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By Changiz Lahidji, Ralph Pezzullo. 2018
Over 100 combat missions, 24 years as a Green Beret—Full Battle Rattle tells the legend of a soldier who served…
America in every war since Vietnam.Master Sergeant Changiz Lahidji served on Special Forces A teams longer than anyone in history, completing over a hundred combat missions in Afghanistan. Changiz is a Special Forces legend. He also happens to be the first Muslim Green Beret. Changiz served this country starting with Operation Eagle Claw in 1980, when he entered Tehran on a one-man mission to spy on Iranian soldiers guarding the US Embassy where 52 US diplomats were being held hostage. Three years later, he was in Beirut, Lebanon when a suicide car bomb exploded in front of the US Embassy killing 83 people. Weeks after that, he was shot by Hezbollah terrorists on a night mission. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, he led a convoy that was ambushed on its way to Fallujah. He was clearing houses in Mogadishu, Somalia on October, 1993 when a US Black Hawk helicopter was shot down 50 feet away from him in the incident that inspired Black Hawk Down. In 2002, he dressed as a farmer and snuck into Eastern Afghanistan and located Osama Bin Laden for the CIA. Along the way, Changiz earned numerous commendations, including the Special Forces Legion of Merit, Purple Hearts, and many others. Last year he was nominated for induction in Military Intelligence Hall of Fame and cited as “the finest noncommissioned officer to ever serve in Special Forces.” His story is an amazing tale of perseverance and courage, of combat and one man’s love of his adopted country.By Will Ellsworth-Jones. 2012
While hiding from the limelight, Banksy has made himself into one of the world's best-known living artists. His pieces have…
fetched millions of dollars at prestigious auction houses. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Once viewed as vandalism, his work is now venerated; fans have gone so far as to dismantle the walls that he has painted on for collection and sale.But as famous as Banksy is, he is also utterly unknown—he conceals his real name, hides his face, distorts his voice, and reveals his identity to only a select few. Who is this man that has captivated millions? How did a graffiti artist from Bristol, England, find himself at the center of an artistic movement? How has someone who goes to such great lengths to keep himself hidden achieved such great notoriety? And is his anonymity a necessity to continue his vandalism—or a marketing tool to make him ever more famous?Now, in the first ever full-scale investigation of the artist, reporter Will Ellsworth-Jones pieces together the story of Banksy, building up a picture of the man and the world in which he operates. He talks to his friends and enemies, those who knew him in his early, unnoticed days, and those who have watched him try to come to terms with his newfound fame and success. And he explores the contradictions of a champion of renegade art going to greater and greater lengths to control his image and his work.Banksy offers a revealing glimpse at an enigmatic figure and a riveting account of how a self-professed vandal became an international icon—and turned the art world upside down in the process.By Gregory L. Vistica. 2003
The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey is an incredible story and a modern morality tale about a man of compassion and…
promise trapped by a horrible secret.On the night of February 25, 1969, an inexperienced, 25-year-old lieutenant, Bob Kerrey, led a commando raid on an isolated hamlet called Thanh Phong in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. While witnesses and official records give varying accounts, one thing is certain: around midnight, Kerrey and his men killed nearly two dozen unarmed women and children. What happened that night and why? It's a terrible secret that Kerrey has borne for more than thirty years. Kerrey went on to do heroic things in Vietnam and later as a politician. Since World War II, he is only Medal of Honor winner to sit as a member of Congress. In many ways, Kerrey's life following that tragic mission has been a struggle for redemption.So is Bob Kerrey a war hero or war criminal? Gregory L. Vistica, who uncovered the Thanh Phong atrocities in a widely-praised cover story for The New York Times Magazine, searches the entire span of Kerrey's life to answer that question.. From his rural boyhood in Nebraska, to his gut wrenching Navy SEAL training, to his aborted run for President, Kerrey's life will become a vehicle for understanding the Vietnam generation shaped in the 50s and sharpened by the tumultuous 60s.Operation Dark Heart tells the story of what really went on—and what went wrong—in Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer led…
a black-ops team on the forefront of the military efforts to block the Taliban's resurgence.For a moment he saw us winning the war. Then the military brass got involved. He witnessed firsthand the tipping point, when what seemed like certain victory turned into failure.This wasn't the first time he had seen bureaucracy stand in the way of national security. He had participated in Able Danger, the aborted intelligence operation that identified many of the future 9/11 terrorists but failed to pursue them. His attempt to reveal the truth to the 9/11 Commission would not go over well with the higher-ups.Operation Dark Heart made headlines when the Department of Defense bought the entire unredacted first printing. The book's revised second printing includes redactions, which, according to The New York Times, "offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that clocks information the government considers too important for public airing." But most importantly, Operation Dark Heart remains a stirring indictment against military bureaucracy and a culture of cover-ups.By Dominic Streatfeild. 2007
