.
Now one of Canadas most successful journalists, Jack Todd is a remarkable writer of great power and vibrancy. It has taken him thirty years to come to terms with the guilt and shame of desertion, to break the silence, to tell this controversial, important, profoundly American story. In a dark century, when many only obeyed orders, he chose not to. This is an intensely moving personal story told with passion and literary verve, as well as an eloquent account of a tortured time in American history. It is hard to put down, and impossible to forget.

Jack Todd made a fateful decision in 1969. A farm boy from a time and place where the obligation to serve in the military was taken for granted, Todd had just completed basic training at an army post near Seattle when he opted to take a Vietnam-veteran friend’s advice and slip across the border into British Columbia rather than risk his life fighting in an unpopular war. His life in Canada was by no means easy; he spent time on Skid Row among fellow deserters and draft evaders, many of them parasitical criminals, and, although he was a veteran journalist, he had to start from scratch at a Vancouver paper, slowly winning the acceptance of his colleagues.

Todd renounced his American citizenship, which made him one of a handful of Vietnam-era deserters to have been ineligible for the general amnesty offered during Jimmy Carter’s presidency–he could not even return to the United States for his mother’s funeral. In this graceful memoir, Todd revisits what he calls his “absurd decision” to leave his country. Absurd, in part, because he later discovered he would not have been sent to Vietnam at all, but was instead slated to serve as a military journalist in Germany. For that decision he has many regrets, although he has clearly made a good life for himself in his adopted country. The cost was perhaps too great, though: “The effect of forced exile is felt not in any sudden tearing away but in the corrosive loss, over a period of time, of too many of the things that make you who you are.” –Gregory McNamee

Desertion: In the Time of Vietnam

Sun Going Down: A Novel

Three generations of the Paint family struggle through 70 years of hardship and heartache on the Western plains in Todd’s ambitious fiction debut. En route from Mississippi to the Dakota Territory at the height of the Civil War, Ebenezar Paint meets and marries twice-widowed Cora, a union that produces two strapping twin boys, Eli and Ezra. Ebenezer vainly chases riches; by 15, the boys are orphans and cowboys—and involved in a risky but profitable bit of horse stealing. Ezra remains a wanderer, while Eli settles down to become a wealthy rancher. The narrative eventually follows Eli’s favorite daughter of his six children: Velma, who is brutalized by two of her three husbands, but whose estrangement from Eli causes her the most pain, and takes the story into the Depression era. Vivid and colorful in its depiction of the West’s transformation from the frontier to the modern age, this is a hardscrabble tale of proud folks who refuse to forgive mistakes or forget faults. Todd’s previous book was Desertion, a memoir of his 1969 desertion from the U.S. Army and his resettlement in Canada. He gives this epic story, which an afterword notes is based on the lives of relatives, pulpy sweep and palpable anguish. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From an award-winning author whose ancestors lived the adventures in this novel comes a spectacular new epic about the American West.

Part history, part romance, and part action-adventure novel, Sun Going Down follows the fortunes of Ebenezer Paint and his descendants — rough and tough individuals who are caught up in Civil War river battles, epic cattle drives through drought and blizzards, the horrors of Wounded Knee, the desperation of the dust bowl, and the prosperity of the roaring 1920s. The page-turning plot is peopled by a vibrant, unforgettable cast of characters: a grizzled Mississippi steamboat merchant, two horse-thieving brothers, five Annie Oakley-like sisters who can outride any cowboy, a half-Sioux bride who demands her new family claim her heritage, and a courageous daughter who defies her father and braves the West alone. Throughout their lives, the Paint family must battle both internal and external elements, and learn to live with spirit and wit.

Letters and diaries from the author’s own family archives form the basis for all the events and characters in Sun Going Down, infusing the novel with richly detailed authenticity and deep emotional power. It is intimate in its portraits of the unforgettable characters who settled our country, sweeping in its geographical reach from Vicksburg up through Montana and the Dakotas, and epic as it spans four generations from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Masterfully written, Sun Going Down holds the reader fast through tears, laughter, terror, and joy until the very last heart-gripping page is turned.

Sun Going Down: A Novel...

“This is a concise, informative, insightful, and highly readable account.” — David Wrobel, author of The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal

David H. Murdoch is Principal Teaching Fellow in the School of History at the University of Leeds. Educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Liverpool University, Dr. Murdoch has written widely on American History and has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 1980.

