General Books - Page 5

My American Journey

Colin Powell, Joseph E., Persico

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 87 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Valued Early Bird over Spies and Secrecy 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I read biographies of key officials as a means of trying to understand how they make decisions, and on what basis of fact or fancy they make decisions.

Colin Powell is a great man, and I hope he returns as Secretary of State under a transpartisan team. He was destroyed by Dick Cheney and his own confusion of loyalty versus integrity.

Here is the sentence, on page 293, that made my day:

when he was Military Assistant to then Sectary of Defense Casper Weinberger, he preferred the Early Bird with its compendium of newspaper stories to the "cream of overnight intelligence" which was delivered to the Secretary of Defense by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) courier each morning.

See also:
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Price of Loyalty : George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

Editorial Review:

General Powell may have undertaken this book as a form of paid political test marketing, but it turns out to be a success of an altogether different kind. We don't learn from this book if Powell is presidential material, but his recounting of the various steps of his career give us an unrivaled view of the ins and outs of military bureaucracy and shows how the modern American military, with its consistent emphasis on can-do attitudes and actual results, is a much more congenial place for realizing one's talents than our still-alarmingly pigeonholing general society.

If I Die in a Combat Zone : Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

Tim O'Brien

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Over time, Tim O'Brien has used both art and artifice to shape his fictional accounts of Vietnam. Award-winning novels such as Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried offer up a surreal view of the war: a soldier who decides to walk to Paris, leaving only a trail of M&M's in his wake; a young man who imports his high-school girlfriend to his base camp high in the jungled mountains, only to lose her to a shadowy squad of Special Forces Green Berets and to "that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure" that was Vietnam. O'Brien's first account of the war, however, was written in the raw, unfiltered months following his return from Southeast Asia in 1969. If I Die in a Combat Zone has all of the eloquence and attention to language and detail that are a mark of the author's work; what is different about it is its straightforward, unembellished depiction of his personal experience of hell.

"When you are ordered to march through areas such as Pinkville--GI slang for Song My, parent village of My Lai ... you do some thinking. You hallucinate. You look ahead a few paces and wonder what your legs will resemble if there is more to the earth in that spot than silicates and nitrogen. Will the pain be unbearable? Will you scream or fall silent? Will you be afraid to look at your own body, afraid of the sight of your own red flesh and white bone? You wonder if the medic remembered his morphine."

O'Brien paints an unvarnished portrait of the infantry soldier's life that is at once mundane and terrifying--the endless days of patrolling punctuated by firefights that end as suddenly and inconclusively as they begin; the mind-numbing brutality of burned villages and trampled rice patties; the terror of tunnels, minefields, and the ever-present threat of death. Powerful as these scenes are, perhaps the most memorable chapter in the book concerns his decision to desert just a few weeks before he was sent to Vietnam. "The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't.... I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them, too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee. Family, the home town, friends, history, tradition, fear, confusion, exile: I could not run." Tim O'Brien went into the war opposing it and came out knowing exactly why. If I Die in a Combat Zone is more than just a memoir of a disastrous war; it is also a meditation on heroism and cowardice, on the mutability of truth and morality in a war zone and, most of all, on the simple, human capacity to endure the unendurable. --Alix Wilber

Flags of Our Fathers (Movie Tie-in Edition)

James Bradley, Ron Powers

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Total reviews: 580 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Battle of Iwo Jima, fought in the winter of 1945 on a rocky island south of Japan, brought a ferocious slice of hell to earth: in a month's time, more than 22,000 Japanese soldiers would die defending a patch of ground a third the size of Manhattan, while nearly 26,000 Americans fell taking it from them. The battle was a turning point in the war in the Pacific, and it produced one of World War II's enduring images: a photograph of six soldiers raising an American flag on the flank of Mount Suribachi, the island's commanding high point.

One of those young Americans was John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who a few days before had braved enemy mortar and machine-gun fire to administer first aid to a wounded Marine and then drag him to safety. For this act of heroism Bradley would receive the Navy Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor.

Bradley, who died in 1994, never mentioned his feat to his family. Only after his death did Bradley's son James begin to piece together the facts of his father's heroism, which was but one of countless acts of sacrifice made by the young men who fought at Iwo Jima. Flags of Our Fathers recounts the sometimes tragic life stories of the six men who raised the flag that February day--one an Arizona Indian who would die following an alcohol-soaked brawl, another a Kentucky hillbilly, still another a Pennsylvania steel-mill worker--and who became reluctant heroes in the bargain. A strongly felt and well-written entry in a spate of recent books on World War II, Flags gives a you-are-there depiction of that conflict's horrible arenas--and a moving homage to the men whom fate brought there. --Gregory McNamee

Sniper One: On Scope and Under Siege with a Sniper Team in Iraq

Dan Mills

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When Sgt. Dan Mills and the rest of the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment flew into Iraq in April, 2004, they were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives.

Within hours of their arrival in Iraq, a grenade bounced off one of the battalion’s Land Rovers, rolled underneath and detonated. The ambush marked the beginning of a full-scale firefight during which Mills killed a man with a round that removed his assailant’s head. It was going to be a long tour.

Like some post-apocalyptic “Mad Max” nightmare, the place had gone to hell in a handbasket. Temperatures on the ground often topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit, sewage systems had long since packed up, and the stench of cooking waste and piles of festering garbage grew wherever you looked. Throat-burning winds, blast bombs and well-trained, well-organized militias armed with AKs, RPGs and a limitless supply of mortar rounds were the icing on the cake.

If any of Mills’s eighteen-man sniper platoon had thought that the people of Al Amarah were going to welcome them with open arms, they were rapidly forced to reconsider. For the next six months, isolated, besieged and under constant fire, the battalion refused to give an inch.

Sniper One is a breathtaking chronicle of endurance, camaraderie, dark humor and courage in the face of relentless, lethal assault.

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Robert Coram

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 92 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Tempering Boyd with Chesterton 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If you want to change the world for the better or just keep your little corner of it from getting worse, then you'll want to read this book. It's not just about "the art of war," as the subtitle claims. It's what Boyd discovered about how conflicts are fought and won. Sadly, although he flew in two wars, most of Boyd's clashes were fought within our own military rather than with some foreign foe. As a result, one of the best USAF fighter pilots who ever lived is better remembered by the Marine Corps, where he is a hero, than by his own branch.

I'm not going spend time praising Boyd. The fact that I finished this book with a list of books and articles to read is praise enough. Instead, I'm going to offer a useful corrective to Boyd the man, by introducing someone else you should read.

That someone is G. K. Chesterton, an Englishman with a maverick, warrior personality every bit as fierce and unyielding as Boyd's. On June 1, 1941, on one of the darkest days in World War II, when the island of Crete had fallen to the Germans, leaving 17,000 British soldiers as prisoners of war, the Times of London, defiantly put these lines from Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" on its front page:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Like Boyd, Chesterton understood that how we fight determines if we win or lose. He shared Boyd's contempt for those who believe that bigger is better. In a 1909 at the height of England's fears about new German battleships, Chesterton wrote precisely what Boyd would later say about fighter aircraft.

"Common-sense tells a man that indefinite development in one direction must in practice over-reach itself... If you perceive your enemy plunging on blindly in a particular direction, the real thing to do, if you have any spirit and invention, is to calculate the weakness in his course and advance yourself in some other direction. You ought to take advantage of his infatuation, not to imitate it; you ought to surprise his plan of campaign, not copy it laboriously. If he is building very big ships, the best thing you could do would probably be to build small ones; ships lighter, quicker, and more capable of navigating rivers."

But Chesterton understood something that Boyd never learned, an aspect of warfare that's so often forgotten today that the very word for it seems quaint--chivalry. Perhaps his best explanation of chivalry came in a 1906 article explaining why the Europe of his day dominated the world. Again Chesterton described a concept dear to Boyd, the power that comes from an ability to think new thoughts and imagine new ways of acting.

"The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination."

Boyd thought like a fighter pilot. He would have us understand a man in order to destroy him, knowing that a foe who's blown out of the air will never trouble you again. As a writer, Chesterton had a different perspective. He believed that understanding leads to restraint, writing in that same article: "For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not."

Chesterton saw conflict in broad terms. When he clashed with H. G. Wells over the latter's infatuation with a World State or with Bernard Shaw over pacifism, he took the time to understand what each was saying. His criticisms of the dangers and weakness of international institutions are among the best ever written. His description of the pacifist personality is so accurate that it applies with near perfection to today's pacifists. But having gotten into the mind of his opponent, he recognized in him a fellow human being. With few exceptions, he retained the respect and even friendship of his foes. Only when one crossed a critical line, demonstrating that without great pain he was beyond redemption, would Chesterton seek to crush him to prevent the evil he intended. What was for Boyd the rule, destroying anyone who disagree with him, was for Chesterton the rare exception. Boyd needs to be tempered with Chesterton

In short, I'd suggest that, as you read what Boyd said about war and conflict, you also read what Chesterton wrote. You'll accomplish a lot more and suffer far less grief if you do. And as you might suspect, I wrote a book on that topic, a collection of Chesterton's best articles on war and peace paying particular attention to his warnings about Germany. And when the necessity arose, Chesterton could be as tough-minded as Boyd. Chesterton used all his powers as a writer to crush those ideas in the German mind that Nazism would later exploit.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II

Editorial Review:

A great American hero-a 20th-century warrior and military strategist who lived outside the spotlight but whose work has been enormously influential-is brought brilliantly to life in this acclaimed biography. John Boyd was the finest fighter pilot in American history. From the proving ground of the Korean War, he went on to win notoriety as the instructor who defeated-in less than 40 seconds-every pilot who challenged him. But what made Boyd a man for the ages was what happened after he left the cockpit. He transformed the way military aircraft-in particular the F-15 and F-16-were designed with his revolutionary Energy-Maneuverability Theory. Boyd dedicated his later years to a radical theory of conflict that was largely ignored during Boyd's lifetime, but that is now widely considered to be the most influential thinking about conflict since Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq

Colby Buzzell

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Total reviews: 86 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

My War is a book that will challenge many of the most common assumptions about the Iraq War and the people fighting in it. Colby Buzzell, the book's author and a U.S. Army machine-gunner who did a year-long tour in Iraq, is not the stereotypical small-town soldier from a Red State. He grew up in San Francisco eating pot brownies at the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, skateboarding, and listening to punk and heavy metal. He supported Ralph Nader for president, reads George Orwell, and his dad worked in Silicon Valley. But he was sick of his "life in oblivion," bouncing around from one dead-end job to another. As Buzzell writes in his typically gritty prose, "I didn’t want to get all old and have my bratty grandkids ask me, 'Grandpa, where were you during the Iraq war?' and me going, 'Oh, I was busy doing temp work and data entry for 12 bucks an hour.'"

In search of adventure, Buzzell joined the army and got sent to Iraq. First stationed in the ultra-dangerous Sunni Triangle, he quickly mastered how to use the M240 Bravo machine gun: "Just get behind that muthafucka and just fire it." His fellow soldiers, mostly hip-hop fans or headbanging metal-heads like him, killed time watching porn on mini-portable DVD players or listening to Metallica on their iPods while on patrol. Long boring spells were interrupted by wild fits of confusing action. On one of Buzzell's first missions, two platoons fired thousands of rounds at near point-blank range at an unarmed Iraqi civilian. Amazingly, he survived. Out of boredom, Buzzell started a blog, one of the first by an ordinary "Joe" grunt in Iraq. It became a media sensation and got Buzzell in trouble with the REMFs ("Rear Echelon Mutha Fuckers") because of his less-than-glamorous portrayal of the war and his superiors, whom he accuses of constantly lying to the public and the soldiers under their command. My War may be disappointing to readers looking for deeper introspections on the moral questions behind the war, but it is a pretty convincing case against the claim that everything in Iraq is going fine. --Alex Roslin

Ulysses S. Grant : Memoirs and Selected Letters : Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865 (Library of America)

Ulysses S. Grant

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Masterpiece 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This book is a must-read for any Civil War or American history buff. Grant's writing is consistently clear, elegant, beautiful. He gives an engaging account of his wartime experiences that are accurate to the best of his ability, and he writes with introspection and humility. The personal letters at the end of the volume reveal much about this fascinating man, and are a welcome addition. Please read this one! Another wonderful book in this series is the volume containing Frederick Douglass's autobiographical works.

Review of Memoirs of US Grant 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

General Grant's use of the English language is very interesting and informative. Absolutely a pleasure to read.

U.S. Grant in his own words... 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

U.S. Grant is often said to have been a failure at everything in his life except his marriage, war, and his memoirs. The latter, written as he was dying of throat cancer in 1884-1885, provide a straightforward account of his years in uniform during the Civil War.

Grant passes quickly over his Ohio boyhood and time at the United States Military Academy. His service in the Mexican War and his financial misfortunes out of uniform between the wars get only slightly more coverage. His story really begins with his return to uniform in 1861 as a commander of Illinois volunteers. The narrative follows Grant's campaigns in Missouri, Tennessee, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, his elevation to supreme command of the Union Armies, and the final grinding agony of the war in Virgina. The account ends with the cessation of hostilies in 1865.

Grant's memoirs are remarkable reading for a number of reasons. First, they provide insight into the first-rate military mind of a consistantly successful general. Grant's ability to determine the essentials of a situation and remain focused on them are evident. Second, the memoirs are a classic example of clear, simple, English narrative. Third, they display the considerable modesty of a naturally reserved man, a departure from the egotism often found in the personal memoirs of famous men. Grant himself continues to be something of a mystery to historians; these memoirs do not really lift the veil of his sense of privacy.

