In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in WW II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the riveting story of the war in North Africa. The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal point in American history, the moment when the United States began to act like a great...

The Spartan hoplite enjoys unquestioned currency as history's greatest fighting man. The last stand at Thermopylae made the Spartans legends in their own time, famous for their toughness, stoicism and martial prowess, and for their refusal to surrender in the face of impossible odds, even when it meant certain death. Was this reputation earned? Or was it simply the success of a propaganda machine that had begun working long before the battle at the...

"The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the US has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody, near-permanent conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global US empire. Drawing on...

Explores the history of the Debatable Land, the former buffer between Scotland and England and once upon a time the bloodiest region in the country.

"Ten years in the making, Presidents of War is a fresh, intimate, irresistibly readable narrative of how a procession of Chief Executives took the nation into major conflicts, mobilized Americans for victory and seized greater power for themselves. Beschloss's findings in original letters, diaries, and declassified documents, and his interviews with surviving participants in the drama, allow him to bring us into the room and into the minds of these...

Explores the life and career of Thomas Alexandre Dumas, a man almost unknown today, but whose swashbuckling exploits appear in The Three Musketeers and whose trials and triumphs inspired The count of Monte Cristo.