Between the Confederacy and recognition by Great Britain stood one unlikely Englishman who hated the slave trade. His actions helped determine the fate of a nation.When Robert Bunch arrived in Charleston to take up the post of British consul in 1853, he was young and full of ambition, but even he couldn’t have imagined the incredible role he would play in the history-making events to unfold. In an age when diplomats often were spies, Bunch’s job included sending in...

Kurt Kurtovic wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, to make a life with his wife and child in Westfield, Kansas. Then September 11 happened and Kurt knew they'd never be safe again unless he did what only he could do, take terror to the terrorists. He knew their world, knew how they worked, knew their weak points. He knew, because he'd been one of them.But as Kurt wages his bloody campaign, hunting down his former Al-Qaeda comrades in Britain, Spain, and Afr...

The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department's counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. B...

Summer of Deliverance is a powerful and moving memoir of anger, love, and reconciliation between a son and his father. Hailed as a literary genius of his generation, James Dickey created his art and lived his life with a ferocious passion. He was a heavy drinker, a destructive husband and father, a poet of grace and sensitivity, and, after the publication and subsequent film of his novel, Deliverance, a wildly popular literary star. Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries,...

**He is the perfect terrorist.He's an all-American boy.Kurt Kurtovic is someone you might know -- and ought to fear.**Kurt was a U.S. Army Ranger. Born and raised in Kansas, he was trained to kill for -- what? Once he might have said "for God and country." Kurt searches in the former Yugoslavia, the land of his parents, for a place, for faith, for a cause. In the midst of the horrors in Bosnia, Kurt is recruited to fight by a holy warrior, a terrorist Iago, who play...

As tension over slavery and western expansion threatened to break the US into civil war, the Southern states found themselves squeezed between two nearly irreconcilable realities: the survival of the Confederate economy would require the importation of more slaves—a practice banned in America since 1807—but the existence of the Confederacy itself could not be secured without official recognition from Great Britain, who would never countenance reopening the Atlantic slave trade. How, then, ...

The centerpiece of a major national campaign to indentify and preserve forgotten history, Here Is Where is acclaimed historian Andrew Carroll’s fascinating journey of discovery in which he travels to each of America’s fifty states and explores locations where remarkable individuals once lived or where the incredible or momentous occurred.Sparking the idea for this audiobook was Carroll’s visit to the spot where Abraham Lincoln’s son was once saved by the brother of Lincoln...

Winner of the 2008 Foundation for Coast Guard History Book AwardThe images of soldiers and marines coming ashore on hostile shores are embedded in our collective memory of World War II. But what of the sailors who manned the landing craft, going back and forth under fire with nowhere to take cover, their craft the special targets of enemy gunners?In this book, Ken Wiley, a Coast Guardsman on an Attack Transport in the Pacific, relates the intricate, often n...

Beginning with the assassination of McKinley and ending with the defeat of the League of Nations by the United States Senate, the twenty-year period covered by John Dos Passos in this lucid and fascinating narrative changed the whole destiny of America. This is the story of the war we won and the peace we lost, told with a clear historical perspective and a warm interest in the remarkable people who guided the United States through one of the most crucial periods.Foremost in the ca...

In the style of Cormac McCarthy, a gritty tale of justice and revenge in the Wild WestThe year is 1910.Nate Cooper is an old-school cowboy. He sees the change brought by the turn of the century—horses giving way to motorcars, his girlfriend marrying his best friend, and his nemesis running for governor—and reckons none of it to be good. The west is being tamed, and with progress, some things are lost. But people? They tend to stay the same. Even after spending nearly thirty...

Two founding fathers of American industry. One desire to dominate business at any price.“Masterful . . . Standiford has a way of making the 1890s resonate with a twenty-first-century audience.”—USA Today“The narrative is as absorbing as that of any good novel—and as difficult to put down.”—Miami HeraldThe author of Last Train to Paradise tells the riveting story of Andrew Carnegie, Henry C...

From humble beginnings in rural Tennessee to his heroic death defending the Alamo, frontiersman, adventurer, and politician David Davy Crockett embodies the spirit and ideals of the national character. Even during his lifetime, tales of the sharpshooting, skilled woodsman were—to his delight—told, retold, and elaborated on. As a US congressman, the former Creek War militiaman steadfastly opposed President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act. As a soldier, he made the ultimate sacrifice fig...