General Books

Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man

Dalton Fury

Amazon Price: $17.13 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Press Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $16.51

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The mission was to kill the most wanted man in the world--an operation of such magnitude that it couldn’t be handled by just any military or intelligence force. The best America had to offer was needed. As such, the task was handed to roughly forty members of America’s supersecret counterterrorist unit formerly known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta; more popularly, the elite and mysterious unit Delta Force.
The American generals were flexible. A swatch of hair, a drop of blood, or simply a severed finger wrapped in plastic would be sufficient. Delta's orders were to go into harm's way and prove to the world bin Laden had been terminated.
These Delta warriors had help: a dozen of the British Queen’s elite commandos, another dozen or so Army Green Berets, and six intelligence operatives from the CIA who laid the groundwork by providing cash, guns, bullets, intelligence, and interrogation skills to this clandestine military force. Together, this team waged modern siege of epic proportions against bin Laden and his seemingly impenetrable cave sanctuary burrowed deep inside the Spin Ghar Mountain range in eastern Afghanistan.
Over the years, since the battle ended, scores of news stories have surfaced offering tidbits of information about what actually happened in Tora Bora. Most of it is conjecture and speculation.
This is the real story of the operation, the first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora, and the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers. Lastly, this is an extremely rare inside look at the shadowy world of Delta Force and a detailed account of these warriors in battle.

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins

Amazon Price: $16.50 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Knopf Amazon Marketplace: 60 new & used starting at $13.93

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Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable book that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time.

Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prizewinning New York Times correspondent whose work was hailed by David Halberstam as “reporting of the highest quality imaginable,” we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Filkins’s narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s; a night’s sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero.

We embark on a foot patrol through the shadowy streets of Ramadi, venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son.

Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10

Marcus Luttrell

List Price: $29.98 By: Hachette Audio Amazon Marketplace: 5 new & used starting at $10.49

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

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Total reviews: 777 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July, 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to have a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive. This is the story of the only survivor of Operation Redwing, SEAL team leader Marcus Luttrell, and the extraordinary firefight that led to the largest loss of life in American Navy SEAL history. His squadmates fought valiantly beside him until he was the only one left alive, blasted by an RPG into a place where his pursuers could not find him. Over the next four days, terribly injured and presumed dead, Luttrell crawled for miles through the mountains and was taken in by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to keep him safe from surrounding Taliban warriors. A born and raised Texan, Marcus Luttrell takes us from the rigors of SEAL training, where he and his fellow SEALs discovered what it took to join the most elite of the American special forces, to a fight in the desolate hills of Afghanistan for which they never could have been prepared. His account of his squadmates' heroism and mutual support renders an experience for which two of his squadmates were posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism that is both heartrending and life-affirming. In this rich chronicle of courage and sacrifice, honor and patriotism, Marcus Luttrell delivers a powerful narrative of modern war.

John Adams

David McCullough

Amazon Price: $73.00 List Price: $100.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Audio Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $58.77

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 779 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The #1 New York Times Bestseller Now Available in a Deluxe Unabridged CD Package

In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who thought, wrote, and spoke out for the "Great Cause" come what might; who traveled far and wide in all seasons and often at extreme risk; who rose to become the second President of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was rightly celebrated for his integrity, and regarded by some as "out of his senses"; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history.

Much about John Adams's life will come as a surprise to many. His rocky relationship with friend and eventual archrival Thomas Jefferson, his courageous voyage on the frigate Boston tin the winter of 1778 and his later trek over the Pyrenees are exploits few would have dared and that few listeners will ever forget.

Like his masterful, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman, David McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. This is history on a grand scale -- an audiobook about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, It is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

Sas Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea

John Wiseman

Amazon Price: $18.96 List Price: $24.95 In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. By: Collins Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $17.60

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 113 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Long book, short review. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I dont wanna write a book explaining this thing, but, even if youre just a part time backpacker, hiker or camper, this is a book you want to invest in. Lots of good information on lots of areas in the world. There is some stuff in here that should be common knowledge, but will teach you new things you never would have thought.

All and all, for 13 bucks, if the book helps even once while in the wilderness, you got your moneys worth. Its a must read/have for alot of people, from weekend warriors to that hardcore survivalist in your family.

Do you want to be a Mountain Man? 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Very good book, packed with detail. Good bathroom read. I can't wait to put some new lessons to use.

Editorial Review:

This text is based on the training techniques of the Special Air Service, the world's most famous elite fighting force. It shows you how to survive outdoors, on land, or at sea, in any weather, in any part of the world. Whether you are a camper, a hiker, a sailor, or anyone else engaged in outdoor pursuits, this reference bible could actually save your life.

A Long Way Gone

Ishmael Beah

By: HarperPerennial Amazon Marketplace: 1 new & used starting at $39.99

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Total reviews: 420 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a lot easier to take when you realize it's mostly FAKE 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I found this book to be quite harrowing: I frequently had to put it down and cool off, so troubling was the stuff I was reading.

But that was only up to about page 50 or so. After that it became a lot easier to stomach.

Why page 50? Because that's when I went to the internet and learned a little bit about the book's author, Ishmael Beah.

In short, Beah, while he apparently did undergo some rather unpleasant experiences in his native Sierra Leone, evidently did not undergo all the experiences related in "A Long Way Gone," or at least not directly. Many journalists have labeled this book a fraud.

If you'd like to find out about the controversy yourself, start with his Wikipedia page. Follow the links at the bottom.

Anyhow, some observations:

1. Beah has to be a world-class moron for not grasping that playing fast and loose with the truth in the age of the Internet is something that would later come back to haunt him. And don't tell me he was an untutored villager who had no way of understanding the implications of this: he was a student at Oberlin.

2. If Beah had simply pulled a Frederick Exley and said, "Hey, folks, this is a fictionalized autobiography. I'm not so much interested in the precise truth of events so much as the effect they had on my spirit and development." He would be untouchable.

3. This irony is certainly not deliberate, but you know how the central thrust of the book is that after an endless parade of horrors, you get inured? After pages and pages of blood, several limbs, and mutilated bodies, you pretty much stop caring. It's like you're an armchair boy soldier!

4. Beah should be despised, not "addressing the U.N." True, he may have "forgiven himself" in some feel-good workshop, but I for one haven't forgiven him. Look, if they gave him a Kalashnikov when he was 7 or 8 and bullied him into shooting up the town, that'd be one thing. But 15? That's old enough to know the difference between right and wrong in any culture. Murderer.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond

Amazon Price: $16.47 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton Amazon Marketplace: 70 new & used starting at $13.00

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Total reviews: 1075 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller—over 1.5 million copies sold—is now a major PBS special.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series.

Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.

The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.

He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations.

The 48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene

List Price: $25.00 By: Diane Pub Co Amazon Marketplace: 1 new & used starting at $79.96

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Total reviews: 509 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

My Former Bible 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Only two types of people have been and will be attracted to reading this book: those who hope it's about one thing and those who know it's about the other. The former belong to the timid, powerless, low-self esteem majority looking for the ultimate guide to gaining respect and admiration from their peers. The latter belong to the unscrupulous, dare I say sociopathic ever-growing minority whose end goal is to win at everything against everyone by any means. Once the book has been read and fully digested, one of two conclusions will be reached. The first is a sudden awareness of what a perfectly outstanding tool they hold in their hands and the limitless rewards it can afford them. The second is an absolute disgust and horror at what a dangerous volume this is and the malicious behavior it outright encourages. Interestingly, the timid are not always the ones repulsed and the ruthless are not always the ones aroused. The wave can break either way.

