A Dawn Like Thunder: The True Story of Torpedo Squadron Eight

By Robert J. Mrazek

One of the great untold stories of World War II finally comes to light in this thrilling account of Torpedo Squadron Eight and their heroic efforts in helping an outmatched U.S. fleet win critical victories at Midway and Guadalcanal. These 35 American men--many flying outmoded aircraft--changed the course of history, going on to become the war's most decorated naval air squadron, while suffering the heaviest losses in U.S. naval aviation history.
Mrazek paints moving portraits of the men in the squadron, and exposes a shocking cover-up that cost many lives. Filled with thrilling scenes of battle, betrayal, and sacrifice, A DAWN LIKE THUNDER is destined to become a classic in the literature of World War II.
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Eyewitness Pacific Theater: Firsthand Accounts of the War in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the Atomic Bombs

By John T. Kuehn and D.M. Giangreco

From the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of the atomic bomb that ended the war, the Pacific Theater of World War II comes alive in a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the battles, campaigns, events, and personalities of the war, complemented by hundreds of period photographs and a CD containing personal narratives.
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The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America

By William Kleinknecht

Kleinknecht shares Will Bunch' s opinion of Ronald Reagan' s current image (see Tear Down This Myth, 2009) but doesn' t credit Reagan, as Bunch does, for failing to match action to rhetoric. Of course, Kleinknecht doesn' t mention foreign policy, in which Reagan did some good. His focus is domestic, and in 11 cogent chapters, he reveals further falseness in the Reagan myth and the devastating effects of Reaganism on America per se. Reagan pretended to represent small-town, small-enterprise America as embodied by his hometown, which, after leaving for Hollywood, he seldom visited and only for personal publicity' s sake, and whose livelihoods of family farming and small industry his favoritism for high-rolling wheeler-dealers has nearly extinguished. To explain Reagan s duplicity, Kleinknecht contrasts Reagan s developed politics of the self with the traditional community politics of his practical opponent during his administration, Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. While O'Neill was inextricable from his community, Reagan made himself a man from nowhere, untrammeled by personal connections, who ignored all damage done in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Contemporary America' s decimated manufacturing, fraudulent banking and finance, criminalized poor and minorities, inaccessible health care, venal politics, all this and more, according to Kleinknecht, constitute the real and living Reagan legacy.
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Weller's War: A Legendary Foreign Correspondent's Saga of World War II on Five Continents

By George Weller; Edited by Anthony Weller
Reporting on WWII for the Chicago Daily News from 1941 to 1945, George Weller (1907–2002) filed stories from every theater. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for a story on an emergency appendectomy performed with kitchen utensils on a submarine in Japanese waters. He was strafed and shelled, contracted recurrent malaria, trained as a paratrooper, flew a mission over Italy on a B-17 with two engines down. He was the first outside observer at nuclear-devastated Nagasaki. He reported it all in an urbane, understated style that never palls. Weller had no sense of himself as a Great Journalist, which perhaps is why he was one. Weller's 1944 presentation of "the worldwide American" stands out as a model of brevity and insight: "His foreign policy represents an attempt to become popular by being benevolent, rather than to be respected by being reasonable." Weller has been obscured by better known personalities like Ernie Pyle. This anthology, edited by his son, should give him the recognition his work merits.
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Henry Hudson: Dreams and Obsession

by Corey Sandler

The surviving records of Henry Hudson's four voyages of 1607-10 are apparently scant but provided enough information to be used in a previous history of his explorations (Donald Johnson's Charting the Sea of Darkness, 1992). Sandler, author of dozens of travel guides, converts the Hudson documentation into a travelogue to several of Hudson's haunts. He traveled somewhat more comfortably than Hudson did, embarking on a cruise ship to Spitzbergen, driving up the Hudson River Valley, and flying to Hudson Bay. Healthily quoting the mariner's logbooks to contrast travel then and now, Sandler also avails himself of the four centuries of history these places have experienced since Hudson sailed by, integrating nuggets of fact with what people have to say about Hudson. Some are quite loquacious on the subject, such as the captain of a replica of Hudson's ship Half Moon.

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The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War

by James Mann

The author of Rise of the Vulcans presents a controversial analysis of the fortieth president's role in ending the cold war, in a provocative report that challenges popular beliefs, reveals lesser-known aspects of the Reagan administration's foreign policy, and cites the contributions of such figures as Nixon, Kissinger, and Gorbachev.

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In Lincoln's Hand: His Original Manuscripts With Commentary by Distinguished Americans

Edited by Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk


In honor of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, a collection of writings includes images of a variety of handwritten speeches, letters, childhood notebooks, and more, accompanied by commentary by James M. McPherson, Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Updike, Steven Spielberg, Toni Morrison, and other notables.

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In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The distinguished scholar examines the origins and history of African-American ancestry as he profiles nineteen noted African Americans--Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones, Sidney Poitier, and others--and illuminates their individual family sagas throughout U.S. history, the tragedy of slavery, and their African roots.

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The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal

by Julie Greene
The Path Between the Seas, viewed from a decidedly different angle.Most histories focus on the larger-than-life men who conceived the Panama Canal, particularly President Theodore Roosevelt and chief engineers John Stevens and George Goethals. Greene (History/Univ. of Maryland; Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917, 1998, etc.) shifts the focus away from those at the top, instead telling the story of rank-and-file workers on the ground. The incredibly diverse labor force assembled between 1904 and 1914, tens of thousands strong, included Americans, West Indians, Mexicans and workers from all over South America and Europe. When they arrived in the Canal Zone, they soon realized that conditions were brutal. The weather was hot, the work was extremely dangerous, the food was barely edible and early on there were outbreaks of yellow fever, bubonic plague, malaria and pneumonia. An estimated 15,000 workers died during the course of the building project, mostly nonwhites. American officials imported segregationist and anti-union policies from home; nonwhite workers, particularly West Indians, received far lower pay. Dissatisfaction eventually flared up into strikes and threats of riots. The author deftly details how hard-line American policy clashed with the reality of managing an army of laborers in a foreign land. Officials were eventually forced to revise their policies and make concessions to workers on many issues. Greene also examines the resentment generated by American colonialism, ably illustrated with the story of a 1912 riot in Panama City between American personnel and Panamanians that caused the death of one U.S. citizen. American imperialism was frequently at odds with American idealism, the author skillfully demonstrates. A telling quote from Secretary of State Elihu Root conveys the essential: "The Constitution follows the flag, but it does not catch up with it."Engaging labor history, and an astute examination of American policies.
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