"The Breaking Crucible, and Other Translations of German Hymns" by anonymous is a collection of German hymns and poems which were subsequently translated so a wider audience could appreciate their beauty. Christianity, from the celebration of advent to the life of Jesus is represented in these hymns along with other elements of living in the world as a person of faith. Many of these hymns are unknown to modern Germans. Thus, this book is a time capsule that ensures they aren't forgotten.

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Crucible is a collection of poems by award-winning poet Daniel Bosch. The poems break easily into two sections. In the first, a set of ironic, emulative "Homages & Elegies," Bosch playfully apostrophizes poets living and dead, as if it took two not only to tango, but to write a poem. He wrestles with Dickinson, grooves with the glacial wit of Frost (belatedly), waltzes with Walcott's ghost (prematurely), mimics Mandelstam, picks apples with Sappho, and shares a transcontinental flight with Brodsky. Each poem is carefully measured; some are composed by meticulous inversion of their precursor's poetic strategy. Literary but by no means prudish, these poems look back-and forward-to a time when poems took stands readers could understand, disagree with, and laugh at. The result is a sort of hypertext essay on what it means to pour oneself into the mold of "poet" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The second half of Crucible is "Passion Fruit," a fourteen-poem "sonnet" that courts a single muse through incarnations as various as "Orange," "Peach," "Banana," "Cherries," "Blueberries," and "Mango." Part love poem, part meditation on physical longing and memory, "Passion Fruit" celebrates the eye's brief glimpses of beauty in poems frank, funny, and joyful. "I admire Daniel Bosch's Crucible very much for its inventiveness and vitality and the enviable skill of its execution. Every poem feels alive, and though they're often 'homages' to other writers, and 'after' other writers, the book is crackling throughout with an individual personality." -David Ferry

From the award-winning historian, Saul David, the riveting narrative of the heroic US troops, bonded by the brotherhood and sacrifice of war, who overcame enormous casualties to pull off the toughest invasion of WWII's Pacific Theater -- and the Japanese forces who fought with tragic desperation to stop them. With Allied forces sweeping across Europe and into Germany in the spring of 1945, one enormous challenge threatened to derail America's audacious drive to win the world back from the Nazis: Japan, the empire that had extended its reach southward across the Pacific and was renowned for the fanaticism and brutality of its fighters, who refused to surrender, even when faced with insurmountable odds. Taking down Japan would require an unrelenting attack to break its national spirit, and launching such an attack on the island empire meant building an operations base just off its shores on the island of Okinawa. The amphibious operation to capture Okinawa was the largest of the Pacific War and the greatest air-land-sea battle in history, mobilizing 183,000 troops from Seattle, Leyte in the Philippines, and ports around the world. The campaign lasted for 83 blood-soaked days, as the fighting plumbed depths of savagery. One veteran, struggling to make sense of what he had witnessed, referred to the fighting as the "crucible of Hell." Okinawan civilians died in the tens of thousands: some were mistaken for soldiers by American troops; but as the US Marines spearheading the invasion drove further onto the island and Japanese defeat seemed inevitable, many more civilians took their own lives, some even murdering their own families. In just under three months, the world had changed irrevocably: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died; the war in Europe ended; America's appetite for an invasion of Japan had waned, spurring President Truman to use other means -- ultimately atomic bombs -- to end the war; and more than 250,000 servicemen and civilians on or near the island of Okinawa had lost their lives. Drawing on archival research in the US, Japan, and the UK, and the original accounts of those who survived, Crucible of Hell tells the vivid, heart-rending story of the battle that changed not just the course of WWII, but the course of war, forever.