Vivid and disturbing, Brainwash is essential insight into the modern practice of interrogation and torture. With access to formerly classified…
documentation and interviews from the CIA, U.S. Army, MI5, MI6, and British Intelligence Corps, Dominic Streatfeild traces the evolution of mind control from its origins in the Cold War to the height of today's war on terror. Behind the front lines of every war in the world, prisoners are forced to sit for interrogation: manipulated, coerced, and sometimes tortured--often without ever being touched. Brainwash is a history of the methods intended to destroy and reconstruct the minds of captives, to extract information, convert dissidents, and lead peaceful men to kill and be killed.The New York Times bestseller Kill Bin Laden is an explosive first-hand account of a Delta Force commando's hunt for…
the world's most wanted man. The mission was to kill the most wanted man in the world—an operation of such magnitude that it couldn't be handled by just any military or intelligence force. The best America had to offer was needed. As such, the task was handed to roughly forty members of America's supersecret counterterrorist unit formally known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta; more popularly, the elite and mysterious unit Delta Force. Told by senior ranking military officer Dalton Fury, this is the real story of the operation, the first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora, and the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers. Lastly, this is an extremely rare inside look at the shadowy world of Delta Force and a detailed account of these warriors in battle.By John J. Fialka. 2003
Sisters is the first major history of the pivotal role played by nuns in the building of American society. Nuns…
were the first feminists, argues Fialka. They became the nation's first cadre of independent, professional women. Some nursed, some taught, and many created and managed new charitable organizations, including large hospitals and colleges. In the 1800s nuns moved west with the frontier, often starting the first hospitals and schools in immigrant communities. They provided aid and service in the Chicago fire, cared for orphans and prostitutes in the California Gold Rush and brought professional nursing skills to field hospitals run by both armies in the Civil War. Their work was often done in the face of intimidation from such groups as the Know Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan.In the 1900s they built the nation's largest private school and hospital systems and brought the Catholic Church into the civil rights movement. As their numbers began to decline in the 1970s, many sisters were forced to take professional jobs as lawyers, probation workers, managers and hospital executives because their salaries were needed to support older nuns, many of whom lacked a pension system. Currently there are about 75,000 sisters in America, down from 204,000 in 1968. Their median age is sixty-nine. In Sisters, Fialka reveals the strength of the spiritual capital and the unprecedented reach of the caring institutions that religious women created in America.By Richard M. Ketchum. 1974
Richard M. Ketchum recounts the early developments of the American Revolution in Decisive Day: The Battle for Bunker Hill.Boston, 1775:…
A town occupied by General Thomas Gage's redcoats and groaning with Tory refugees from the Massachusetts countryside. Besieged for two months by a rabble in arms, the British decided to break out of town. American spies discovered their plans, and on the night of June 16, 1775, a thousand rebels marched out onto Charlestown peninsula and began digging a redoubt (not on Bunker Hill, which they had been ordered to fortify, but on Breeds Hill, well within cannon shot of the British batteries and ships). At daybreak, HMS Lively began firing. It was the opening round of a battle that saw unbelievable heroism and tragic blunders on both sides (a battle that marked a point of no return for England and her colonies), the beginning of the Revolutionary War.By James Brady. 2005
A memoir from the New York Times bestselling author of Warning of War and Marines of Autumn, James Brady's The…
Scariest Place in the World. Half a century after he fought there as a young lieutenant of Marines, James Brady returns to the brooding Korean ridgelines and mountains to sound taps for a generation. It's been years since Brady first wrote of Korea in The Coldest War, drawing raves from Walter Cronkite and The New York Times, which called it "a superb personal memoir of the way it was." In the spring of 2003, Brady and Pulitzer Prize–winning combat photographer Eddie Adams flew in Black Hawk choppers and trekked the Demilitarized Zone where it meanders into North Korea, interviewing four-star generals and bunking in with tough U.S. recon troops, in Brady's words, "raw meat on the point of a sharpened stick." Brady recalls that first time on bloody Hill 749, the men who died there, what happened to the Marines who lived to make it home, and experiences yet again the emotional pull of a lifelong love affair with the Corps in which they all served. Brady summons up the past and illuminates the present, be it the Korea of "the forgotten war," the Yanks who fought there long ago, or today's soldiers standing wary sentinel over "the scariest place in the world." The result is uplifting, inspiring, often heartbreaking, and this Brady memoir proves as powerful as his first.By Peter Gottschalk. 2013
In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of political activists in New York City joined together to challenge…
