Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Military

A bold framework for turning aggression into strength. At its worst, anger is responsible for destruction and death. But what if that same power could be harnessed to build and create? In Ancient Greece, anger was considered a separate part of the soul that required its own education. In What If...

Written between 1717 and 1790, and originally referred to by its author as simply Memoirs, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is considered the pioneering example of the genre. In this influential account of the American Dream in action, Franklin recounts his early life, his inventions, his quest for virtue and self-improvement, and his political achievements. The unfinished work is a vivid depiction of life in early America, as well as a relatable and inspiring portrait of one of its revolutionary thinkers.

When they fell in love in 1928, Rika and Waldemar could have not been more different. She was a thirty-seven-year-old Dutch-born mother, estranged from her husband. He was her immigrant boarder, not yet twenty, and a wealthy Surinamese descendant of slaves. The child they have together, brown skinned and blue eyed, brings the couple great joy yet raises some eyebrows. Until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands explodes their promising life. What unfolds is more than the astonishing story of a love that prevailed over convention. It’s also the quest of a young boy.

Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil's Advocate, the 11th-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams - comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors - are used widely in both the public and private sector.

This book is the culmination of more than three decades of meticulous historiographic research on Nazi Germany by one of the period’s most distinguished historians. The volume brings together the most important and influential aspects of Ian Kershaw’s research on the Holocaust for the first time. The writings are arranged in three sections - Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Final Solution in historiography - and Kershaw provides an introduction and a closing section on the uniqueness of Nazism. 

Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg’s generation. He later distilled this monumental work into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction, as well as the most distinguished, authoritative biography of Lincoln ever published.

Growing up in an Illinois prairie town, Sandburg listened to stories of old-timers who had known Lincoln. By the time this single-volume edition was competed, he had spent a lifetime studying, researching, and writing about our 16th president.

In this epic 1885 work, General Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States and staunch supporter of the Union cause, set the record straight on his storied life and career. At its heart is Grant, victor and eyewitness to the defining moments of the Civil War, including the Battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga, and the Wilderness; the Siege of Vicksburg; and the Appomattox campaign, which concluded with the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.  

In November 1943, Marine 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr. was mortally wounded while leading a successful assault on critical Japanese fortifications on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa. But it was not until August 2015 that he was finally laid to rest. Bonnyman Jr. was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and Purple Heart for his heroic actions during the bloody battle, which would ultimately claim the lives of almost 2,000 Marines and 5,000 Japanese soldiers. But the lieutenant, along with hundreds of other Marines, was buried in an unmarked grave.

From the time of Ancient Sumeria, the heavy infantry phalanx dominated the battlefield. Armed with spears or pikes, standing shoulder to shoulder with shields interlocking, the men of the phalanx presented an impenetrable wall of wood and metal to the enemy. Until, that is, the Roman legion emerged to challenge them as masters of infantry battle.

After a devastating run of German victories, Allied troops are beginning to halt Hitler’s advance. But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling. Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world’s first nuclear weapon. For the Allies’ top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler’s chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years. 

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies....

London in April, 1940, was a place of great fear and conflict. Everyone was on edge; civilization itself seemed imperiled. The Germans are marching. They have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. They now menace Britain. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, lose their control, and are divided. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence is the way to survive, attempt to usurp one another by any means possible.

In The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II, based on wartime documents, interviews with locals, and the application of modern forensic practices on long-hidden gravesites. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with 5,000 neighbors of the Jews, has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide.

This candid and darkly witty memoir recounts an exhilarating life - and a few close brushes with death. With remarkable sangfroid and a humorist's eye for absurdity, H. K. Roy describes his many strange and risky exploits in his long career with the CIA. Whether he was pursuing Soviet and Cuban spies, running "denied area" operations in Eastern Europe, hunting Bosnian War criminals, or providing actionable intelligence to US government and coalition forces in Iraq, Roy usually found himself at the right place at the right time.

Sometime in 1965, James Hawes landed in the Congo with cash stuffed in his socks, morphine in his bag, and a basic understanding of his mission: recruit a mercenary navy and suppress the Soviet- and Chinese-backed rebels engaged in guerilla movements against a pro-Western government. He knew the United States must preserve deniability, so he would be abandoned in any life-threatening situation; he did not know that Che Guevara was attempting to export his revolution a few miles away. Cold War Navy SEAL gives unprecedented insight into a clandestine chapter in US history through the experiences of Hawes, a distinguished Navy frogman and later a CIA contractor. His journey began as an officer in the newly-formed SEAL Team 2, where Hawes commanded boats in the CIA's series of covert, hit-and-run raids into North Vietnam. Those raids directly instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

An award-winning military strategist and top West Point professor unlocks the secrets to success in the wars that mattered most, offering fresh insights from history about leadership, power, and the art of better decision making in our modern world. What makes a general great? What should...

In Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum investigates the meanings and motivations people have attached to Hitler and his crimes against humanity. What does Hitler tell us about the nature of evil? In often dramatic encounters, Rosenbaum confronts historians, scholars, filmmakers, and deniers as he skeptically analyzes the key strains of Hitler interpretation.

From taking a bullet for a frightened schoolgirl in Alabama to riding on the bonnet of a tank during the liberation of France, each of the hard-drinking, chain-smoking clerics featured in Priests de la Résistance were willing to give their lives for a world they believed in - even as their superiors beckoned them to safety. In this spellbinding new collection, the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie, bestselling author of A Field Guide to the English Clergy, presents fifteen men and women who dared to stand up to fascism, proving that some hearts will never be conquered.

Gore Vidal has been described as the last “noble defender” of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America - those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue - by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America’s international power, are the true patriots.

In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a...