"Death to the French" is an absorbing historical novel about the Peninsular War. It narrates the experiences of a British soldier, Rifleman Dodd, who gets separated from the army, joins the guerrillas and becomes their leader to avoid being caught by the French. The soldier and the story of his adventures is fictionalized, but the events are somewhat based on real historical events.

In what may be the last memoir to be published by a living veteran of the pivotal invasion of Guadalcanal, which occurred almost seventy years ago, Marine Jim McEnery has teamed up with author Bill Sloan to create an unforgettable chronicle of heroism and horror McErery’s Rifle Company—the legendary K/3/5 of the First Marine Division, made famous by the HBO miniseries The Pacific—fought in some of the most ferocious battles of the war. In searing detail, the author takes us back to Guadalcanal, where American forces first turned the tide against the Japanese; Cape Gloucester, where 1,300 Marines were killed or wounded; and bloody Peleliu, where McEnery assumed command of the company and helped hasten the final defeat of the Japanese garrison after weeks of torturous cave-to-cave fighting. McEnery’s story is a no-holds-barred, grunt’s-eye view of the sacrifices, suffering, and raw courage of the men in the foxholes, locked in mortal combat with an implacable enemy sworn to fight to the death. From bayonet charges and hand-to-hand combat to midnight banzai attacks and the loss of close buddies, the rifle squad leader spares no details, chronicling his odyssey from boot camp through twenty-eight months of hellish combat until his eventual return home. He has given us an unforgettable portrait of men at war.

'Describing narrow squeaks and terrible deprivations, Harris's unflowery account of fortitude and resilience in Spain still bristles with a freshness and an invigorating spikiness' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY 'A most vivid record of the war in Spain and Portugal against Napoleon' MAIL ON SUNDAY Benjamin Harris was a young shepherd from Dorset who joined the army in 1802 and later joined the dashing 95th Rifles. His battalion was ordered to Portugal, where he marched under the burning sun, weighed down by his kit and great-coat, plus all the tools and leather he had to carry as the battalion's cobbler - 'the lapstone I took the liberty of flinging to the Devil'. Rifleman Harris was a natural story-teller with a remarkable tale to unfold, and his Recollections have become one of the most popular military books of all time.

Guns have never been as prevalent in American culture as they are at this moment. Most contemporary conversations on guns either highlight the gun as just a tool used in mass killings or a right to be fiercely defended; eventually, whatever progress these debates foster in the public conversation tend to halt altogether once the old cliché, "guns don't kill people; people kill people" is trotted out. These gun control and gun violence discussions take the gun as passive object, ignoring the changing effects, and the very agency, that guns may deploy as politicized objects. What happens if we reset the conversation and admit that guns, and not the people behind them, kill people? The Lives of Guns offers a new and compelling way of thinking about the role of the gun in our social and political lives. In gathering ideas from law, science studies, sociology, and politics, each chapter turns the stale, standard gun conversations around by investigating the gun as an object with agency. In approaching guns from a technological perspective, down to the very science of how they are created and how they fire, The Lives of Guns takes up a number of questions, such as: How does the presence of these objects shape civic ideology? What does it mean to develop and care for gun and gun accessories technology? What do guns mean to those who build them versus those who fight for-and against-them? What could happen when drone technology meets gun technology? In bringing together fresh perspectives from leading lawyers, political scientists, and historians, The Lives of Guns promises to move the gun debate forward by opening up new ways of thinking about these issues and broadening the scope of these perennial debates.

Drawing on numerous diaries, journals, and reminiscences, Richard Bruce Winders presents the daily life of soldiers at war; links the army to the society that produced it; shares his impressions of the soldiers he "met" along the way; and concludes that American participants in the Mexican War shared a common experience, no matter their rank or place of service. Taking a "new" military history approach, Mr. Polk's Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War examines the cultural, social, and political aspects of the regular and volunteer forces that made up the army of 1846-48, presents the organizational framework of the army, and introduces the different styles of leadership exhibited by Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott.