Dare Wilson's sporting career dates back to 1920s when, as a small boy, he started fishing in Northumberland on River Derwent. Since then as he has pursued successful careers in the Army and Conservation, he has fished and shot all over the world; turkey hunting and snake catching in Georgia, pheasants in Korea, sand grouse and quail in Palestine, geese in Ireland, ducks in Manitoba.??A natural story teller, General Wilson's sporting career almost ended while wildfowling in The Wash in early 1939 – he, his Cambridge University friends and their dogs were saved by a miracle. An uninterrupted line of black Labradors have shared Dare's experiences. The current one, is the 12th. ??For good measure the General tells of his thrilling winter sports (skiing and cresta) and parachuting experiences. His team of SAS free-fallers broke the World Record in 1962 – tragically one member died.??Dare may have lived life on the edge but the risks he has taken have always been carefully calculated. Had they not been he would not still be an active fisherman and shot in his 90's. This is a treasure trove of sporting stories.

The sixth book in W.E.B. Griffin’s sweeping military epic of the United States Army—the New York Times bestselling Brotherhood of War series. “W.E.B. Griffin is a storyteller in the grand tradition, probably the best man around for describing the military community. Brotherhood of War...is an American epic.”—Tom Clancy They were the leaders, the men who made the decisions that changed the outcome of battles...and the fate of continents. From the awesome landing at Normandy to the torturous campaigns of the South Pacific, from the frozen hills of Korea to the devastated wastes of Dien Bien Phu, they had earned their stars. Now they led America's finest against her most relentless enemy deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. It was a new kind of war, but the Generals led a new kind of army, ready for battle—and for glory...

The story of the arcane table-top game that became a pop culture phenomenon and the long-running legal battle waged by its cocreators. When Dungeons & Dragons was first released to a small hobby community, it hardly seemed destined for mainstream success--and yet this arcane tabletop role-playing game became an unlikely pop culture phenomenon. In Game Wizards, Jon Peterson chronicles the rise of Dungeons & Dragons from hobbyist pastime to mass market sensation, from the initial collaboration to the later feud of its creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. As the game's fiftieth anniversary approaches, Peterson--a noted authority on role-playing games--explains how D&D and its creators navigated their successes, setbacks, and controversies. Peterson describes Gygax and Arneson's first meeting and their work toward the 1974 release of the game; the founding of TSR and its growth as a company; and Arneson's acrimonious departure and subsequent challenges to TSR. He recounts the "Satanic Panic" accusations that D&D was sacrilegious and dangerous, and how they made the game famous. And he chronicles TSR's reckless expansion and near-fatal corporate infighting, which culminated with the company in debt and overextended and the end of Gygax's losing battle to retain control over TSR and D&D. With Game Wizards, Peterson restores historical particulars long obscured by competing narratives spun by the one-time partners. That record amply demonstrates how the turbulent experience of creating something as momentous as Dungeons & Dragons can make people remember things a bit differently from the way they actually happened.

Here is a narrative account of decisive engagements that succeeded by brilliant strategy more than by direct force. The reader accompanies those who fought, from Roman legionaries and Mongol horsemen to Napoleonic soldiery, and Douglas MacArthur's Inchon invaders. Maps. Illustrations.

Research on general video game playing aims at designing agents or content generators that can perform well in multiple video games, possibly without knowing the game in advance and with little to no specific domain knowledge. The general video game AI framework and competition propose a challenge in which researchers can test their favorite AI methods with a potentially infinite number of games created using the Video Game Description Language. The open-source framework has been used since 2014 for running a challenge. Competitors around the globe submit their best approaches that aim to generalize well across games. Additionally, the framework has been used in AI modules by many higher-education institutions as assignments, or as proposed projects for final year (undergraduate and Master's) students and Ph.D. candidates. The present book, written by the developers and organizers of the framework, presents the most interesting highlights of the research performed by the authors during these years in this domain. It showcases work on methods to play the games, generators of content, and video game optimization. It also outlines potential further work in an area that offers multiple research directions for the future.

A New York Times bestseller! An epic history of the decline of American military leadership—from the bestselling author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell. While history has been kind to the American generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley—it has been less kind to the generals of the wars that followed, such as Koster, Franks, Sanchez, and Petraeus. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out to explain why that is. In chronicling the widening gulf between performance and accountability among the top brass of the U.S. military, Ricks tells the stories of great leaders and suspect ones, generals who rose to the occasion and generals who failed themselves and their soldiers. In Ricks’s hands, this story resounds with larger meaning: about the transmission of values, about strategic thinking, and about the difference between an organization that learns and one that fails.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British bestseller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more,The Book of General Ignorance is a witty “gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school. Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. You’ll be surprised at how much you don’t know! Check out The Book of General Ignorance for more fun entries and complete answers to the following: How long can a chicken live without its head? About two years. What do chameleons do? They don’t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states. How many legs does a centipede have? Not a hundred. How many toes has a two-toed sloth? It’s either six or eight. Who was the first American president? Peyton Randolph. What were George Washington’s false teeth made from? Mostly hippopotamus. What was James Bond’s favorite drink? Not the vodka martini.

A beautifully illustrated and poignant graphic memoir that tells the story of World War II from an Everyman's perspective. In March of 1943, Scott Chantler's grandfather, Law Chantler, shipped out across the Atlantic for active service with the Highland Light Infantry of Canada, along with his best friend, Jack, a fellow officer. Not long afterward, they would find themselves making a rocky crossing of the English Channel, about to take part in one of the most pivotal and treacherous military operations of World War II: the Allied invasion of Normandy. Two Generals tells the story of what happened there through the eyes of these two young men -- not the celebrated military commanders or politicians we often hear about, but everyday heroes who risked their lives for the Allied cause. Meticulously researched and gorgeously illustrated, Two Generals is a harrowing story of battle and a touching story of friendship -- and a vital and vibrant record of unsung heroism.

This account of the Russian Civil War, originally published in 1971, combines a vivid narrative of the military events with a biographical discussion of the White Generals, figures of the former Imperial Russian Army offices who led the separate campaigns against the Red Soviets - men such as Kornilov, Alekseev, Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel, Yudenich and the Finnish Yudeniol Marshal Mannerheim. Despite their shared designation, the White Generals had no common programme. Their tragedy was that Lenin's dogmatism, intransigence and ruthlessness, all essential qualities in a country which had never known anything other than autocracy, were alien to their characters.