Americans have chosen to invest one small part of their history, the settlement of the western wilderness, with extraordinary significance. The lost frontier of the 1800s remains not merely a source of excitement and romance but of inspiration, because it is seen as providing a set of unique and imperishable core-values: individualism, self-reliance, and a pristine sense of right and wrong. As a construct of the imagination, our creation of the West is exceptional. Since this construct has little to do with history, David H. Murdoch argues that our beliefs about the West amount to a modern functional myth.

In addition to presenting a sustained analysis of how and why the myth originated, Murdoch demonstrates that the myth was invented, for the most part deliberately, and then outgrew the purposes of its inventors.

The American West answers the questions that have too often been either begged or ignored. Why should the West become the focus for myth in the first place, and why, given the long process of western settlement, is the cattleman’s West so central and the cowboy, of all prototypes, the mythic hero? And why should the myth have retained its potency up to the last decade of the twentieth century?

This edition is for sale only in the U.S.A., its Dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines.

“This is a concise, informative, insightful, and highly readable account.” — David Wrobel, author of The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal

The American West : The Invention of a Myth

Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West

A narrative history of the many peoples and cultures of the American West from prehistory to the twenty-first century.

This new historical overview tells the dramatic story of the American West from its prehistory to the present. A narrative history, it covers the region from the North Dakota-to-Texas states to the Pacific Coast. This West has always been home to richly diverse cultural groups, including today’s growing numbers of Indian, Hispanic, Asian and African Americans....

Writer and researcher Don M. Fox lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

Stirring accounts of the almost legendary campaigns of the United States Fourth Armored Division, universally recognized as “Patton’s Best,” from its pre-World War II origins up through its famous relief of the 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge are presented in this book. The break out of Normandy at Avranches, the isolation of the Brittany peninsula, the armored thrust across France, the tank battles at Arracourt that cemented the reputation of the Fourth Armored, the brutal struggle in Lorraine, and, ultimately, the legendary drive to Bastogne are among the topics. The accounts were assembled through the use of original unit combat diaries and after-action reports, memoirs of key historical figures and abundant supplementary documents and correspondences. But the essence of the book are the first-hand recollections from members of the division gathered by the author. With maps, drawings and photographs.

Patton’s Vanguard: The United States Army Fourth Armored Division

Armored Attack 1944: U. S. Army Tank Combat in the European Theater from D-Day to the Battle of Bulge

Steven Zaloga is a world-renowned armor historian and has appeared in documentaries on the History Channel.

1,199 photos of American and German tanks with Zaloga’s expert captions Covers D-Day, Normandy, southern France, the Siegfried Line, the push to the Rhine, and the Battle of the Bulge Includes all varieties of American armor, from Shermans to Hellcats Printed on high-quality glossy stock Perfect for modelers and World War II enthusiasts

Armored Attack 1944: U. S. Army Tank Combat in the European Theater from D-Day to the Battle of Bulge ...

I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciate this book, which is clearly the work of a scholar who has integrated many aspects of classics, philosophy and philology into an exceptionally useful, engaging and accessible guide to two dialogues of Plato. Such work is not easy and Bailly has presented us with a very frank and useful introduction that shows his skill as a philosopher, commentator, and classicist.

G.S. Bowe, Bilkent University

Bryn Mawr Classical Review May 2004

For the complete review, search on http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/

The close translation and notes are designed to provide access to the original work in highly readable English. For both students and the general reader.

This is an English translation of Sophocles famous tragedy of Oedipus and the fate he so much tries to avoid. Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide access to understanding Greek culture.

I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciate this book, which is clearly the work of a scholar who has integrated many aspects of classics, philosophy and philology into an exceptionally useful, engaging and accessible guide to two dialogues of Plato. Such work is not easy and Bailly has presented us with a very frank and useful introduction that shows his skill as a philosopher, commentator, and classicist.

G.S. Bowe, Bilkent University

Bryn Mawr Classical Review May 2004

For the complete review, search on http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/

Sophocles: King Oidipous: Introduction, Translation and Essay (Focus Classical Library)

Prometheus Bound

“I love the introduction, translation, and notes. Very well informed and stimulating.”–John Lenz, Drew University...

An illustrated account of classical Greek buildings, sculptures and paintings, shown in 200 glorious photographs and drawings....

Alexandra Croom is Senior Keeper of Archaeology and Curator of Arbeia Roman Fort, Tyne and Wear. She has published on small finds, food and drink in the Arbeia Journal and magazine, and is secretary of a re-enactment group Cohors V Gallorum, which involves researching and recreating third-century provincial clothing.

There is plenty of information about military dress in Roman Britain and the rest of the Roman Empire, but the evidence for civilian dress has not been comprehensively looked at since the 1930s. ...