In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces.

Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. How these men persevered—sacrificed themselves for their comrades and never gave up—makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating.

General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This devastating account rises above the specific ordeal it chronicles to present a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge, dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier.

It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor.

The Dragon Reborn—the leader long prophesied who will save the world, but in the saving destroy it; the savior who will run mad and kill all those dearest to him—is on the run from his destiny.

Able to touch the One Power, but unable to control it, and with no one to teach him how—for no man has done it in three thousand years—Rand al'Thor knows only that he must face the Dark One. But how?

Winter has stopped the war—almost—yet men are dying, calling out for the Dragon. But where is he?

Perrin Aybara is in pursuit with Moiraine Sedai, her Warder Lan, and Loial the Ogier. Bedeviled by dreams, Perrin is grappling with another deadly problem—how is he to escape the loss of his own humanity?

Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are approaching Tar Valon, where Mat will be healed—if he lives until they arrive. But who will tell the Amyrlin their news—that the Black Ajah, long thought only a hideous rumor, is all too real? They cannot know that in Tar Valon far worse awaits...

Ahead, for all of them, in the Heart of the Stone, lies the next great test of the Dragon reborn....

Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modern stage, Mother Courage and Her Children is Bertolt Brecht's most passionate and profound statement against war.

Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling — "Mother Courage" — an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe's religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes — her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy.

Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in the literature of drama.

Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone.

Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend Ellen Rosen often think of life before the war. It's now 1943 and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the Nazi soldiers marching through town. When the Jews of Denmark are relocated, Ellen moves in with the Johansens and pretends to be one of the family.

Soon Annemarie is asked to go on a dangerous mission to save Ellen's life.

As the Royal Navy takes part in the wars against Napoleonic France, young Jack Aubrey receives his first command, the small, old, and slow HMS Sophie. Accompanied by his eccentric new friend, the physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin, Aubrey does battle with the naval hierarchy, with his own tendency to make social blunders, and with the challenges of forging an effective crew -- before ultimately taking on enemy ships in a vivid, intricately detailed series of sea battles.

As a journalist, Paxton Andrews would experience Vietnam firsthand. We follow her from high school in Savannah to college in Berkeley and then to work in Saigon.

For the soldiers she knew and met there, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways they could never have imagined. For the men in her life, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways they could not escape or deny. Peter Wilson, fresh from law school, was a new recruit who would confront his fate in Da Nang. Ralph Johnson, a seasoned AP correspondent, had been in Saigon since the beginning. He knew Vietnam and the war inside out. Bill Quinn, captain of the Cu Chi tunnel rats, was on his fourth tour of duty and it seemed nothing could touch him. Sergeant Tony Campobello had come to Vietnam from the streets of New York to vent a rage that had followed him all the way to Saigon.

For seven years, Paxton Andrews would write an acclaimed newspaper column from the front before finally returning to the States and then attending the Paris peace talks. But for her and the men who fought in Viet Nam, life would never be the same again.

Anne's children are almost grown up, except for pretty, high-spirited Rilla. No one can resist her bright hazel eyes and dazzling smile. Rilla, almost fifteen, can't think any further ahead than going to her very first dance at the Four Winds lighthouse and getting her first kiss from handsome Kenneth Ford. But undreamed-of challenges await the irrepressible Rilla when the world of Ingleside is endangered by a far-off war. Her brothers go off to fight, and Rilla brings home an orphaned newborn in a soup tureen. She is swept into a drama that tests her courage and changes her forever.

And Quiet Flows the Don or Quietly Flows the Don (Тихий Дон, lit. "The Quiet Don") is a 4-volume epic novel by Russian writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. The first three volumes were written from 1925 to '32 and published in the Soviet magazine October in 1928–32. The fourth volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the first three volumes appeared under this title in 1934.

The novel is considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature in the 20th century. It depicts the lives and struggles of Don Cossacks during WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. The authorship of the novel is contested by some literary critics and historians, who believe it wasn't entirely written by Sholokhov.

Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed.

Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered about them is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

The true and harrowing account of Primo Levi’s experience at the German concentration camp of Auschwitz and his miraculous survival; hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as a “true work of art, this edition includes an exclusive conversation between the author and Philip Roth.In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and “Italian citizen of Jewish race,” was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi’s classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit.

