The rise and fall of ancient Egypt

Toby Wilkinson.

Wilkinson, an award-winning Egyptologist who teaches at Oxford, provides a fine single-volume history of ancient Egypt that covers more than 3,000 years, from prehistory to the Roman conquest. He uses a conventional chronological approach that inevitably uses archaeological sources to provide examples. Like his colleagues, Wilkinson expresses admiration for the continuity, stability, and relative harmony of pharaonic Egypt. Yet he is strikingly at odds with other Egyptologists in his efforts to present the darker side of Egyptian life. This superbly written survey is ideal for general readers and likely to engender controversy among specialists.--Booklist (Check Catalog)

Battle of Britain

James Holland.

This massive volume is informative, enthralling, and moving often all three at once. It effectively combines narrative and analysis to tell the story of the confrontation between the Luftwaffe and RAF Fighter Command from May through October 1940. Genuinely brilliant.--Booklist (Check Catalog)

Odessa : genius and death in a city of dreams

By Charles King.

In his intricately researched new work, King (The Black Sea) brings to life the stories of the Russians, Jews, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Germans, and Romanians that make up the "quintessentially mixed city" of Odessa. Far from the Russian and Ukrainian seats of power, but close to Europe, Asia, and the Mediterranean states, Odessa has always been both a progressive, cosmopolitan trading port and a lawless outpost given to periods of violence, revolution, and economic depression. King effortlessly moves between the city's high points, like the booming grain trade in the late-18th and mid-19th centuries and urban development under the duc de Richelieu, and its desperate times, including the economic collapse associated with the Crimean War and the city's devastating Jewish holocaust at the hands of Romanian occupiers in the 1940s. King weaves into his history the lives of Alexander Pushkin, Isaac Babel, and Sergei Eisenstein, all of whom had connections to Odessa, a city still struggling to understand its place in the world. King's ability to lay bare the city's secrets both good and badgives a fascinating prism through which to observe.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan

By Francis West.

After making clear the ambiguity and confusion of current American policy, the author writes that America must stay in Afghanistan as long as it takes, learn to fight smarter and neutralize the enemy. He urges reducing conventional U.S. forces and building an advisory task force that can make the Afghan army as battle-ready as the Taliban. --Kirkus (Check Catalog)

The New York State Capitol and the Great Fire of 1911

  by Paul Mercer. In the early morning hours of March 29, 1911, a fire broke out in the New York State Capitol at Albany. By sunset, the entire western portion of the building had sustained extensive structural damage. Within lay the entire collection of the New York State Library, almost completely reduced to ashes. Founded in 1818, this had been one of the finest research libraries in the country and home to innumerable manuscript and printed rarities. In a particularly bitter irony, the fire struck as the overcrowded library was four months away from moving into new, spacious quarters under construction across the street. Miraculously there was only one fatality, an elderly watchman, Samuel Abbott, whose body was not recovered until several days later. Images of America: The New York State Capitol and the Great Fire of 1911 includes recently discovered photographs documenting the construction of the building, beginning in 1867, as well as eyewitness accounts of its destruction. --Summary (Check Catalog)

George Washington's First War: His Early Military Adventures

By David A. Clary.

What Washington, who secured his first military appointment at 21, lacked in experience he made up for in ambition. Yet one of the untested officer's first assignments was to confront French traders over their claim to Ohio River Valley land. Some deemed it "extraordinary," he would reflect, "that so young and inexperienced a person should have been employed on a negotiation with which subjects of the greatest importance were involved." In well over his head, Washington got his diplomatic party into a messy military skirmish that fueled the start of the Seven Year's War. Despite this, an appetite for adventure won Washington an opportunity to return to the wilderness (where on his second assignment he and his men surrendered to the French after becoming trapped). Clary expertly chronicles how Washington navigated command layers and adaptedor failed to adaptto the wild American terrain, revealing that these early military failures shaped Washington to become a versatile commander, capable of leading not only a revolution, but a country.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

By Megan K. Stack.

As a 25-year-old correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Stack covered Afghanistan in the days immediately following 9/11, then traveled to other outposts in the war on terror, from Iraq to Iran, Libya, and Lebanon. In a disquieting series of essays, Stack now takes readers deep into the carnage where she was exposed to the insanity, innocence, and inhumanity of wars with no beginning, middle, or end. Her soaring imagery sears itself into the brain, in acute and accurate tales that should never be forgotten by the wider world, and yet always are. Stack grew increasingly demoralized with each new outburst of hostilities, and clearly covering the violence took its emotional toll: the uncomfortable hypocrisy of Abu Ghraib, the unconscionable confusion over womens subjugation, the unfathomable intricacies of tribal allegiances. Anyone wishing to understand the Middle East need only look into the faces of war that Stack renders with exceptional humanity the bombers as well as the bureaucrats, the rebels and the refugees, the victors and the victims.--Booklist (Check Catalog)

The long walk : the true story of a trek to freedom

 by Slavomir Ravicz.

In 1939, Rawicz was arrested by the Russians as a spy and sent to a labor camp in Siberia. He escaped with six other prisoners, heading south to India, across the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas. British actor John Lee's forceful narration, perfectly matched to the text's pace, expresses the strength and defiance that kept Rawicz alive. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Discovering the Civil War

 Photographs of astonishing detail, reproductions of handwritten records, and personal tales bring one of the most important eras of American history to rich, fascinating life. In his foreword, Ken Burns highlights the personal nature of history, a theme reinforced by letters (such as that written by a teenage soldier who died at Gettysburg), stories of women passing as men to enlist, and historic photographs of battlegrounds. Hand-drawn sketches of enemy camps mapped from an artist in a tethered balloon, startling pictures of war camps and hospitals, details of patents inspired by the war for improved prosthetic devices and other ideas, this beautiful and fascinating book expands on what we already know about the Civil War. Editor Barry also includes the Constitution of the Confederacy, the handwritten Emancipation Proclamation, and a short but powerful 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, clearly illustrating the sorrows and joys of this era. Photographs, maps, and documents are interspersed with articles that provide insight into the 1860s society: telegrams, censorship, shipbuilding, citizenship. This volume is highly recommended for high school and public library collections, as well as the personal collections of history buffs. --Publishers Weekly (Check catalog)