Known as "the Leopard," the president of Zaire for thirty-two years, Mobutu Sese Seko, showed all the cunning of his namesake -- seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm. While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace like some modern-day reincarnation of Joseph Conrad's...

"Based on real history, The Call of the Wrens explores the bonds of sisterhood and love even when all hope seems lost"--

In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive. Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning combat correspondent recounts his personal experience of covering World War II on the front lines. Legendary reporter Don Whitehead covered almost every important Allied invasion and campaign in Europe-from North Africa to landings in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and Normandy, and to the drive into Germany. His dispatches, published in Beachhead Don, are treasures of wartime journalism. From September 1942, as a freshly minted...

An incredible, untold story of survival and acceptance that sheds light on one of the darkest chapters in Japanese history. This book tells the story of Kazuo Odachi who-in 1943, when he was just 16 years-old-joined the Imperial Japanese Navy to become a pilot. A year later, he was unknowingly assigned to the Kamikaze Special Attack Corps-a group of airmen whose mission was to sacrifice their lives by crashing planes into enemy ships. Their callsign...

The extraordinary World War II story of shipwreck and survival that paved John F. Kennedy's path to power – hailed as a "breathtaking account" by James Patterson, "masterfully written" by historian Douglas Brinkley, and "the finest book" ever written on the subject by Lt. Commander William Liebenow, the man who rescued JFK and the PT 109 crew in August 1943. In the early morning darkness of August 2, 1943, during a chaotic nighttime skirmish amid...

Eighty years ago, Britain stood at the brink of defeat. In 1942, a string of military disasters engulfed Britain in rapid succession : the collapse in Malaya; the biggest surrender in British history at Singapore; the passing of three large German warships through the Straits of Dover in broad daylight; the longest ever retreat through Burma to the gates of India; serious losses to Rommel's forces in North Africa; the siege of Malta and the surrender...

The full story of Combat Team 28, one of the greatest units fielded in the history of the U.S. Marines. The unit, 4500 men strong, landed on the black sands of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945 and raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi after four days of ferocious combat, yet their battle had just begun

"Peter Rodrick died when his plane crashed in the Indian Ocean, leaving behind a family that included his thirteen-year-old son, Stephen. In The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick explores the life and death of the man who indelibly shaped his life.... To better understand his father and his own experience growing up without him, Rodrick spent nearly two years with his father's former squadron. As he learns more about his father, he also uncovers...

"On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning, an explosive charge of more than 15 kilotons fell on the city of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of people were pulverized, and everything within four square miles was instantly destroyed. A deluge of flames and ash had just caused Japan's greatest trauma and changed the course of modern warfare and life on Earth forever. The world was horrified by the existence of the bomb--the first weapon of mass destruction....