Michael Prichard
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Working from 50 years of conversations he had with Neil, from notes, interviews, NASA spaceflight transcripts, and remembrances of those Armstrong trusted, Barbree writes about Neil's three passions, flight, family, and friends. This is the inside story of Neil Armstrong from the time he flew combat missions in the Korean War and then flew a rocket plane called the X-15 to the edge of space, to when he saved his Gemini 8 by flying the first emergency...
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United States Marines, for more than two centuries, have been among the world's fiercest and most admired of warriors. They have fought from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan and Iraq, in famous battles become bone and sinew of American lore. But why do Marines fight? Why fight so well? Why run toward the guns? Now comes a thrilling new book, pounding and magnificent in scope, by the author some Marines consider the unofficial "poet laureate" of...
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A revelatory look at the life of the great American author-and how it shaped his most beloved works
Jack London was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast-an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed bestselling books The Call of theWild,...
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A brilliant and revealing biography of the two most important Americans during the Cold War era-written by the grandson of one of them
Only two Americans held positions of great influence throughout the Cold War; ironically, they were the chief advocates for the opposing strategies for winning-and surviving-that harrowing conflict. Both men came to power during World War II, reached their professional peaks during the Cold War's most frightening...
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Fire Base Illingworth is an epic, never-before-told true story of a North Vietnamese Army attack and how the men of this nearly overrun Fire Base survived.
In the early morning hours of April 1, 1970, more than four hundred North Vietnamese soldiers charged out into the open and tried to over-run FSB Illingworth. The battle went on, mostly in the dark, for hours. Exposed ammunition canisters were hit and blew up, causing a thunderous explosion inside...
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Few books in history have been as poorly understood as the Qur'an. Sent down in a series of revelations to the Prophet Muhammad, the Qur'an is the unmediated word of Allah: a ritual, political, and legal authority; an ethical and spiritual guide; and a literary masterpiece that inspires devotion, passion, fear, and sometimes incomprehension.
In The Qur'an, historian and Islamic Studies professor Bruce Lawrence shows precisely how the Qur'an is the...
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A century after Appomattox, the civil rights movement won full citizenship for black Americans in the South. It should not have been necessary: by 1870 those rights were set in the Constitution. This is the story of the terrorist campaign that took them away.
Nicholas Lemann opens his extraordinary new book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes...
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A revelatory study of how Americans were bound together as a young nation by the words, the image, and the myth of George Washington and how slavery shaped American nationalism in ways that define and haunt us still.How did people in our country-North and South, East and West-come to share a remarkably durable and consistent common vision of what it meant to be an American in the first fifty years after the Revolution? How did the nation respond to...
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Pete Earley had no idea. He'd been a journalist for over thirty years, and the author of several award-winning-even bestselling-nonfiction books about crime and punishment and society. Yet he'd always been on the outside looking in. He had no idea what it was like to be on the inside looking out until his son, Mike, was declared mentally ill, and Earley was thrown headlong into the maze of contradictions, disparities, and catch-22s that is America's...
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A work of remarkable scholarship that moves with the swift pace of a John le Carre thriller, A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich is a chilling addition to the literature of espionage. In 1943, a young official named Fritz Kolbe from the German foreign ministry arranged to meet with Allen Dulles, then an OSS officer in Switzerland and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Kolbe had decided to betray his country. Over the next two...
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From the early 1800s to the end of his life in 1917, Buffalo Bill Cody was as famous as anyone could be. Annie Oakley was his most celebrated protegee, the "slip of a girl" from Ohio who could (and did) outshoot anybody to become the most celebrated starof Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.In this sweeping dual biography, Larry McMurtry explores the lives, the legends, and above all the truth about two larger-than-life American figures. With his Wild...
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John Brown is a lightning rod of history. Yet he is poorly understood and most commonly described in stereotypes - as a madman, martyr, or enigma. Not until Patriotic Treason has a biography or history brought him so fully to life, in scintillating prose and moving detail, making his life and legacy-and the staggering sacrifices he made for his ideals-fascinatingly relevant to today's issues of social justice and to defining the line between activism...
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The operation known as "Market Garden"-made famous in the book and film A Bridge Too Far-was the largest airborne assault in history up to that time. A high-risk Allied invasion of enemy territory that has become a legend of World War II, it still invites criticism from historians. Now a thrilling and revelatory new book re-creates the operation as never before, revealing for the first time the full adventures of the bold "Jedburgh" paratroopers whose...
14) Hong Kong
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This time, for Admiral Jake Grafton, the stakes are chillingly personal... Admiral Jake Grafton takes his wife, Callie, along when the U.S. government sends him to Hong Kong to find out how deeply the American consul-general is embedded in political money raising scandal. And why not? Jake and Callie met and fell in love in Hong Kong during the Vietnam War, and the consul-general is a friend from those days. The Graftons quickly discover, however,...
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Spymaster, defector, double agent-the remarkable true story of the man who ran Russia's post–cold war spy program in America.In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, the cold war ended, and a new world order began. We thought everything had changed. But one thing never changed: the spies.From 1995 to 2000, a man known as "Comrade J" was the highest-ranking operative in the SVR-the successor agency to the KGB-in the United States. He directed all Russian...
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Behind the scenes with the legendary CEO Jack Welch's innovative leadership strategies revived a lagging GE, transforming it into a powerhouse with a staggering $300 billion-plus market capitalization. In writing Jack Welch and the GE Way, author Robert Slater was given unprecedented access to Welch and other prominent GE insiders. What emerged is a brilliant portrait that tells you what makes Jack Welch tick. Learn how to work the Welch magic on...
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A heartwarming Civil War tale bound to become an American holiday classicIn the winter of 1862, during the seemingly endless nightmare of the Civil War, a small miracle occurred. Just after Christmas, on the eve of the bloody battle of Stones River in Tennessee, the Union and Confederate armies set up camp within shouting distance of one another. To raise their spirits, they began a volley of patriotic tunes-"Yankee Doodle" drowned out by "Dixie."...
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A fascinating narrative-and a bold new thesis in the study of the Civil War-that suggests Robert E. Lee had a heretofore undiscovered strategy at Gettysburg that, if successful, could have crushed the Union forces and changed the outcome of the war.The Battle of Gettysburg is the pivotal moment when the Union forces repelled perhaps America's greatest commander-the brilliant Robert E. Lee, who had already thrashed a long line of Federal opponents-just...
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Bestselling author of Papal Sin and Why I Am a Catholic, Garry Wills spent five years as a young man at a Jesuit seminary and nearly became a priest himself. But after a lifetime of study and reflection, he now poses some challenging questions: Why do we need priests at all? Why did the priesthood arise in a religion that began without it and opposed it? Would Christianity be stronger without the priesthood, as it was at its outset? Meticulously researched,...
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Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy...