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› Find signed collectible books: 'The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: '1945: The War That Never Ended'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The American People in World War II: Freedom from Fear'
Even as the New Deal was coping with the Depression, a new menace was developing abroad. Exploiting Germany's own economic burdens, Hitler reached out to the disaffected, turning their aimless discontent into loyal support for his Nazi Party. In Asia, Japan harbored imperial ambitions of its own. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression eventually had to shoulder arms in another conflict that wreaked worldwide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age, and forever changed their way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world.
The American People in World War II--the second installment of Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear--explains how the nation agonized over its role in the conflict, how it fought the war, why the United States emerged victorious, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could. The American People in World War II is a gripping narrative and an invaluable analysis of the trials and victories through which modern America was formed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Bag of Marbles'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Battle Group!: German Kampfgruppen Action of World War Two'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Battle Of The Bulge: Hitler's Ardennes Offensive, 1944-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Show'
When The Big Show was first published, paper rationing meant that the text had to be heavily cut. Now, for the first time, this international bestseller has been returned to its complete, and breathtaking, original state. Pierre Clostermann was a Free French fighter ace who flew with the RAF during the Second World War. Over the course of five years he engaged in hundreds of dog-fights, shot down scores of Luftwaffe planes, escorted American bombers on some of the most dangerous raids of the war, and watched many of his friends falling to their deaths in the skies over the Channel. The Big Show, his incredible account of the air war over Britain and France, has become one of the most famous memoirs of the Second World War. Now in its original state, it contains everything one could wish for in a war memoir: wonderfully observed descriptions of wartime Britain, frighteningly evocative stories of in-the-cockpit action, an amazing cast of characters, and all the drama and bravery of a man fighting a desperate war thousands of feet above the ground. An undeniable classic. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Big Show : The Greatest Pilot's Story of World War II'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bitter Woods: The Dramatic Story, Told at All Echelons- From Supreme Command to Squad Leader- Of the Crisis That Shook the Western Coalition H'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blitzkrieg, from the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bruneval Raid : Stealing Hitler's Radar'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Caen: Anvil of Victory'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Churchill'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Churchill's Generals'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park'
fine 1st edition 1st printing paperback [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collaborator: The Trial & Execution of Robert Brasillach'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crumbling Empire: The German Defeat in the East, 1944'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Das Reich: The Military Role of the 2nd Ss Divison'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Days of Sadness Years of Triumph: The American People,1939-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Defeat in the West'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Defiance : The Bielski Partisans'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Destruction of the European Jews'
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![[???]: Dirty Dozen [???]: Dirty Dozen](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0304359289.01._SL160_SCLZZZZZZZ__.jpg)
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dream of Scipio'
Like his elegant debut, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio is an inventive, gloriously detailed historical novel told from multiple viewpoints. But Pears has set himself an additional challenge by spreading his narrators over several centuries: there's the fifth century French nobleman and bishop, Manlius, a civilized man who has embraced the uncouth Christian faith in order to protect what he holds dear; an 11th-century scholar and troubadour named Olivier de Noyen, the famously ill-fated admirer of a married girl; and Julien Barneuve, an early 20th-century scholar of de Noyen who discovers, through him, a magnificent manuscript of Manlius's called "The Dream of Scipio." Though all three men come from the same small Provençal town, it is this manuscript, derived from the teachings of a wise woman, that links the three narrative threads of Pears's story. At the heart of The Dream of Scipio and, one suspects, at the heart of its author, is the conflict between a classical ideal of learning and the contemplation of beauty, and the noisy, uncivilized, democratizing impulses of the Christian era. A novel of ideas like its predecessor, The Dream of Scipio is neither chilly nor didactic and doesn't shy away from depicting the costs of its narrators' unpopular devotions. --Regina Marler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Duel for France: 1944'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eastern Approaches: Essays on Asian Art and Archaeology'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932-1972'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia'
This important book draws on vital new archival material to unravel the mystery of Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941 and Stalin's enigmatic behavior on the eve of the attack. Challenging the currently popular view that Stalin was about to invade Germany when Hitler made a preemptive strike, Gorodetsky argues that Stalin was actually negotiating for peace in order to redress the European balance of power. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heat of the Day'
A novel which draws on a recollection of wartime London to depict the effect of war on the manners, morals and emotions of those not directly engaged in the fighting. By the author of TO THE NORTH, THE HOTEL and A WORLD OF LOVE. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Fascism, 1914-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: New Guinea and the Marianas, March 1944-August 1944'
The University of Illinois Press continues its paperback release of Samuel Eliot Morison's panoramic fifteen-volume naval history with three volumes that chronicle the war in the Pacific from May 1942 through May 1944. This new edition will be issued in increments of three volumes per season through Spring 2003.