In 1914, a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth, they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

London is poised on the brink of World War II. Timid, scrawny Willie Beech -- the abused child of a single mother -- is evacuated to the English countryside. At first, he is terrified of everything, of the country sounds and sights, even of Mr. Tom, the gruff, kindly old man who has taken him in. But gradually Willie forgets the hate and despair of his past. He learns to love a world he never knew existed, a world of friendship and affection in which harsh words and daily beatings have no place.

Then a telegram comes. Willie must return to his mother in London. When weeks pass by with no word from Willie, Mr. Tom sets out for London to look for the young boy he has come to love as a son.

Before George R. R. Martin, there was Dorothy Dunnett... THE PERFECT GIFT for fans of A Game of Thrones. 'She is a brilliant story teller, The Lymond Chronicles will keep you reading late into the night, desperate to know the fate of the characters you have come to care deeply about.' - The Times Literary Supplement

Checkmate is the sixth and final book in the series. It is 1557 and legendary Scottish warrior Francis Crawford of Lymond is once more in France. There he is leading an army to rout the hated English from Calais. Yet while Lymond seeks victory on the battlefield, he is haunted by his troubled past - chiefly the truth about his origins and his marriage (in name only) to young Englishwoman Philippa Somerville. As the French offer him a way out of his marriage and his wife appears in France on a mission of her own, the final moves are made in a great game that has been playing out over an extraordinary decade of war, love, and struggle - bringing The Lymond Chronicles to a spellbinding close.

'A masterpiece of historical fiction' - Washington Post
'Melodrama of the most magnificent kind' - The Guardian

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives...

This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome... but so is war.

A Separate Peace is a poignant exploration of adolescence set against the backdrop of World War II. This American classic, which has captivated readers for over thirty years, unfolds within the confines of an all-boys boarding school in New England. We witness the story of Gene, an introverted intellectual, and his friendship with Phineas, a charismatic and daring athlete.

Their summer together is marked by a series of events that irrevocably change both their lives, mirroring the loss of innocence experienced by the country as a whole during the war. John Knowles' novel is not only a bestseller but also a profound parable about the darker aspects of adolescence and the complexities of friendship.

Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon—the towering novel of the twentieth century's most dramatic geopolitical event. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies—the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power. Here is the tale that swept the world with its fury: the story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era. Here is Exodus—one of the great bestselling novels of all time.

In 1936, George Orwell travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War and instead joined the fight against the Fascists. This famous account describes the war and Orwell's own experiences. Introduction by Lionel Trilling.

Catch-22 is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944, and follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. The narrative primarily takes place while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy.

The book delves into Yossarian's experiences and those of his fellow airmen as they strive to maintain their sanity amidst the chaos of war, with the overarching goal of fulfilling their service requirements to return home.

Catch-22 is renowned for its unique blend of hilarity and horror, its originality, and its powerful vitality. It presents a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as perceived by someone dangerously sane, offering both outrageous humor and a poignant reflection on the human condition.

Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.

Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions—despair.

A vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge on the Drina earned Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric's stunning novel. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it:

Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest - the bridge.

Acclaimed entertainer Hans Schnier collapses when his beloved Marie leaves him because he won’t marry her within the Catholic Church. The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father, and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards.

In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war.

The Killer Angels is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America's destiny.

Considerada una obra maestra, esta novela supuso el reconocimiento de Simin Daneshvar como una autora indispensable de la moderna literatura persa. Reeditada en numerosas ocasiones, Suvashun fue una novela valiente, la primera escrita por una mujer iraní y narrada por su protagonista femenina. Ambientada en el Irán de la Segunda Guerra Mundial durante la ocupación de los Aliados, la historia está narrada por Zahra, una joven ama de casa que es testigo de los acontecimientos.

El amor que siente por su marido, sus tres hijos, su casa y su jardín, a los que considera su país, y la educación en el colegio de los misioneros ingleses han hecho de ella una mujer culta pero sumisa, tolerante ante las injusticias que ve a su alrededor, una actitud que choca frontalmente con la personalidad de su marido, Yusef, que se rebela frente a los invasores, como el mítico héroe persa Suvashun.

Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him.

First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife.

Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart and blood... and, possibly, their death.

In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence, and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair... in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no other the honor and savagery of men.

