Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

Max Hastings. Hastings emphasizes personal experiences as well as his often squirm-inducing opinions. Most general histories sprinkle their pages with anecdotes, but Hastings has this down to a science. He employs numerous specialists, delving into Russian and Italian archives and personally tracking down obscure, vivid, often painful stories from the usual combatants as well as Poles, Bengalese, Chinese and Japanese. Excellent general WWII accounts abound—including those by historical superstars such as Stephen Ambrose and John Keegan—but Hastings is matchless.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Deadline Artists: America's Greatest Newspaper Columns

Avlon, John (Editor), Angelo, Jesse (Editor), Louis, Errol (Editor). Well-catalogued and categorized, this exultant retrospective of American journalism seems ideal for today's attention spans and travel schedules. "Well done is better than well said," Benjamin Franklin wrote, but as far as this essential anthology goes, it's so well done, there's nothing left to say.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge

Danny Parker. Military historian Parker returns with a sharply focused look at a grisly 1944 incident, the massacre of more than 80 American prisoners outside Malmédy, Belgium. Assembling a massive amount of data, the author views the tragedy from the perspectives of survivors, the Germans and the Belgian civilians, some of whom aided the wounded, some of whom did not. Comprehensive, definitive, grim and gripping.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy

Susan Herman. A focused, thorough account of the federal government's panicked response to 9/11 and the consequent rollback of our civil liberties. Divided into three major sections—"Dragnets and Watchlists," "Surveillance and Secrecy" and "American Democracy"—the book offers a compelling case that the basic constitutional protections most Americans take for granted, including the rights to free speech, a fair trial and due process, as well as freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, were seriously compromised after 9/11 as a result of the government's well-meaning but ill-conceived efforts to safeguard the country against another attack.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Moscow, December 25, 1991 : the last day of the Soviet Union

Conor O'Clery. The author gives microscopic attention to the telling details: whose pen was used to sign documents, how CNN got to broadcast Gorbachev's speech and much more. Shaping the day, writes O'Clery, were the successive effects of the bitterness, resentments and grudges of the five-year rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. A compelling story about how sometimes the little everyday things can shape the broad sweep of history more powerfully than ideologies or competitive economic systems.--Kirkus (Check Catalog).

The New Deal: A Modern History

Michael Hiltzik. With panache and skill, Hiltzik chronicles the rise and decline of the New Deal, from the desperate improvisation of the Hundred Days through the more carefully considered passage of such landmark legislation as the Securities Exchange Act and the Social Security Act. A timely, well-executed overview of the program that laid the foundation for the modern progressive state.--Kirkus (Check Catalog).

1812: The Navy's War

A naval expert's readable take on the U.S. Navy's surprising performance in the war that finally reconciled the British to America's independence. Daughan focuses on the personalities, ships and battles that prevented the British from suffocating the infant nation's maritime ambitions. A smart salute to a defining moment in the history of the U.S. Navy.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

Siddhartha Deb. Deb offers a refreshingly skeptical rejoinder to the feel-good narratives of an ascendant India happily contributing to and benefiting from globalization. His mosaic of stories of striving, hopes dashed or realized, is more craggy, gritty, and realistic than the glossy accounts of information technology and free markets as benign, modernizing forces--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

David McCullough. Not content to focus on a few of the 19th-century American artists, doctors and statesmen who benefited enormously from their Parisian education, McCullough embraces a cluster of aspiring young people such as portraitist George Healy and lawyer Charles Sumner, eager to expand their horizons in the 1830s by enduring the long sea passage, then spirals out to include numerous other visitors over an entire eventful century. A gorgeously rich, sparkling patchwork, eliciting stories from diaries and memoirs to create the human drama McCullough depicts so well.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, Kennedy, Caroline, Beschloss, Michael. Presents the annotated transcription and original audio for the 1964 interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy on her experiences and impressions as the wife of John F. Kennedy, offering an intimate and detailed account of the man and his times.--Book Description (Check Catalog).