Morison's genius for capturing the flash and fire and the pathos of combat infuses his narrative with an immense vitality and suspense. This is not an official history, in the ordinary sense of that term, but "Morison's history, " a gripping, face-to-face encounter with the human drama of war.
Volume 4: Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions, May 1942 -- August 1942 details the American victory in the Coral Sea and the U.S. Navy's stunning defeat of a far superior Japanese force at Midway, as well as the events leading up to the six-month struggle at Guadalcanal. This volume also provides a richly detailed look at the first-year exploits of the "Silent Service": the fledgling American submarine corps in the Pacific. Morison supplements his firsthand experience of American operations and access to Allied documents with critical information from the Japanese side. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: Aleutians, Gilberts and Marshalls, June 1942-April 1944'
The University of Illinois Press continues its paperback release of Samuel Eliot Morison's panoramic fifteen-volume naval history with three volumes that chronicle the war in the Pacific from May 1942 through May 1944. This new edition will be issued in increments of three volumes per season through Spring 2003.
Morison's genius for capturing the flash and fire and the pathos of combat infuses his narrative with an immense vitality and suspense. This is not an official history, in the ordinary sense of that term, but "Morison's history, " a gripping, face-to-face encounter with the human drama of war.
Volume 4: Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions, May 1942 -- August 1942 details the American victory in the Coral Sea and the U.S. Navy's stunning defeat of a far superior Japanese force at Midway, as well as the events leading up to the six-month struggle at Guadalcanal. This volume also provides a richly detailed look at the first-year exploits of the "Silent Service": the fledgling American submarine corps in the Pacific. Morison supplements his firsthand experience of American operations and access to Allied documents with critical information from the Japanese side. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, January 1943-June 1944'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: Supplement and General Index'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich'
As the Cold War followed on the heels of the Second World War, as the Nuremburg Trials faded in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, both the Germans and the West were quick to accept the idea that Hitler's army had been no SS, no Gestapo, that it was a professional force little touched by Nazi politics. But in this compelling account Omer Bartov reveals a very different history, as he probes the experience of the average soldier to show just how thoroughly Nazi ideology permeated the army.
In Hitler's Army, Bartov focuses on the titanic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union--where the vast majority of German troops fought--to show how the savagery of war reshaped the army in Hitler's image. Both brutalized and brutalizing, these soldiers needed to see their bitter sacrifices as noble patriotism and to justify their own atrocities by seeing their victims as subhuman. In the unprecedented ferocity and catastrophic losses of the Eastrn front, he writes, soldiers embraced the idea that the war was a defense of civilization against Jewish/Bolshevik barbarism, a war of racial survival to be waged at all costs. Bartov describes the incredible scale and destruction of the invasion of Russia in horrific detail. Even in the first months--often depicted as a time of easy victories--undermanned and ill-equipped German units were stretched to the breaking point by vast distances and bitter Soviet resistance. Facing scarce supplies and enormous casualties, the average soldier sank to ta a primitive level of existence, re-experiencing the trench warfare of World War I under the most extreme weather conditions imaginable; the fighting itself was savage, and massacres of prisoners were common. Troops looted food and supplies from civilians with wild abandon; they mercilessly wiped out villages suspected of aiding partisans. Incredible losses led to recruits being thrown together in units that once had been filled with men from the same communities, making Nazi ideology even more important as a binding force. And they were further brutalized by a military justice system that executed almost 15,000 German soldiers during the war. Bartov goes on to explore letters, diaries, military reports, and other sources, showing how widespread Hitler's views became among common fighting men--men who grew up, he reminds us, under the Nazi regime. In the end, they truly became Hitler's army.