a religious group they believed were hostile to the American values of liberty and freedom. Called the Know Nothings, they started riots during elections, tarred and feathered their political enemies, and barred men from employment based on their religion. The group that caused this uproar?: Irish and German Catholics—then known as the most villainous religious group in America, and widely believed to be loyal only to the Pope. It would take another hundred years before Catholics threw off these xenophobic accusations and joined the American mainstream. The idea that the United States is a stronghold of religious freedom is central to our identity as a nation—and utterly at odds with the historical record. In American Heretics, historian Peter Gottschalk traces the arc of American religious discrimination and shows that, far from the dominant protestant religions being kept in check by the separation between church and state, religious groups from Quakers to Judaism have been subjected to similar patterns of persecution. Today, many of these same religious groups that were once regarded as anti-thetical to American values are embraced as evidence of our strong religious heritage—giving hope to today's Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious groups now under fire.By Gene Allen Smith. 2013
A sweeping and original look at American slavery in the early nineteenth century that reveals the gamble slaves had to…
take to surviveImages of American slavery conjure up cotton plantations and African American slaves locked in bondage until the Civil War. Yet early on in the nineteenth century the state of slavery was very different, and the political vicissitudes of the young nation offered diverse possibilities to slaves. In the century's first two decades, the nation waged war against Britain, Spain, and various Indian tribes. Slaves played a role in the military operations, and the different sides viewed them as a potential source of manpower. While surprising numbers did assist the Americans, the wars created opportunities for slaves to find freedom among the Redcoats, the Spaniards, or the Indians. Author Gene Allen Smith draws on a decade of original research and his curatorial work at the Fort Worth Museum in this fascinating and original narrative history. The way the young nation responded sealed the fate of slaves for the next half century until the Civil War. This drama sheds light on an extraordinary yet little known chapter in the dark saga of American history.By Gordon Cucullu, Chris Fontana. 2011
For the first time ever, author Gordon Cucullu gives readers an explosive inside look at modern military police units and…
their role in defending our freedom.America has been at war on several fronts since the 9/11 attack. While public attention has focused on Marines, conventional Army units, and Special Operations Forces, a lion's share of the war-fighting has been done, under media radar, by Military Police units. These squad and platoon-sized units patrol dangerous urban streets, build up local police units to improve neighborhood stability, and conduct civic action missions. On many occasions they have rushed into a vicious firefight to come to the assistance of infantry units in desperate straits. They keep villages Taliban-free, monitor balloting sites, and interdict drug shipments. In detention centers at Camp Bucha, Iraq, Bagram, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo, Cuba they guard some of the most dangerous terrorists in history.The story is told by the soldiers themselves, recounting what they have seen and experienced, along with historical context and first-hand field observations by the author team who were provided with unique inside access. Warrior Police takes readers into the bloody streets of Iraq, the dangerous back-country of Afghanistan, and wherever our Military Police are needed.By Richard M. Ketchum. 1973
The Winter Soldiers is the story of a small band of men held together by George Washington in the face…
of disaster and hopelessness, desperately needing at least one victory to salvage both cause and country. In the fall of 1776 the British delivered a crushing blow to the Revolutionary War efforts. New York fell and the anguished retreat through New Jersey followed. Winter came with a vengeance, bringing what Thomas Paine called "the times that try men's souls."Richard M. Ketchum tells the tale of unimaginable hardship and suffering that culminated in the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Without these triumphs, the American Revolution that had begun so bravely could not have gone on.By James A. Warren. 2013
An in-depth look at the strategy and tactics of the visionary commander who beat the United States in the Vietnam…
War.General Vo Nguyen Giap was the commander in chief of the communist armed forces during two of his country's most difficult conflicts—the first against Vietnam's colonial masters, the French, and the second against the most powerful nation on earth, the United States. After long and bloody conflicts, he defeated both Western powers and their Vietnamese allies, forever changing modern warfare. In Giap, military historian James A. Warren dives deep into the conflict to bring to life a revolutionary general and reveal the groundbreaking strategies that defeated world powers against incredible odds. Synthesizing ideas and tactics from an extraordinary range of sources, Giap was one of the first to realize that war is more than a series of battles between two armies and that victory can be won through the strength of a society's social fabric. As America's wars in the Middle East rage on, this is an important and timely look at a man who was a master at defeating his enemies even as they thought they were winning.By Maurice Simon. 1950
First published in 1950, Jewish Religious Conflicts gives an account of the principal cleavages that have taken place within the…
Jewish people since the close of the Old Testament over questions of religious faith, doctrine and practice. While passing in review the chief sects that have formed themselves during that period, it pays particular attention to the most recent cleavages, those between the ‘orthodox’ and ‘reform’, and between the ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ movements, which are dividing the Jewish community. This book will be of interest to students of religion and history.By A. C. Bouquet. 1948
