“They call it golf, because all the other four-letter words were taken.” - AnonymousWhen links journeyman Lee Douglas and his bumbling caddie Victor Danielson land an unlikely invitation to the world’s biggest tournament, it feels like a movie.Of course, not all movies have happy endings.Suddenly entangled with a host of meddling suits and a small-town population ranging from eccentric to evil—not to mention a slew of surreal developments--Douglas and Danie...

This myth-busting military biography reveals the true story of the legendary WWII German flying ace—and how his story was manipulated during the Cold War.Over the course of 1,404 wartime missions, Luftwaffe fighter pilot Erich Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills. His storied career contains all the dramas you would expect: frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, a decade of imprisonment in the...

Joshua Heter and David O’Hara have circled a diverse group of camper-philosophers around the fire in Camping and Philosophy: Big Ideas in the Great Outdoors to try to answer some unanswerable questions. There is an entire cosmos of reasons campers have been prone to spiritual experiences since humanity started sleeping under the stars (by choice) thousands of years ago. And these twenty-seven chapters offer their own answers to the questions asked by campers across the globe. What...

With over 1,404 wartime missions, Erich Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills, and his career contains all the dramas you would expect. There were the frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, a decade of imprisonment in the wretched Soviet POW camps, and further military service during the Cold War that ended with conflict and angst.Hartmann was adopted by a network of writers and commentators personally invested in his ...

This is the little-known story of Heavy Panzer (Tiger) Battalion 507 told through the recollections of the men who fought with the unit.The book was conceived during a reunion of the "507" at Rohrdorf in 1982, where it was agreed to set up an editorial committee under Helmut Schneider, himself a veteran of the battalion, to search for as many survivors of the unit as possible and gather their reminiscences. The resulting account is a treasure trove of first-hand material, including...

In 2002, Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq to facilitate the deployment of follow-on conventional military forces numbering over 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division, would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the North as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground in Iraq within weeks, the entire campaign likely to be over by summer.The ...

Europe has fallen. Pearl Harbor is in flames. Enter: the Eighth.In 1941 the RAF fought a desperate battle of survival against the Luftwaffe over Britain. Then, from across the Atlantic, came a new generation of American pilots, gunners, and bombardiers, a new generation of flying machines called the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, the P-47 Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang fighter. Soon these brave young men were hurtling themselves and their unproven planes across the Ch...

Prior to World War Two, Wing Commander Guy Gibson joined the Royal Air Force. In 1944, he wrote down his experience of serving in the RAF.Aged just 25, Gibson had completed two full tours, each of 30 operations, with Bomber Command, and had led the now-famous Dam Busters raid against the dams of the Ruhr Valley in May 1943. He died aged 26 in 1944, when his Mosquito crashed near Steenbergen in the Netherlands.Gibson’s story is an incredible one. He struggled daily to work t...

Richard Freiherr von Rosen was a highly decorated Wehrmacht soldier and outstanding panzer commander.After serving as a gunlayer on a Pz.Mk.III during Barbarossa, he led a Company of Tigers at Kursk. Later he led a company of King Tiger panzers at Normandy and in late 1944 commanded a battle group (12 King Tigers and a flak Company) against the Russians in Hungary in the rank of junior, later senior lieutenant (from November 1944, his final rank).Only 489 of these King Tige...

The son of a former slave, Pertinax was the Roman Emperor who proved that no matter how lowly your birth, you could rise to the very top through hard work, grit and determination.Born in AD 126, Pertinax made a late career change from working as a grammar teacher to a position in the army. As he moved up the ranks and further along the aristocratic cursus honorum, he took on many of the most important postings in the Empire, from senior military roles in fractious Britain, the Marc...

The Brandenburgers were Hitler's Special Forces, a band of mainly foreign German nationals who used disguise and fluency in other languages to complete daring missions into enemy territory. Overshadowed by stories of their Allied equivalents, their history has largely been ignored.First published in 1984, de Giampietro's highly-personal and eloquent memoir is a vivid account of his experiences. In astonishing detail, he delves into the reality of life in the unit from everyday conc...

From the author of Memory and the Mediterranean, a comprehensive history of the Italian city states from 1450 to 1650.In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Its cultural, economic, and political dominance is utterly astonishing and unique in world histor...