Secondhand History, War & Adventure Bargain Book Box SP2917

Secondhand History, War & Adventure Bargain Book Box SP2917

Eighteen books on conflict across two centuries — from the Civil War's bloodiest afternoon and Imperial Germany's secret sabotage operations in New York to the diaries of a French peasant through the Nazi occupation, first-hand Gulf War accounts, and Alistair Horne's portrait of Montgomery in 1944-45. Also here: Monturiol's Dream, the remarkable story of the man who built the world's first engine-powered submarine and wanted it to free coral divers.

1. Private: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and the Biggest Exposure of Official Secrets in American History — Denver Nicks — The story of the Army intelligence analyst who leaked the largest cache of classified documents in American history: his background, the leaks, the detention, and the questions raised about what governments are entitled to conceal.
2. Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America 1914-1917 — Jules Witcover — In 1916, German agents blew up the munitions depot on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor — the largest explosion in American history to that point. Witcover reconstructs the spy network behind it.
3. Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 — Ernest B. Furguson — Grant ordered a frontal assault on Lee's entrenched positions on June 3, 1864; in under an hour, seven thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded. The definitive account of the worst single hour of the Civil War.
4. Marching to Captivity: The War Diaries of a French Peasant 1939-45 — Gustave Folcher, trans. Christopher Hill — Folcher was conscripted, captured, and spent the years of the German occupation as a prisoner of war. His diaries are one of the most vivid first-hand accounts of the French experience of the war.
5. Gulf War One: Real Voices from the Front Line — Hugh McManners — First-hand accounts from soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the 1991 Gulf War: the desert build-up, the hundred-hour ground war, and what modern warfare actually looks and feels like from inside it.
6. Picking Up the Reins: America, Britain and the Postwar World — Norman Moss — The transfer of global leadership from Britain to America in the years between 1945 and the early Cold War: the decisions made at Potsdam, Bretton Woods, and in the ruins of the wartime alliance.
7. Monty: The Lonely Leader, 1944-1945 — Alistair Horne with David Montgomery — The final phase of Montgomery's war: from D-Day to the Rhine crossing, the Market Garden disaster, and the sustained tensions with Eisenhower and Patton that made him the most controversial Allied commander of the war.
8. The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past — Jim Cullen — How Americans have used the Civil War — in film, fiction, music, and television — to argue about race, region, and national identity from Birth of a Nation to Ken Burns.
9. Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World — Matthew Stewart — Narcís Monturiol built the world's first steam-powered submarine in 1860s Barcelona — not to wage war, but to free the coral divers of the Mediterranean from drowning. One of the strangest and most affecting stories in the history of invention.
10. World War II: Beyond the Battlefield — (anthology) — Five accounts of the war's margins gathered in one volume: Under an English Heaven, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Street Boys, The Wooden Horse, and The Secrets of D-Day.
11. Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War — Eric Larrabee — Roosevelt as war commander: his working relationships with Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, King, and Nimitz, and the strategic decisions behind each alliance and each front.
12. Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten 1928-1938 — ed. John Evans — Britten's diaries from his schooldays through his early career as a composer — the decade in which he became the most important British composer of his generation, watching Europe slide toward war.
13. The Greatest Story Ever Sold — Frank Rich — A chronicle of how the Bush administration marketed the Iraq War through image management, selective intelligence, and a media culture that forgot to ask questions. Frank Rich as political journalist at his most forensic.
14. Dark Noon: The Final Voyage of the Fishing Boat "Pelican" — Tom Clavin — In August 1951, the charter fishing boat Pelican went down off Long Island with forty-five passengers; nineteen survived. Clavin reconstructs the voyage, the storm, and the decisions that led to one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in American history.
15. Blood, Sweat and Tears: Australia's WWII Remembered — Margaret Geddes — First-hand accounts of the Australian experience of the Second World War from veterans and civilians across all theatres — the Pacific, the Middle East, and the home front.
16. The Irrepressible Churchill — compiled by Kay Halle — Churchill through his own words and the words of those who knew him: the speeches, the memos, the table talk, and the anecdotes that capture both the public orator and the private man.
17. Echoes from Forgotten Wars — Ronald McKie — McKie covered Asian conflicts as a journalist and this book records the campaigns that left no monuments — the smaller wars that killed their share of people and were then quietly set aside by history.
18. Sparring with Charlie: Motorbiking Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail — Christopher Hunt — Hunt rides from Hanoi to Saigon along the former supply route, talking to veterans on both sides, former Viet Cong, and the farmers and traders who have replaced the soldiers on the trail.