DescriptionPacked with breathtaking air battles and ground tactics, this new addition to the Great Generals series features the controversial command and strategies of the former Air Force Chief of Staff. Curtis LeMay was a terrifying, complex, and brilliant general. In World War II, he ordered the firebombing of Tokyo and was in charge when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. He was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths, a fact he liked to celebrate by smoking Cuban cigars. But LeMay was also the man who single-handedly transformed the American Air Force from poorly trained and badly equipped pilots into one of the fiercest weapons of the war. Over the last decades, most U.S. military missions have been carried out entirely through use of the Air Force. This is LeMay's legacy.
DescriptionOn September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into the hospitals and consulting the doctors of the bomb's victims, Weller was the first to document its unprecedented long-range medical effects. He also became the first to enter the nearby Allied POW camps, which rivaled those of the Nazis for cruelty and bested them for death count. Among these prisoners' untold stories was that of their voyage to imprisonment in Japan on "hellships" that transported them so inhumanely that one third died in transit. Heavily censored by General MacArthur, most of these dispatches were never published and believed lost - until now. This historic body of work is a stirring reminder of the courage of rogue reporting that ferrets out the truth.
DescriptionHiroshima not only marked the start of the nuclear age but also created an ethical challenge beyond the reaches of the theodicy of any culture. On the 48th anniversary of the atomic bombing, Professor James Foard speaks of the ritual and symbolic responses that emerged from the catastrophe. He has surveyed a group of surviving alumni and family members of the 669 Japanese schoolgirls who perished in the bombing. By relating their story, and including reference to the Holocaust, he attempts to illuminate the human situation in the post-nuclear age.
DescriptionIn post-9/11, nuclear proliferation has put new meaning to the world's first nuclear attacks. Defense analysts say that America could be next. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki give us a clear picture of the consequences and underscore the imperative…
DescriptionThey were told as little as possible. Their orders were to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and report for work at a classified Manhattan Project site, a location so covert it was known to them only by the mysterious address: 109 East Palace. They were greet…
DescriptionNicholai Hel, born in the ravages of World War I China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go Master, survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and its most accomplished and highly paid assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel's secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection: shibumi. Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his magnificent Eurasian mistress, Hel faces his most sinister enemy, a super-monolith of espionage and monopoly. The battle lines are drawn: ruthless power and corruption on one side and on the other, shibumi.