In six years of warfare, the vast majority of German men passed through the Wehrmacht and almost every family had a relative who fought in the East. Bartov's powerful new account of how deeply Nazi ideology penetrated the army sheds new light on how deeply it penetrated the nation. Hitler's Army makes an important correction not merely to the historical record but to how we see the world today. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hitler's Greatest Defeat: The Collapse of Army Group Centre, June 1944'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945'
When The Holocaust first appeared in Israel in 1987, it was hailed as the finest, most authoritative history of Hitler's war on the Jews ever published. Representing twenty years of research and reflection, Leni Yahil's book won the Shazar Prize, one of Israel's highest awards for historical work. Now available in English, The Holocaust offers a sweeping look at the Final Solution, covering not only Nazi policies, but also how Jews and foreign governments perceived and responded to the unfolding nightmare.
The Holocaust is astonishingly comprehensive. Yahil weaves a gripping chronological narrative that stretches from the Norwegian fjords to the Greek islands, from Amsterdam to Tehran--and even Shanghai. Her writing is balanced, objective, and compelling, as she systematically explores the evolution of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe, probing its politics, planning, goals, and key figures. Yahil uses her command of the many relevant languages to marshal an impressive array of documentary and statistical evidence, driving her narrative forward with telling details and personal accounts--such as a survivor's description of her perseverance during a death march, or the story of the Struma, a boat that sank with over 700 Jewish refugees when the British refused to receive it in Palestine.
Along the way, she destroys persistent myths about the Holocaust: that Hitler had no plan for exterminating the Jews, that the Jews themselves went peacefully to the slaughter. Though Yahil finds that Nazi policies were often inconsistent, particularly during the years before the war, she conclusively demonstrates that Hitler was always working toward a final reckoning with world Jewry, envisioning his war as a war against the Jews. The book also recounts numerous uprisings and acts of resistance in ghettos and concentration camps, as well as the activities of Jewish partisan units. Yahil describes the work of Jews in America, Palestine, and world organizations on behalf of Hitler's victims--often in the face of resistance by the Allied governments and neutral states--and explores the factors that affected the success of rescue efforts.
The Holocaust is a monumental work of history, unsurpassed in scope and insightful detail. Objective yet compassionate, Leni Yahil brings together the countless diverse strands of this epic event in a single gripping account. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The King of Children : The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Language of Threads'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932'
William Manchester met Winston Churchill on January 24, 1953. Their encounter on the Queen Mary sparked an intense curiosity in Manchester that would eventually result in his classic three-volume magnum opus The Last Lion.
In this, the first volume, we follow Churchill from his birth to 1932, when he began to warn against the remilitarization of Germany. Born of a lovely, wanton American mother and a gifted but unstable son of a duke, his childhood was one of wretched neglect. He sought glory on the battlefields of Cuba, Sudan, India, South Africa and the trenches of France. In Parliament he was the prime force behind the creation of Iraq and Jordan, laid the groundwork for the birth of Israel, and negotiated the independence of the Irish Free State. Yet, as Chancellor of the Exchequer he plunged England into economic crisis, and his fruitless attempt to suppress Gandhi's quest for Indian independence brought political chaos to Britain.
Throughout, Churchill learned the lessons that would prepare him for the storm to come, and as the 1930's began, he readied himself for the coming battle against Nazism--an evil the world had never before seen. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Luftwaffe War Diaries: The German Air Force in World War II'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream'
Doris Kearns Goodwin's classic life of Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the Great Society, the Vietnam War, and other defining moments the tumultuous 1960s, is a monument in political biography. From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, first encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 1967, she became fascinated by the man--his character, his enormous energy and drive, and his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power. As a member of his White House staff, she soon became his personal confidante, and in the years before his death he revealed himself to her as he did to no other.
