Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times--from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes’s conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive--Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world. Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values–the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship–which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.

Court of Appeal Case(s): D014803

Skye Frago is in California at the behest of Hiram Stoddard, a powerful man who wants to establish the first stagecoach line along the Old Mission Trail, and he's not the only one. But when Frago sees how ruthless his would-be employer really is, he quits on the quick and sides with the competition and the competition's lovely daughter.

Fargo cuts a trail of trouble… Skye Fargo is in California at the behest of Hiram Stoddard, a powerful man who wants to establish the first stagecoach line along the Old Mission Trail—and he’s not the only one. But when Fargo sees how ruthless his would-be employer really is, he quits on the quick and sides with the competition—and the competition’s lovely daughter. Now the Trailsman has to beat a path through the bush if he’s going to make it out alive…

At about 9 o’clock on the morning of November 9, 1971, soon after sending her three children off to school, Helen List sat in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee. She was still in her nightgown and slippers. John List came up behind her and put a 9mm German-made Steyr automatic pistol to the side of her head and fired once. She died instantly. The bullet smashed into the opposite wall... John made his way up the stairs to the third floor where his 85-year old mother, Alma, wearing a housedress, was preparing breakfast in her efficiency kitchen…She was standing near the storage room that adjoined her kitchen when a 9mm bullet ripped through the side of her scull. Alma List was dead before her body crumpled in a heap on the floor… The righteous carnage had begun.

In Out of Carnage, which was originally published in 1945, author Alexander R. Griffin presents a series of articles on the practice of medicine during the war, with emphasis on new development and techniques. “An intelligent, well written survey of the medicines, inventions and humane methods which are daily saving the lives of the men in our armed forces. Mr. Griffin’s title is well taken, for his catalogue of the life-saving discoveries being used in this war proves beyond doubt that it is tragic but true that progress comes out of death and suffering. Dealing with such broad topics as psychoneurotic treatment, air evacuation, burn treatment, penicillin, use of blood plasma, malaria prevention and care, the miraculous DDT, air-sea rescue methods and the manual of survival as worked out by the AAF, the book pretty well covers all the allowed-to-be-known ways through which our Army and Navy cuts down loss of life from bullets and disease. An encouraging book, written for, but never down to, the layman, it will appeal to any civilian who’s interested either in one special service man or in the general welfare of all of them.”—Kirkus Review

New York Times Bestseller “Not a conventional Trump-era book. It is less about the daily mayhem in the White House than about the unprecedented capitulation of a political party. This book will endure for helping us understand not what is happening but why it happened…. [An] indispensable work.”—Washington Post Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent provides a rollicking insider’s look at the making of the modern Republican Party—how a decade of cultural upheaval, populist outrage, and ideological warfare made the GOP vulnerable to a hostile takeover from the unlikeliest of insurgents: Donald J. Trump. As George W. Bush left office with record-low approval ratings and Barack Obama led a Democratic takeover of Washington, Republicans faced a moment of reckoning: they had no vision, no generation of new leaders, and no energy in the party’s base. Yet Obama’s progressive agenda, coupled with the nation’s rapidly changing cultural identity, lit a fire under the right. Republicans regained power in Congress but spent that time fighting among themselves. With these struggles weakening the party’s defenses, and with more and more Americans losing faith in the political class, the stage was set for an outsider to crash the party. When Trump descended a gilded escalator to launch his campaign in the summer of 2015, the candidate had met the moment. Only by viewing Trump as the culmination of a decade-long civil war inside the GOP can we appreciate how he won the White House and consider the fundamental questions at the center of America’s current turmoil. Loaded with explosive original reporting and based on hundreds of exclusive interviews—including with key players such as President Trump, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell—American Carnage takes us behind the scenes of this tumultuous period and establishes Tim Alberta as the premier chronicler of a political era.

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