Shortly after this book was published, I happened upon it in a bookstore and knew I had to have it. A blaze of energy electrified my body and pounded through the deepest recesses of my mind. I was on fire, I couldn't put it down and yet I knew I could never share it with anyone, the way a child might hide away their favorite toy. In truth I became obsessed. I had to learn and then master every element of every law and take supreme authority over every aspect of my life. Indeed, this book, The 48 Laws of Power, became my bible, the most passionate conquest I had ever sought to undertake.

Within its pages I met with the reflection of every gruesome bully and every merry manipulator I had ever known. Their power was uncanny and yet so mysterious, mostly because I could never fathom how such apparently absent minds could lay so cool yet strike with such venom. It was awe-inspiring, and I had to come to terms with their secrets. The secrets that earned them respect from their enemies and fear from their admirers. The secrets that won them the most buxom women, who always appeared so entranced by even their rudest and most audacious displays. "How could they get away with everything so smoothly?!" I had wondered. "How could they be so desirable?!" I had thought. "HOW?!"

Well...here is how. It is simple.

Some people are given to a heredity and/or an upbringing that nourishes what is commonly considered 'bad' behavior. Certain genes as well as certain parenting styles perpetuate an attitude of unruliness which leads in its purest variety to utter contempt for anyone else's thoughts, feelings, or needs. Their minds develop without a balanced set of experiences, leading them to deduce that the information they received must indeed be correct. This is also applicable to those who suffer violence in their youth, even if that violence is not carried out physically. The fact remains that whatever world with which one is presented is accepted as unmitigated truth. 'Bad' behavior is usually viewed by such a person as normal. Thus selfishness, cruelty, and manipulation are seen as strengths, while compassion, kindness and humility are seen as weaknesses.

Surely there are a bevy of other factors that cannot go without mention. High intelligence, a pleasing appearance, a particular talent, et cetra can all act as lauchpads for immorality if similar virtues in others go unrecognized as being equal. This sense of equality is what it all comes down to, in fact. The very idea of power assumes that another cannot or should not be in a position to where the perspectives of both can be viewed as equally valid. On the one end is the person who is possessed by their own image, on the other is the person who believes that they have no intrinsic worth at all. The two feed off of each other in a sadistic/masochistic symbiotic relationship. The point then comes to bear that a person who believes himself powerful only remains so long as the other believes the same thing. Put two people who both see power as the ultimate attainment and you have the setting for nearly every meeting in the business world. From here, only two things can happen. One party will cave, allowing the other to dominate, or neither party will cave, effectively precipitating resentment and rage in both. The former leads to a continuation of the cycle while the latter leads to war.

This book is extremely well-researched and exquisitely written, which is why I still give it three stars. But I warn you now to be aware of your true intentions. Buy this book if you don't care about anyone but yourself, and it pleases you to see another man crumble. Do not buy this book if you have even the slightest interest in saving yourself from years of unnecessary struggle. Remember that the wave does break both ways, and you do not know who you may become if you toss your ethics in the wastebasket. Needless to say, I was the timid one who was sick of being overlooked, but in the end, it was this book that I tossed into the wastebasket. Your call.

Editorial Review:

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention--grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded--or been victimized by--power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst The Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza

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Total reviews: 380 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.

Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.

It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers.

The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

 

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Liberation Trilogy)

Rick Atkinson

Amazon Price: $11.56 List Price: $17.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Holt Paperbacks Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $9.50

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Subjects -> History -> Military -> World War II -> Europe

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Total reviews: 89 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“A triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sight and sounds of battle.”—The New York Times

In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943 and then, mile by bloody mile, fight their way north toward Rome.

The Italian campaign’s outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by Lieutenant General Mark Clark, one of the war’s most complex and controversial commanders, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. And with the liberation of Rome in June 1944, ultimate victory at last began to seem inevitable.

Drawing on a wide array of primary source material, written with great drama and flair, this is narrative history of the first rank. With The Day of Battle, Atkinson has once again given us the definitive account of one of history’s most compelling military campaigns.