In December 1903 a British army marched over the Himalayas to counter a non-existent Russian threat and was confronted by a medieval Tibetan army ordered to stop it by non-violent means. It was a clash between the mightiest political power in the world and the weakest. Leading the mission was the charismatic Francis Younghusband. Commanding the army escort was an officer determined to do things by the book: General James Macdonald. The result was conflict at every level. Drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished first-hand accounts, Charles Allen reveals not only the true character of one of Britain's great imperial heroes but also the calamitous outcome for the Tibetan people of Britain's last attempt at empire-building.

In December 1903 a British army marched over the Himalayas to counter a non-existent Russian threat and was confronted by a medieval Tibetan army ordered to stop it by non-violent means. It was a clash between the mightiest political power in the world and the weakest. Leading the mission was the charismatic Francis Younghusband. Commanding the army escort was an officer determined to do things by the book: General James Macdonald. The result was conflict at every level. Drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished first-hand accounts, Charles Allen reveals not only the true character of one of Britain's great imperial heroes but also the calamitous outcome for the Tibetan people of Britain's last attempt at empire-building.

Novel, based partly on fact, of the Japanese occupation of Attu in the Aleutians during World War II, and a group of Japanese geurillas dropped into remote Alaska.

Based on George Washington's own journal, Duel in the wilderness tells the true story of his journey in 1753-1754 into the Ohio country.

A collection of humorous and nostalgic Americana stories—the beloved, bestselling classics that inspired the movie A Christmas Story Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant—and utterly hilarious—works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of irony, affection, and perfect detail that speaks across generations. In God We Trust, Shepherd's wildly witty reunion with his Indiana hometown, disproves the adage “You can never go back.” Bending the ear of Flick, his childhood-buddy-turned-bartender, Shepherd recalls passionately his genuine Red Ryder BB gun, confesses adolescent failure in the arms of Junie Jo Prewitt, and relives a story of man against fish that not even Hemingway could rival. From pop art to the World's Fair, Shepherd's subjects speak with a universal irony and are deeply and unabashedly grounded in American Midwestern life, together rendering a wonderfully nostalgic impression of a more innocent era when life was good, fun was clean, and station wagons roamed the earth. A comic genius who bridged the gap between James Thurber and David Sedaris, Shepherd may have accomplished for Holden, Indiana, what Mark Twain did for Hannibal, Missouri.

Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) came of age during the vast unheaval of the Napoleonic Wars, a period in Russian history which crucially influenced his work. This book examines Pushkin's poetry, politics, and life, which ended shortly after a strange duel in which he was fatally wounded. First published by Macmillan London in 1994. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Many of the West’s best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh’s literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world.

“An utterly absorbing account of one of history’s most momentous battles” (Forbes) that not only changed the Civil War but the future of all sea power—from acclaimed popular historian Richard Snow, who “writes with verve and a keen eye” (The New York Times Book Review). No single sea battle has had more far-reaching consequences than the one fought in Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, took a radical step to combat the Union blockade, building an iron fort containing ten heavy guns on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack. The North got word of the project, and, in panicky desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship. Rushed through to completion in just one hundred days, it mounted only two guns, but they were housed in a shot-proof revolving turret. The ship hurried south from Brooklyn, only to arrive to find the Merrimack had already sunk half the Union fleet—and would be back to finish the job. When she returned, the Monitor was there. She fought the Merrimack to a standstill, and, many believe, saved the Union cause. As soon as word of the fight spread, Great Britain—the foremost sea power of the day—ceased work on all wooden ships. A thousand-year-old tradition ended and the naval future opened. Richly illustrated with photos, maps, and engravings, Iron Dawn “renders all previous accounts of the encounter between the Monitor and the Merrimack as obsolete as wooden war ships” (The Dallas Morning News). Richard Snow brings to vivid life the tensions of the time in this “lively tale of science, war, and clashing personalities” (The Wall Street Journal).