National bestselleredgar award nomineeone of the best books of the year: O, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, The Washington Post, The Oprah Magazine, St. With a blistering, bestselling author of ghost soldiers, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester's The Death of a President and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.
As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King's funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five day search for King’s assassin that would lead them across two continents.
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
National glory would fall to whoever could plant his flag upon its shores. Thus began their long march across the endless ice—a frozen hell in the most lonesome corner of the world. New york times bestselling author hampton sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded AgeIn the late nineteenth century, people were obsessed by one of the last unmapped areas of the globe: the North Pole.
Amid the rush of water and the shrieks of breaking wooden boards, the crew abandoned the ship. Two years into the harrowing voyage, the hull was breached. Less than an hour later, the jeannette sank to the bottom, and the men found themselves marooned a thousand miles north of Siberia with only the barest supplies.
The foremost cartographer in the world, a German named August Petermann, believed that warm currents sustained a verdant island at the top of the world. So he funded an official U. S. With twists and turns worthy of a thriller, In The Kingdom of Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and determination in the most unforgiving territory on Earth.
Blood and Thunder
Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.
A magnificent history of the american conquest of the West; "a story full of authority and color, truth and prophecy" The New York Times Book Review. In the summer of 1846, the army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico.
On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle
Washington postfrom the new york times bestselling author of ghost soldiers and in the kingdom of ice, 1950, a chronicle of the extraordinary feats of heroism by Marines called on to do the impossible during the greatest battle of the Korean WarOn October 15, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of UN troops in Korea, convinced President Harry Truman that the Communist forces of Kim Il-sung would be utterly defeated by Thanksgiving.
While expertly detailing the follies of the american leaders, grunt's-eye view of history, On Desperate Ground is an immediate, enthralling in its narrative pace and powerful in its portrayal of what ordinary men are capable of in the most extreme circumstances. Hampton sides has been hailed by critics as one of the best nonfiction writers of his generation.
What followed was one of the most heroic--and harrowing--operations in American military history, and one of the classic battles of all time. The chinese, he said with near certainty, would not intervene in the war. As he was speaking, 300, 000 Red Chinese soldiers began secretly crossing the Manchurian border.
Faced with probable annihilation, and temperatures plunging to 20 degrees below zero, the surrounded, ingenuity, and hugely outnumbered, Marines fought through the enemy forces with ferocity, and nearly unimaginable courage as they marched their way to the sea. Hampton sides' superb account of this epic clash relies on years of archival research, unpublished letters, declassified documents, and interviews with scores of Marines and Koreans who survived the siege.
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
Harrowing, and inspiring, poignant, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. A recent prison massacre by japanese soldiers elsewhere in the Philippines made the stakes impossibly high and left little time to plan the complex operation. Sides shows how the pows banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture.
Troops slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines. In ghost soldiers hampton sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.
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Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier
S. Reporting for outside, among other national media, and npr, the new Yorker, the award-winning journalist has established a reputation not only as a wry observer of the contemporary American scene but also as one of our more inventive and versatile practitioners of narrative non-fiction. In these two dozen pieces, sides gives us a fresh, collected here for the first time, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else.
. Grand Canyon river rats. Following sides, we crash the redwood retreat of an apparent cabal of fabulously powerful military-industrialists, drop in on the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and join a giant techno-rave at the lip of the Grand Canyon. We retrace the route of the historic Bataan Death March with veterans from Sides’ acclaimed WWII epic, Ghost Soldiers.
Americana gives us a sparkling mosaic of our country, in all its wild and poignant charm.
The Last Stone
Time. On march 29, ages ten and twelve, then grief, dc as shock spread, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, 1975, a massive police effort found nothing. The true story of a cold case, a compulsive liar, and five determined detectives, from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author and “master journalist” The Wall Street Journal.
Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. The acclaimed author of black hawk down and hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and covered the frantic first weeks of the story.
One of our best writers of muscular nonfiction. The denver post “Deeply unsettling . . . It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware.
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
Like the greatest novels of john le carré, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations. The son of two kgb agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine.
For nearly a decade, gordievsky helped the west turn the tables on the kgB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Cold War reached its twilight, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war.
Their obsession ultimately doomed gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between america, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet.
If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, mi6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source.
He took his first posting for russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.
The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West
They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, no guarantees of any sort, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people.1 new york times bestseller pulitzer prize–winning historian david mccullough rediscovers an important and dramatic chapter in the American story—the settling of the Northwest Territory by dauntless pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would come to define our country.
As part of the treaty of paris, in which great britain recognized the new United States of America, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Michigan, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam.
Mccullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments.
They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.
Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II
. Soon a pattern emerged: The lead tank always gets hit. As clarence and gustav trade fire down a long boulevard, they are taken by surprise by a tragic mistake of war. At first, clarence and his fellow crews in the legendary 3rd Armored Division—“Spearhead”—thought their tanks were invincible. New york times, wall street journal, los angeles times, and usa today bestseller • “a band of brothers in an American tank .
Makos drops the reader back into the Pershing’s turret and dials up a battle scene to rival the peak moments of Fury. The wall street journalfrom the author of the international bestseller a Higher Call comes the riveting World War II story of an American tank gunner’s journey into the heart of the Third Reich, where he will meet destiny in an iconic armor duel—and forge an enduring bond with his enemy.
. For a world war iI aficionado, it will read like a dream.
In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown The American Revolution Series Book 3
. A riveting and wide-ranging story, unexpected turns, full of dramatic, in the end, In the Hurricane's Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, on Washington and the sea. Here he seeks to elevate the naval battles between the French and British to a central place in the history of the American Revolution.
He succeeds, marvelously. The new york times book reviewthe thrilling story of the year that won the Revolutionary War from the New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Valiant Ambition. Recognized today as one of the most important naval engagements in the history of the world, the Battle of the Chesapeake--fought without a single American ship--made the subsequent victory of the Americans at Yorktown a virtual inevitability.
In a narrative that moves from washington's headquarters on the hudson River, to the wooded hillside in North Carolina where Nathanael Greene fought Lord Cornwallis to a vicious draw, to Lafayette's brilliant series of maneuvers across Tidewater Virginia, Philbrick details the epic and suspenseful year through to its triumphant conclusion.
And then, 1781, on September 5, the impossible happened. New york times bestseller"nathaniel Philbrick is a masterly storyteller.