Showing results for "The Lines" in Americas

The extraordinary firsthand account of an American special forces unit in the jungles of southeast Asia and their guerilla operations against the Japanese during World War II!

Calling all Dapper Dans and Oomph Girls - take a ride through the American lexicon at its most inventive. The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter: Forgotten Hipster Lines, Tough Guy Talk, and Jive Gems explores the rich vocabulary of gangsters, hipsters, jazz musicians, and military personnel of the 1930s and ’40s. Entries include definitions, etymology, and examples of usage. This delightful compendium celebrates the linguistic gems cut and polished during the Great Depression, World War I, and the postwar '50s - now forgotten or in danger of being forgotten.

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometers of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare. Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. 

The Finnish Front Line is a historical biography of Urho Kekkonen, the eighth and longest-serving president of Finland. Gordon F. Sander focuses on Kekkonen's pivotal first term as president, which was bracketed by two crises that together formed the template for both Finland's relationship with the Soviet Union from 1956 through the fall of the USSR, and Kekkonen's own "special" relationship with Moscow: the Night Frost crisis of 1957, which derived from the Kremlin's desire to exert greater influence on Finnish politics.

The Southern Fault Line explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement. Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South.

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A riveting narrative about the biggest earthquake in North American recorded history—the 1964 Alaska earthquake that demolished the city of Valdez and swept away the island village of Chenega—and the geologist who hunted for clues to explain how...

If you were asked when America became polarized, your answer would likely depend on your age: You might say during Barack Obama’s presidency, or with the post-9/11 war on terror, or the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, or the “Reagan Revolution” and the the rise of the New Right. How did the US become so divided? Fault Lines offers a richly told, wide-angle history view toward an answer.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Line Becomes a River, written and read by Francisco Cantú. How does a line in the sand become a barrier that people will risk everything to cross? Francisco Cantú was a US Border Patrol agent from 2008 to 2012. He worked the desert along the Mexican border, at the remote crossroads of drug routes and smuggling corridors, tracking humans through blistering days and frigid nights across a vast terrain. He detains the exhausted and the parched.

In the vibrant tapestry of humanity, "Nature Knows No Color-Line" unravels the threads of shared ancestry across continents and time. This groundbreaking work challenges rigid racial lines, exposing the myths of purity and celebrating the interconnectedness of our roots. Prepare to embark on a captivating journey through history, anthropology, and genetics, where evidence whispers a powerful truth: skin may differ, but beneath it all, we bloom from the same soil.

Former collegiate star, sports agent, and NFL Executive Michael Huyghue recounts his journey in professional sports and shows how race and racism operate among the rich and the white and extend way beyond the NFL and the world of sports executives. With a deep, abiding love for sports, Huyghue...

At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, Canada and the United States had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had made an expansive international border that restricted movement.

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first nonfiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.

The fourth and final eBook in POLITICO’s Playbook 2012 series once again provides an unprecedented minute-by-minute account of the race for the presidency. The End of the Line follows President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney as their campaign teams go all-in to win in the...

Bloomsbury presents Mediterranean Sweep by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, read by Christopher Ragland. Filled with personal accounts of the action, this book details the USAAF’s tactical and strategic campaigns in the skies over Italy in World War II. With the defeat of the Germans and Italians on...

When A Beauty That Hurts first appeared in 1995, Guatemala was one of the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights. An accord brokered by the United Nations brought a measure of peace after three decades of civil war, but the country’s troubles are far from over. W. George Lovell revisits Guatemala to grapple once again with the terror inflicted on its Maya peoples by a military-dominated state.

As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. A closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal.

The compelling untold story of a group of stranded U.S. Army nurses and medics fighting to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. When 26 Army nurses and medics-part of the 807th Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron-boarded a cargo plane for transport in November 1943, they never anticipated the...

Havana is Cuba's soul: a mix of Third World, First World, and Other World. After over a decade of visits as a teacher, researcher, and friend, Karen Dubinsky looks past political slogans and tourist postcards to the streets, neighborhoods, and personalities of a complicated and contradictory city. Her affectionate, humorous vignettes illustrate how Havana's residents - old communist ladies, their skeptical offspring, musicians, underground vendors, entrepreneurial landlords, and poverty-stricken professors - go about their daily lives.

Tainted drug supplies, inadequate civic responses, and prevailing negative opinions about people who use drugs, the poor, and those struggling with mental health issues lead to thousands of preventable deaths each year while politicians are slow to adopt effective policies. Putting themselves at great personal risk (and often breaking the law to do so), the brave men and women profiled in This Is Ohio are mounting a grassroots effort to combat ineffective and often incorrect ideas about addiction and instead focus on saving lives through commonsense harm reduction policies.