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back

Thomas L. Friedman. Reflecting on America's past greatness and its slipping position among global powers, Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist Friedman (The World is Flat) and foreign policy expert Mandelbaum (The Frugal Superpower) warn against the United States' "dangerous complacency" in the face of increasingly complex global challenges.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918

Stevenson, David. Stevenson's detailed, lucid description of the development and maturation of that ability reflects encyclopedic mastery of published and archival sources while synergizing military, economic, political, and social-cultural factors. It is also a door-opener to any reader seeking to understand the Great War's last stage.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Empire State: A History of New York

Milton Klein. New York now has a new, comprehensive history book that chronicles the state through centuries of change. A richly illustrated volume, The Empire State begins in the early seventeenth century (when the region was still populated solely by Native Americans) and concludes in the mid-1990s, by which time people from all over the world had made the state their home.--Publisher. (Check Catalog)

Kontum: The Battle to Save South Vietnam

Thomas McKenna. McKenna, in his first book, presents a well-researched, heavily detailed look at the 1972 North Vietnamese Army invasion of South Vietnamthe so-called Easter Offensive designed to topple the South Vietnamese government and end the war. McKenna, severely wounded near the end of the offensive, switches from the first person to the third and includes excessive military minutiae, but does an effective job of melding his own story with the bigger picture. --Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Killing the Cranes: A Reporter's Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan

Edward Girardet. European-based journalist Girardet (Afghanistan: The Soviet War) shares his personal story of the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and offers disturbing parallels to America's involvement. Girardet admits to having "romanticized Afghanistan because of its harsh beauty and poetic embrace," but still offers a sobering assessment. --Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II

Denis Avey, Rob Broomby. Submerged memories of a remarkable encounter in Auschwitz drove an aged British World War II veteran, Denis Avey, to reveal his plainspoken, moving story—assisted by BBC journalist Rob Broomby. Avey arranged with another Jewish prisoner, Hans, to switch clothing so that Avey could infiltrate the Jewish barracks for a night and Hans could eat and rest in the British prisoners' camp. It was a perilous ploy, but it worked, and Avey was duly horrified by the brutal conditions and life-saving mechanisms. --Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the Secret Special Forces War in Iraq

Mark Urban. BBC Newsnight diplomatic and defense editor Urban takes a cerebral approach to establishing the unique challenges faced by both British SAS and American Special Forces (SF) as the Iraq occupation developed, unraveled and was ultimately stabilized by the "surge." The prickly relationship between the two countries helps the author focus his narrative on the British forces—he explains that they had to grapple with the controversial strategies of American Joint Special Operations Command head General Stanley McChrystal, a "soldier-monk" who favored "industrial counter-terrorism," a constant cycle of missions to counter the evolving threat.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice

Gerald Steinacher. Steinacher has meticulously researched how so many Nazi war criminals were able to escape justice after World War II. While its title may lead some readers to expect a dashing adventure tale of espionage and escape, this book is really about the bureaucratic chaos that paralyzed the Allied governments in the early postwar period.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Lake George Shipwrecks and Sunken History

Zarzynski, Joseph W, Benway, Bob. Lake George: Its Sunken History Revealed is an assortment of short tales that focus on the sunken heritage of one of North America's most historic waterways the 32 mile long Lake George in upstate New York. Each of the stories focuses on a shipwreck, a maritime mystery, or an underwater archeological discovery and investigation, and will be accompanied by one or two historic images or modern underwater photos.--Publisher Marketing (Check Catalog)

The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

David McCullough. One of Americas most popular historians and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, McCullough (1776) has hit the historical jackpot. Travelers before the telephone era loved to write letters and journals, and McCullough has turned this avalanche of material into an entertaining chronicle of several dozen 19th-century Americans who went to Paris, an immense, supremely civilized city flowing with ideas, the arts, and elegance, where no one spit tobacco juice or defaced public property.--Publisher's Weekly. (Check Catalog)