First published in 1948, Hinduism presents an introductory outline of the story of Hinduism from the earliest times, and paves…
the way for further and more detailed study, as well as interests the general reader. It intends to exhibit Hinduism as an event rather than as something static; as an organism, developing, reforming itself, and even changing and absorbing new elements, rather than as a rigid creed, or even as a survival from the past. This book will be of interest to students of religion, history and South Asian studies.By David Hinton. 2015
A master translator's beautiful and accessible rendering of the seminal Chinese textIn a radically new translation and interpretation of the…
I Ching, David Hinton strips this ancient Chinese masterwork of the usual apparatus and discovers a deeply poetic and philosophical text. Teasing out an elegant vision of the cosmos as ever-changing yet harmonious, Hinton reveals the seed from which Chinese philosophy, poetry, and painting grew. Although it was and is widely used for divination, the I Ching is also a book of poetic philosophy, deeply valued by artists and intellectuals, and Hinton's translation restores it to its original lyrical form.Previous translations have rendered the I Ching as a divination text full of arcane language and extensive commentary. Though informative, these versions rarely hint at the work's philosophical heart, let alone its literary beauty. Here, Hinton translates only the original strata of the text, revealing a fully formed work of literature in its own right. The result is full of wild imagery, fables, aphorisms, and stories. Acclaimed for the eloquence of his many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy, Hinton has reinvented the I Ching as an exciting contemporary text at once primal and postmodern.By Iain Sinclair. 2013
The visionary writer Iain Sinclair turns his sights to the Beat Generation in America in his most epic journey yet"How…
best to describe Iain Sinclair?" asks Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian. "A literary mud-larker and tip-picker? A Travelodge tramp (his phrase)? A middle-class dropout with a gift for bullshit (also his phrase)? A toxicologist of the twenty-first-century landscape? A historian of countercultures and occulted pasts? An intemperate WALL-E, compulsively collecting and compacting the city's textual waste? A psycho-geographer (from which term Sinclair has been rowing away ever since he helped launch it into the mainstream)? He's all of these, and more." Now, for the first time, the enigma that is Iain Sinclair lands on American shores for his long-awaited engagement with the memory-filled landscapes of the American Beats and their fellow travelers. A book filled with bad journeys and fated decisions, American Smoke is an epic walk in the footsteps of Malcolm Lowry, Charles Olson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and others, heated by obsession (the Old West, volcanoes, Mexico) and enlivened by false memories, broken reports, and strange adventures. With American Smoke, Sinclair confirms his place as the most innovative of our chroniclers of the contemporary.By Judith E. Stein. 2016
In 1959, Richard Bellamy was a witty, poetry-loving beatnik on the fringe of the New York art world who was…
drawn to artists impatient for change. By 1965, he was representing Mark di Suvero, was the first to show Andy Warhol’s pop art, and pioneered the practice of “off-site” exhibitions and introduced the new genre of installation art. As a dealer, he helped discover and champion many of the innovative successors to the abstract expressionists, including Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, and many others. The founder and director of the fabled Green Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, Bellamy thrived on the energy of the sixties. With the covert support of America’s first celebrity art collectors, Robert and Ethel Scull, Bellamy gained his footing just as pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art were taking hold and the art world was becoming a playground for millionaires. Yet as an eccentric impresario dogged by alcohol and uninterested in profits or posterity, Bellamy rarely did more than show the work he loved. As fellow dealers such as Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis capitalized on the stars he helped find, Bellamy slowly slid into obscurity, becoming the quiet man in oversize glasses in the corner of the room, a knowing and mischievous smile on his face.Born to an American father and a Chinese mother in a Cincinnati suburb, Bellamy moved to New York in his twenties and made a life for himself between the Beat orbits of Provincetown and white-glove events like the Guggenheim’s opening gala. No matter the scene, he was always considered “one of us,” partying with Norman Mailer, befriending Diane Arbus and Yoko Ono, and hosting or performing in historic Happenings. From his early days at the Hansa Gallery to his time at the Green to his later life as a private dealer, Bellamy had his finger on the pulse of the culture. Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy’s artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties rescues the legacy of the elusive art dealer and tells the story of a counterculture that became the mainstream. A tale of money, taste, loyalty, and luck, Richard Bellamy’s life is a remarkable window into the art of the twentieth century and the making of a generation’s aesthetic.--"Bellamy had an understanding of art and a very fine sense of discovery. There was nobody like him, I think. I certainly consider myself his pupil." --Leo CastelliBy Christopher Isherwood. 1980
My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu…
priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood's own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, scriptwriting conferences at M-G-M, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating (in collaboration with the Swami) the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written.