Widely praised and enormously popular, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream is a work of biography like few others. With uncanny insight and a richly engrossing style, the author renders LBJ in all his vibrant, conflicted humanity. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders - an Intimate History of Damage and Denial'
In 1959 the German journalist Norbert Lebert conducted extensive interviews with the sons and daughters of prominent Nazis: Hess, Bormann, Göring, and Himmler; Baldur von Schirach, creator of the Hitler Youth; and Hans Frank, governor of Poland. Then at the beginning of their adult lives, Lebert's subjects were the bearers of notorious names that made them outcasts to some, symbols of a lost glory to others.
Forty years later, Lebert's son Stephan-also a journalist-tracked down these same men and women to find out what had become of them, how they remembered their fathers, and what effect the names they carried had on the paths they had taken. Lebert's account of his conversations, juxtaposed with his father's postwar interviews, gives us an extraordinary and unflinching look at how these individuals have coped with a horrifying heritage.
The stories that emerge are fascinating, surprising, and often disturbing: The young man who refuses military service and is granted conscientious objector status on the grounds that his father is imprisoned by the state--as a Nazi war criminal. The boy who begins his education learning the principles of fascism, finishes it at a Catholic boarding school, and later becomes a priest and a missionary to Africa. The woman who was systematically refused work because she wouldn't use an alias, but who now lives in the suburbs under her husband's name and keeps secret contacts with other nostalgic Nazis. The journalist who writes a scathing magazine article reviling the father responsible for two million deaths, and is greeted with a barrage of letters from outraged Germans--whatever your father may have done, the letters argue, fathers must always be honored.
My Father's Keeper is a remarkable and illuminating addition to our knowledge of the Nazi past and of how this past continues to haunt the present. And it offers a chilling perspective on the way children live with the legacy of their parents' deeds. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nisei Daughter'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Borrowed Time: How World War II Began'
non fiction book on World War II. dust jacket wear. our merchandise is bought from many different locations and range from brand new to acceptable. all items have normal shelf wear unless otherwise indicated. if you have any questions or problems with an order please contact us. we take great care of our customers. thanks for shopping art by nature and don't forget your feedback! :)blrwcs [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Panzer Commander: The Memoirs of Colonel Hans Von Luck'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Panzer Operations: The Eastern Front Memoir of General Raus, 1941-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Patton Papers 1940-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Present at the Creation, My Years in the State Department'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Presumption of Death'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany 1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reminiscences'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Road to Berlin'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Road to Berlin: Stalin's War With Germany'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rommel: Battles and Campaigns'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Scorched Earth; Hitler's War on Russia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shinano: The Sinking of Japan's Secret Supership'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II'
In the final six months of World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union focused on Hungary: Stalin demanded victory at all costs as a key to securing his European empire; Hitler ordered an unrelenting defense of Budapest in order to prolong his grip on Vienna and preserve the route to Berlin. Consequently, the siege of Budapest was one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the entire war.
Based on formerly inaccessible documents and several hundred interviews with Hungarian and German survivors, this is the first complete and unbiased account of the siege of Budapest. Street by street, day by day, Krisztián Ungváry describes the battle and its horrors in meticulous detail. One hundred and two days passed between the appearance of the first Soviet tank and the final capture of Buda Castle. More than 80,000 Soviet troops and 38,000 German and Hungarian soldiers were killed; about 38,000 Hungarian civilian lives were lost. Civilian casualties were extraordinarily high because the citys 800,000 noncombatant residents were never evacuated. This book represents a massive effort of historical reconstruction, and a major contribution to the history of World War II.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Silent Angel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Social History of the Third Reich'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'SS-GB: Nazi-Occupied Britain, 1941'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Storming Eagles : German Airborne Forces in World War II'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field-Marshall Erwin Rommel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944'
A strong and disturbing account of the Vichy period, demonstrating how in the interests of stability, French national feeling favored collaboration with the German-controlled regime. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'War in Italy 1943-1945: A Brutal Story'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'White Teeth: Reader's Companion'
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.
Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions:
The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man.Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "They have both lost their way," he grumbles. "Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Widow Killer'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Zhukov at the Oder: The Decisive Battle for Berlin'
In his new book, Tony Le Tissier provides the first detailed account of the Soviet-German conflict east of Berlin, culminating in 1945 with the last major land battle in Europe that proved decisive for the fate of Berlin. When the first Red Army soldier reached the Oder on the 31st of January, everyone at the Soviet Headquarters expected Marshall Zhukov's troops to bring a quick end to the war. However, despite desperate fighting by both sides, a stalemate persisted for two months, at the end of which the Soviet bridgeheads north and south of Kustrin were united and the fortress finally fell. By drawing not only on official sources, but also on the accounts of individuals involved, Le Tissier meticulously reconstructs the difficult breakthrough achieved on the Oder: the establishment of bridgeheads, the battle for the fortress of Kustrin, the bloody fight for Seelow Heights. Numerous maps and step by step illustrations show the operations of both contestants in detail and reveal a most interesting episode in the history of the Second World War in Europe.
In his new book, Tony Le Tissier provides the first detailed account of the Soviet-German conflict east of Berlin, culminating in 1945 with the last major land battle in Europe that proved decisive for the fate of Berlin. When the first Red Army soldier reached the Oder on the 31st of January, everyone at the Soviet Headquarters expected Marshall Zhukov's troops to bring a quick end to the war. However, despite desperate fighting by both sides, a stalemate persisted for two months, at the end of which the Soviet bridgeheads north and south of Kustrin were united, and the fortress finally fell.
By drawing not only on official sources, but also on the accounts of individuals involved, Le Tissier meticulously reconstructs the difficult breakthrough achieved on the Oder: the establishment of bridgeheads, the battle for the fortress of Kustrin, and the bloody fight for Seelow Heights. Numerous maps and step by step illustrations show the operations of both contestants in detail and reveal a most interesting episode in the history of the Second World War in Europe.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'La Misteriosa Llama De La Reina Loana'
Es triste despertarte una mañana en una cama de hospital y ser incapaz de reconocer a tu mujer y a tus hijos, abrir los ojos y no recordar cuál es tu profesión, ni dónde vives o cuáles son tus gustos a la hora de comer y beber. Esa es la desconcertante realidad de Giambattista Bodoni, Yambo para los amigos, un hombre de sesenta años que, tras sufrir un accidente, ha perdido por completo la memoria personal, la más ligada a las emociones, y en cambio conserva intacta la memoria histórica, así que sabe muy bien quién es Napoleón, pero ve su propia vida como si acabara de inaugurarla.
Para ayudarle en el proceso de recuperación, su esposa Paola insiste en que pase una temporada en el caserón de Solara, un pueblo en las colinas piamontesas. Ahí Yambo vivió su infancia, y en el desván están guardados los libros, los tebeos, los discos, los recortes de periódico y los carteles de las películas que lo acompañaron en los primeros años de su vida. Inicia así una labor casi detectivesca para reencontrarse con el pasado a través de estos objetos, que para él no son recuerdos sino hipótesis de trabajo, cosas nuevas que le hablan de un mundo que fue el suyo y el de todas las personas que vivieron en primera persona los momentos más importantes de la historia del siglo XX. Las fotos de Mussolini se juntan con las imágenes de Flash Gordon y Mandrake, Salgari le da la mano al ratón Mickey, y los negros uniformes de las juventudes fascistas se mezclan con las redacciones escolares de ese niño que fue Yambo, mientras el rostro de una mujer amada y el recuerdo de un crimen atroz asoman en la niebla. [via]
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