Last men out : the true story of America's heroic final hours in Vietnam

Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. An exciting, focused account of the bitter evacuation by helicopter of the last Marines securing the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon on April 30, 1975. The Americans washed their bloody hands of the Vietnam War with the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, which stipulated withdrawal from South Vietnam except for a handful of Marine Security Guards (MSGs) and other personnel posted at the embassy and at a defense outpost (DOA) adjacent to the airport in downtown Saigon.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. Rapa Nui (aka the Easter Islands) have long been thought to illustrate how human environmental overreach led to collapse, as advanced monument builders undermined the ecology, beginning an inevitable slide. The authors make a counter-argument that "the problems were social, not a result of environmental ruin.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership That Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe

Jonathan Jordan. Independent historian Jordan ("Lone Star Navy", with research based on diaries and personal accounts, puts us in the mindset of the protagonists and their staffs to understand what was boiling under the surface. Another combination of generals might have fared better or worse—we will never know. Patton died in December 1945 after a car accident, while Eisenhower and Bradley moved upward and on. This is very much an emotional military history, compelling and easy to read, yet also well documented. Recommended to both specialists and general readers.--Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth

Frederick Kempe. Former longtime Wall Street Journal editor Kempe recounts a curious series of episodes in which the Russians appeared to be bearing olive branches, the Americans arrows. The climax of the difficult year 1961, as Kempe demonstrates, was the building of the Berlin Wall following one misreading of Soviet cues after another on the part of the Kennedy administration. In the end, Kennedy had to swallow his pride and accept the fact of the wall, which "had risen as he passively stood by."--Kirkus Reviews. (Check Catalog) 

The Churchills: In Love and War

Mary Lovell. Although the central character here may be Winston Churchill, British biographer Lovell ("A Rage To Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton" essentially offers a popular biography of several members of the 19th- and 20th-century Churchill family, with less coverage beforehand on the earlier Churchills, such as the original Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Lovell tends to be drawn to strong female characters, and her new book is no exception; she devotes significant attention to American heiresses Jennie Jerome (Winston Churchill's mother) and Consuelo Vanderbilt (his cousin by marriage). --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee's Triumph, 1862-1863

Jeffrey D. Wert. Wert eschews the tick-tock of battle in favor of analysis of the big-picture, how the army was led and how the rank and file responded. Nimbly sifting the oftentimes conflicting judgments of a wide array of historians and making vivid use of primary source documents, the author demonstrates how everything—the good and the bad—began with Lee.--Kirkus (Check Catalog)

Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

Joel Brinkley. Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Brinkley takes on the pricey pitfalls of nation building and the labyrinth of centuries-old political corruption in this riveting piece of literary reportage. At once a tale of human tragedy and a primer on the future of Western engagement with developingand autocraticcountries, the book offers a rare look inside a country beleaguered by poverty and imprisoned by patronage and venal leadership since the 13th century; traumatized by colonialism, Pol Pot's brutal Khmer Rouge, and the genocide he unleashed.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States

Gordan Wood. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Wood challenges the popular view that the war for American independence was fought for practical and economic reasons, like unfair taxation. In this exceptional collection of essays, he argues brilliantly to the contrary, that the Revolution was indeed fought over principles, such as liberty, republicanism, and equality. This is a remarkable study of the key chapter of American history and its ongoing influence on American character.--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean

Alex von Tunzelmann. Three dictators, circa 1960Castro in Cuba, Franois Duvalier in Haiti, and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republicare, are the principals in von Tunzelmanns political history. Recounting alarms that trio set off in Washington, she ponders how well the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations understood situations on the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. Von Tunzelmanns diligent work will widen the eyes of cold war buffs.--Booklist (Check Catalog)

Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends

Mary McAuliffe. The Belle Epoque is an age from roughly the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the onset of WWI in 1914. McAuliffe examines the earliest phase of the period, up to the turn of the century. In literature, giants like Zola and Hugo were active. The list of painters and sculptors who emerged seems endless, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Monet, and Rodin. McAuliffe tracks, on a year-by-year basis, this explosion of artistic expression. This is an excellent and honest portrayal of an exciting and vital era in European history.--Booklist. (Check Catalog)

This great struggle : America's Civil War

Steven Woodworth. Woodworth displays his vast knowledge of Civil War military history in this sprightly march through the run-up to the war, the fighting, and the war's immediate aftermath. He provides an unabashedly guns-and-battle account, emphasizing strategy and individual actions but not the politics or economic, social, and cultural factors affecting and being affected by the war. His descriptions of the generals and their tactics are sure-handed, and his command of action complete and compelling. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Steven Woodworth

Cairo: Histories of a City

Nezar Al Sayyad.

AlSayyad, professor of architecture, planning, and urban history at the University of California, Berkeley, has provided a timely and often surprising series of vignettes serving to trace the physical and cultural evolution of the city from the pharaonic period to the present. Each of the dozen vignettes covers a specific historical period, and AlSayyad includes many fascinating details about historical figures and their impact on the city as it grewfrom a tiny settlement to a great metropolis.--Booklist (Check Catalog)

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs

Jim Rasenberger.

This focused account of the invasion and America's involvement draws new insights from material recently released by the CIA. Bound to be of interest, given the anniversary and current events in Cuba.--Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Rawhide down : the near assassination of Ronald Reagan

Del Quentin Wilber.

Wilber's gripping minute-by-minute account of the day that president Reagan (codename Rawhide) was shot reveals the major players in the drama, including the president's doctors, his would-be assassin, Secret Service agents, White House staffers, Vice President George H.W. Bush, and Nancy Reagan. The first time author, a reporter for The Washington Post, writes with particular empathy for the stunned, shaken doctors and nurses who made a massive effort to overcome the challenges of locating the bullet, repairing the lung, and fighting debilitating blood loss as the 70-year-old president's life hung in the balance--Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, Rfk, Carter, Ford, Reagan

Jeff Greenfield. Greenfield offers three what-if political tales with a familiar cast of Presidents and politicos operating in alternate but plausible historical circumstances. This is a particularly good contribution to the alternate history genre because it relies on nonfiction works, memoirs, and the author's experience as a political pundit. Greenfield's spirited writing reaches its high point when he describes how the Cuban Missile Crisis resulted in a limited nuclear war in 1962 during Lyndon Johnson's presidency (Johnson became President in January 1961, one month after president-elect Kennedy was killed in a bomb explosion). The second story explores Robert F. Kennedy's election and turbulent presidency, following the failed assassination attempt by Sirhan Sirhan after the 1968 California primary. The final scenario weaves a complex web of Gerald Ford defeating Jimmy Carter in 1976, followed by Ford's failed presidency, and the 1980 election of Gary Hart, who defeated Ronald Reagan in a close race.--Library Journal (Check Catalog)

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)

Yellow dirt : an American story of a poisoned land and a people betrayed

 by Judy Pasternak. In the 1940s, when the U.S. government was embarking on developing atomic weapons, it discovered huge uranium deposits in Navajo territory covering parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. Mines constructed there yielded uranium that would be used in the Manhattan Project and eventually in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Navajo themselves saw little of the huge profits from uranium but as workers and land dwellers would suffer radiation exposure four times that of the Japanese targeted by the A-bomb. Award-winning environmental journalist Pasternak follows four generations of Navajo families, from the patriarch who warned against violating the land to those tempted by the prospects of jobs and money. She chronicles the cultural stoicism that prohibited them from complaining for so long about the alarming rates of cancer deaths, the betrayal of trust by corporate and government interests, the growing awareness of the tragedy visited on them in the name of national security, and the efforts to fight for restoration. A stunning look at a shameful chapter in American history with long-lasting implications for all Americans concerned with environmental justice. --Booklist (Check Catalog)