The Thin Red Line is James Jones's fictional account of the battle between American and Japanese troops on the island of Guadalcanal. This gripping narrative shifts effortlessly among multiple viewpoints within C-for-Charlie Company, including commanding officer Capt. James Stein, his psychotic first sergeant Eddie Welsh, and the young privates they send into battle.

The descriptions of combat conditions—and the mental states it induces—are unflinchingly realistic, painting a vivid picture of the chaos and brutality of war. This novel delves deep into the psychological impacts of combat and the nature of male identity in the face of such adversity.

More than just a classic of combat fiction, The Thin Red Line stands as one of the most significant explorations of identity and survival in American literature.

The relentless struggle of the Vietminh guerrillas for independence and the futility of the French gestures of resistance become inseparably meshed with the personal and moral dilemmas of two men and the Vietnamese woman they both love. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The Unknown Soldier is a story about the Continuation War between Finland and Soviet Union, told from the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers. Gritty and realistic, it was partly intended to shatter the myth of the noble, obedient Finnish soldier, and in that it succeeded admirably.

Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of warfare.

Focusing on the experiences of a fourteen-man platoon stationed on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific during World War II, and written in a journalistic style, it tells the moving story of the soldiers' struggle to retain a sense of dignity amidst the horror of warfare, and to find a source of meaning in their lives amidst the sounds and fury of battle.

All My Sons is a profound drama set during World War II, capturing the complex relationships and ethical dilemmas within the Keller family. Joe Keller and Steve Deever were business partners who, during the war, produced defective airplane parts leading to the deaths of many men. While Deever faces imprisonment, Keller avoids punishment and prospers.

The narrative intensifies as Keller's son, Chris, engages in a love affair with Ann Deever, Steve's daughter. George Deever returns from war only to find his father incarcerated and his father's partner free. The unfolding events and the burden of guilt bear down on the characters, culminating in a gripping and electrifying climax.

Winner of the Drama Critics' Award for Best New Play in 1947, All My Sons not only established Arthur Miller as a pivotal figure in American theater but also introduced recurring themes seen in his later works: the intricate bonds between fathers and sons, and the perpetual conflict between business interests and personal morality.

With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose.

He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in The Periodic Table and The Wrench, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him.

He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known.

Louisa May Alcott's classic tale of four sisters.

Grown-up Meg, tomboyish Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. The four March sisters couldn't be more different. But with their father away at war, and their mother working to support the family, they have to rely on one another. Whether they're putting on a play, forming a secret society, or celebrating Christmas, there's one thing they can't help wondering: Will Father return home safely?

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

Sarmiento, proscrito por la tiranía rosista y exiliado por dos veces en Chile, fue periodista brillante, político y polemista literario. "Facundo" es una biografía concebida como historia, historia de las guerras civiles de su patria centradas en la figura de Juan Facundo Quiroga, el más famoso, cruel, violento y despiadado caudillo de las guerras civiles argentinas. El desarrollo de los acontecimientos impulsó a Sarmiento a unir el tema biográfico a la realidad presente, denunciando a su enemigo Rosas.

It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution.

Five families, American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh, move through the dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage. The plot contains profanity, graphic sexual situations, and violence. Book #1

Regeneration is a historical fiction novel set during World War I. It documents characters based on real people and their experiences with shell shock and recovery at the Craiglockhart Hospital.

This novel explores the psychological effects of war on soldiers and the attempts at recovery in a medical setting. It provides a deep insight into the human mind during times of extreme stress and trauma.

On a summer morning in Sarajevo a hundred years ago, a teenage assassin named Gavrilo Princip fired not just the opening shots of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history, when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Yet the events Princip triggered were so monumental that his own story has been largely overlooked, his role garbled and motivations misrepresented.

The Trigger puts this right, filling out as never before a figure who changed our world and whose legacy still has an impact on all of us today. Born a penniless backwoodsman, Princip's life changed when he trekked through Bosnia and Serbia to attend school. As he ventured across fault lines of faith, nationalism and empire, so tightly clustered in the Balkans, radicalisation slowly transformed him from a frail farm boy into history's most influential assassin.

By retracing Princip's journey from his highland birthplace, through the mythical valleys of Bosnia to the fortress city of Belgrade and ultimately Sarajevo, Tim Butcher illuminates our understanding both of Princip and the places that shaped him. Tim uncovers details about Princip that have eluded historians for a century and draws on his own experience, as a war reporter in the Balkans in the 1990s, to face down ghosts of conflicts past and present.