Chronicles the 1975 offensive of the Vietnam People’s Army and the uprisings that secured the liberation of South Vietnam.

Mark Solonin is a Russian aviation engineer and historian. He was born in Kuybyshev (now Samara) on 29 May 1958. The problem with history is that it changes, depending on who is writing it and for whom it is being written. As the hackneyed phrase goes: "History is written by the victors". A subtler rephrasing has it that "the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians." Sometimes, however, many parties feel that certain historical events are best forgotten, the facts being too awful and the conclusions too dire to face. This was certainly the case with the history of the Red Army's advance through Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. This was the most massive ethnic cleansing ever performed. Between 1944 and 1950, through terror and starvation, 12-14 million ethnic Germans were driven from their eastern homelands with a death toll so large and chaotic that it can only be estimated between 600 thousand and 2 million. The Western Allies preferred not to know so as to avoid being sullied by the crimes. The Soviets, who never had their Nuremburg for this or other doings, most certainly were not ready to face the matter and never have. "It was a long time ago and it never happened anyway." This short book was written by Mark Solonin in 2009 and is possibly the first book written by a Russian historian as a polemic for Russian readers to face facts and discover one can still live -and live better- with awkward knowledge. It is a remarkable work and should be useful to Western readers who also need to face the fact that we here allowed these matters to swept under the carpet as well. Mark Solonin is the author of several best-selling books in Russian that freshly analyse the history of the Second World War (the Soviet Great Patriotic War). As a result, he now finds himself obliged for his personal safety to live in exile.

The triumphant story of baseball and America after World War II. In 1945 Major League Baseball had become a ghost of itself. Parks were half empty, the balls were made with fake rubber, and mediocre replacements roamed the fields, as hundreds of players, including the game's biggest stars, were serving abroad, devoted to unconditional Allied victory in World War II. But by the spring of 1946, the country was ready to heal. The war was finally over, and as America's fathers and brothers were coming home, so too were the sport's greats. Ted Williams, Stan Musial, and Joe DiMaggio returned with bats blazing, making the season a true classic that ended in a thrilling seven-game World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. America also witnessed the beginning of a new era in baseball: it was a year of attendance records, the first year Yankee Stadium held night games, the last year the Green Monster wasn't green, and, most significant, Jackie Robinson's first year playing in the Brooklyn Dodgers' system. The Victory Season brings to vivid life these years of baseball and war, including the littleknown "World Series" that servicemen played in a captured Hitler Youth stadium in the fall of 1945. Robert Weintraub's extensive research and vibrant storytelling enliven the legendary season that embodies what we now think of as the game's golden era.

Ernest R. May's Strange Victory presents a dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940. Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question: How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances? Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.

A critical look at the the fourth year of Lincoln's administration and the conclusion of the author's four-volume re-examination of the Civil War.

In a new and updated second edition, this book--first published in 1983--provides a detailed review of the end of the Vietnam War. Drawing on the author's eyewitness reporting and extensive research, the book relies on carefully reported facts, not partisan myths, to reconstruct the war's last years and harrowing final months. The catastrophic suffering those events brought to ordinary Vietnamese civilians and soldiers is vividly portrayed. The largely unremembered wars in Cambodia and Laos are examined as well, while new material in an updated final chapter points out troubling parallels between the Vietnam War and America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Spine title: U.S. Marines in Vietnam, 1973-1975.