It's been almost a year since the Trials of Unyielding Steel.When Lydia gets a lead on the whereabouts of Jonathan Sterling, she concludes her training with a legendary immortal sorcerer and puts a plan in motion for his capture.Near Selyr, Taelien reunites with an old friend - Wrynn Jaden, the legendary Witch of a Thousand Shadows - and meets with Jonan to make a deal.Jonan, of course, has other concerns. His master, the legendary Lady of Thieves herself, has given him a new assignment - one that hints at world-shaping events, if he can survive the mission. He'll partner with Velas, but she has her own problems to deal with, including a revelation that will test where her loyalties truly lie.

"Throughout time, major wars have defined historical epochs and charted the rise and decline of great powers. The U.S. global war on terror, with Iraq as the Bush administration's chosen centerpiece, is almost certainly destined to do the same. Indeed, the Bush doctrine for conducting the war on terror and the Iraqi Freedom campaign are likely to prove benchmarks in U.S. history precisely because of the many orthodoxies and traditions the administration has purposely challenged. At the same time, fundamental flaws have already appeared in many tenets underlying the Bush transformation of foreign and military affairs. So contends award-winning journalist James Kitfield. As with his critically acclaimed Prodigal Soldiers, the story of how America arrived at this fateful crossroads is a narrative full of drama and personal anecdote, rich in context and detail. War and Destiny is based on interviews with the key players and on Kitfield's personal observation of major events. Like his first book, it may well become the chronicle of a critical period in American history"--Provided by publisher.

The age of empires has ended.The Great War erupts across the known world, pitting empires against nations. The Middle Eastern desert becomes a battlefield, as the Ottoman Empire battle against the pressing British Forces.A reporter, a spy, an archaeologist, are all proper descriptions of Marion by the age of 18. He ran away from home after his mother passed away, seeking to walk in the footsteps of Sir Richard Francis Burton, and he did, both literally and figuratively.Traveling with the Imperial Camel Corp deep into enemy territory he discovers a history and a secret dating back centuries. The myths of Saladin, Sinan, Assassins, Templars hide a truth of an ancient war.Marion does not know who to trust when a mysterious new enemy seek an artifact, which may hold a secret that could tip the balance of power.

Relive the emotional and thrilling adventures from the film Avengers: Infinity War, complete with original illustrations that bring this tale to life right on the cusp of the release of Avengers: Endgame, the film that will see the culmination of every significant event in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

What makes a great president? Certainly leadership, accomplishments, crisis management, political skill, character, and integrity are part of the equation, but the great presidents have something more. They not only govern well, but are part of something lasting; their presidencies influence the thoughts and beliefs of generations. These powerful men are not flawless leaders, they have made mistakes and miscalculations, but in the end their decisions have changed the nation and often the world. In Destiny’s Consul: America’s Greatest Presidents, presidential scholar Michael P. Riccards provides a concise introduction to the lives, presidencies, and personal qualities of ten great individuals whom Riccards argues are our greatest presidents. Organized chronologically, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan are shown to truly be great. It will be of interest to anyone interested in the presidency of American history.

The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.

This book provides a concise but thorough summary of how the selective service system worked from 1965 through 1973, and also demonstrates how this selective process, during a highly unpopular war, steered major life choices of millions of young men seeking deferrals based on education, occupation, marital and family status, sexual orientation, and more. This book explains each category of deferral and its resulting “ripple effect” across society. Putting a human face on these sociological trends, the book also includes a number of brief personal anecdotes from men in each category, told from a remove of 40 years or more, when the lifelong effects of youthful decisions prompted by the draft have become evident. There are few books which address the military draft of the Vietnam years, most notably CHANCE AND CIRCUMSTANCE: The Draft, the War and the Vietnam Generation, by Baskir and Strauss (1978). This early study of draft-age men discusses how they were socially channeled by the selective service system. RANDOM DESTINY follows up on this premise and draws from numerous later studies of men in the lottery pool, to create the definitive portrait of the draft and its long-term personal and social effects. RANDOM DESTINY presents an in-depth explanation of the selective service system in its final years. It also provides a comprehensive yet personal portrait of how the draft and the lottery steered a generation of young lives into many different paths, from combat to conscientious objection, from teaching to prison, from the pulpit to the Canadian border, from public health to gay liberation. It is the only recent book which demonstrates how American military conscription, in the time of an unpopular war, profoundly influenced a generation and a society over the decades that followed.

This fascinating study sheds new light on antebellum America's notorious "filibusters--the freebooters and adventurers who organized or participated in armed invasions of nations with whom the United States was formally at peace. Offering the first full-scale analysis of the filibustering movement, Robert May relates the often-tragic stories of illegal expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries and details surprising numbers of aborted plots, as well. May investigates why thousands of men joined filibustering expeditions, how they were financed, and why the U.S. government had little success in curtailing them. Surveying antebellum popular media, he shows how the filibustering phenomenon infiltrated the American psyche in newspapers, theater, music, advertising, and literature. Condemned abroad as pirates, frequently in language strikingly similar to modern American denunciations of foreign terrorists, the filibusters were often celebrated at home as heroes who epitomized the spirit of Manifest Destiny. May concludes by exploring the national consequences of filibustering, arguing that the practice inflicted lasting damage on U.S. relations with foreign countries and contributed to the North-South division over slavery that culminated in the Civil War.

This revised edition of the standard history of Guam is intended for general readers and students of the history, politics, and government of the Pacific region. Its narrative spans more than 450 years, beginning with the initial written records of Guam by members of Magellan 1521 expedition and concluding with the impact of the recent global recession on Guam’s fragile economy.