The Union Army of the Civil War had more than its fair share of politicians in uniform and politically-minded generals. Grant was not immune to spinning history his way; careful-eyed scholars have found more than a few instances where Grant remembered only part of the story or settled a few scores with old opponents. Nevertheless, Grant's memoirs are a valuable resource for understanding the conduct of the Civil War, not least because Grant became such a key figure in the winning of it.

Grant's memoirs are highly recommended to students of the Civil War, and to scholars seeking to understand the art of war in the midst of rebellion.

Editorial Review:

Grant wrote his "Personal Memoirs" to secure his family's future. In doing so, the Civil War's greatest general won himself a unique place in American letters. His character, sense of purpose, and simple compassion are evident throughout this deeply moving account, as well as in the letters to his wife, Julia, included here.

Rogue Warrior

Richard Marcinko

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Total reviews: 159 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A brilliant virtuoso of violence, Richard Marcinko rose through Navy ranks to create and command one of this country's most elite and classified counterterrorist units, SEAL TEAM SIX. Now this thirty-year veteran recounts the secret missions and Special Warfare madness of his worldwide military career -- and the riveting truth about the top-secret Navy SEALs.

Marcinko was almost inhumanly tough, and proved it on hair-raising missions across Vietnam and a war-torn world: blowing up supply junks, charging through minefields, jumping at 19,000 feet with a chute that wouldn't open, fighting hand-to-hand in a hellhole

jungle. For the Pentagon, he organized the Navy's first counterterrorist unit: the legendary SEAL TEAM SIX, which went on classified missions from Central America to the Middle East, the North Sea, Africa and beyond.

Then Marcinko was tapped to create Red Cell, a dirty-dozen team of the military's most accomplished and decorated counterterrorists. Their unbelievable job was to test the defenses of the Navy's most secure facilities and installations. The result was predictable: all hell broke loose.

Here is the hero who saw beyond the blood to ultimate justice -- and the decorated warrior who became such a maverick that the Navy brass wanted his head on a pole, and for a time, got it. Richard Marcinko -- ROGUE WARRIOR.

Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War

Robert Roper

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the Family Whitman.

Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother, George Washington Whitman, who led his men in twenty-one major battles—from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Vicksburg to the Wilderness—almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended. Drawing on the searing letters that Walt, George, their mother Louisa, and their other brothers, wrote to each other during the conflict, and on new evidence and new readings of the great poet, Now the Drum of War chronicles the experience of an archetypal American family—from rural Long Island to working-class Brooklyn—enduring its own long crisis alongside the anguish of the nation. Robert Roper has constructed a powerful narrative about America’s greatest crucible, and a compelling, braided story of our most original poet and one of our bravest soldiers.

Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945 (Modern War Studies)

Boris Gorbachevsky

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The monumental battles of World War II's Eastern Front - Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk - are etched into the historical record. But there is another, hidden history of that war that has too often been ignored in official accounts.Boris Gorbachevsky was a junior officer in the 31st Army who first saw front-line duty as a rifleman in the 30th Army. "Through the Maelstrom" recounts his three harrowing years on some of the war's grimmest but forgotten battlefields: the campaign for Rzhev, the bloody struggle to retake Belorussia, and the bitter final fighting in East Prussia. As he traces his experiences from his initial training, through the maelstrom, to final victory, he provides one of the richest and most detailed memoirs of life and warfare on the Eastern Front.Gorbachevsky's panoramic account takes us from infantry specialist school to the front lines to rear services areas and his whirlwind romances in wartime Moscow. He recalls the shriek of Katiusha rockets flying overhead toward the enemy and the unforgettable howl of Stukas divebombing Soviet tanks. And he conveys horrors of brutal fighting not recorded previously in English, including his own participation in a human wave assault that decimated his regiment at Rzhev, with piles of corpses growing the closer they got to the German trenches.Gorbachevsky also records the sufferings of the starving citizens of Leningrad, the savage execution of a Russian scout who turned in false information, the killing of an innocent German trying to welcome the Soviet troops, and a chilling campfire discussion by four Russian soldiers as they compared notes about the women they'd raped. His memoir brims with rich descriptions of daily army life, the challenges of maintaining morale, and relationships between soldiers. It also includes candid exposes of the many problems the Red Army faced: the influence of political officers, the stubbornness of senior commanders, the attrition through desertions, and the initial months of occupation in postwar Germany."Through the Maelstrom" features the swiftly moving narrative and rich dialogue associated with the grand style of great Russian literature. Ultimately, it provides a fitting and final testament to soldiers who fought and died in anonymity.