Finalist for the National Book Award, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive in Iraq. "The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined. With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.

Of the 620,000 soldiers who perished during the American Civil War, the overwhelming majority died not from gunshot wounds or saber cuts, but from disease. In this ground-breaking medical history, Andrew McIlwaine Bell explores the impact of two terrifying mosquito-borne maladies---malaria and yellow fever---on the major political and military events of the 1860s, revealing how deadly microorganisms carried by a tiny insect helped shape the course of the Civil War.

The waning years of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of journalism in the United States, one that not only challenged government and corporate power, but also turned to sordid crimes and scandals for much of its material. Sensational, shocking, and lurid, this new style of reporting came to be known as "yellow journalism." The trend influenced newspapers across the country, and its role in building public support for the Spanish-American War has become the stuff of legend. The supplemental features of this book, including striking photographs, primary sources, and informative sidebars, trace the development of yellow journalism and demonstrate its impact today.

In this action-packed third book in the New York Times bestselling Dorothy Must Die series, new girl from Kansas Amy Gumm is caught between her home—and Oz. My name is Amy Gumm. Tornadoes must have a thing about girls from Kansas, because—just like Dorothy—I got swept away on one too. I landed in Oz, where Good is Wicked, Wicked is Good, and the Wicked Witches clued me in to my true calling: Assassin. The only way to stop Dorothy from destroying Oz—and Kansas—is to kill her. But I failed. Others died for my mistakes. Because of me, the portal between the worlds has been opened. And if I don’t find a way to close it? Dorothy will make sure I never go home again. Now it’s up to me to: join the Witches, fight for Oz, save Kansas, and stop Dorothy once and for all. Perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, Danielle Paige delivers a dark, high-octane reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Many books about Alabama's role in the Civil War have focused serious attention on the military and political history of the war. The Yellowhammer War likewise examines the military and political history of Alabama's Civil War contributions, but it also covers areas of study usually neglected by centennial scholars, such as race, women, the home front, and Reconstruction. From Patricia A. Hoskins's look at Jews in Alabama during the Civil War and Jennifer Ann Newman Treviño's examination of white women's attitudes during secession to Harriet E. Amos Doss's study of the reaction of Alabamians to Lincoln's Assassination and Jason J. Battles's essay on the Freedman's Bureau, readers are treated to a broader canvas of topics on the Civil War and the state. CONTRIBUTORS Jason J. Battles / Lonnie A. Burnett / Harriet E. Amos Doss / Bertis English / Michael W. Fitzgerald / Jennifer Lynn Gross / Patricia A. Hoskins / Kenneth W. Noe / Victoria E. Ott / Terry L. Seip / Ben H.

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.

"Most notable among Hearst's competitors was The World, owned and managed by a Jewish immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer. In The Yellow Journalism, David R. Spencer describes how the evolving culture of Victorian journalism was shaped by the Yellow Press. He details how these two papers and others exploited scandal, corruption, and crime among New York's most influential citizens and its most desperate inhabitants - a policy that made this "journalism of action" remarkably effective, not just as a commercial force but also as an advocate for the city's poor and defenseless."--BOOK JACKET.

The Manchu Qing victory over the Chinese Ming Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century was one of the most surprising and traumatic developments in China's long history. In the last year of the Ming, the southwest region of China became the base of operations for the notorious leader Zhang Xianzhong (1605-47), a peasant rebel known as the Yellow Tiger. Zhang's systematic reign of terror allegedly resulted in the deaths of at least one-sixth of the population of the entire Sichuan province in just two years. The rich surviving source record, however, indicates that much of the destruction took place well after Zhang's death in 1647 and can be attributed to independent warlords, marauding bandits, the various Ming and Qing armies vying for control of the empire, and natural disasters. On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger is the first Western study to examine in detail the aftermath of the Qing conquest by focusing on the social and demographic effects of the Ming-Qing transition. By integrating the modern techniques of trauma and memory studies into the military and social history of the transition, Kenneth M. Swope adds a crucial piece to the broader puzzle of dynastic collapse and reconstruction. He also considers the Ming-Qing transition in light of contemporary conflicts around the globe, offering a comparative military history that engages with the universal connections between war and society.

This book explores the interplay between war and the environment in Henan Province, a hotly contested frontline territory that endured massive environmental destruction and human disruption during the conflict between China and Japan that raged during World War II. In a desperate attempt to block Japan's military advance, Chinese Nationalist armies under Chiang Kai-shek broke the Yellow River's dikes in Henan in June 1938, resulting in devastating floods that persisted until after the war's end. Greater catastrophe struck Henan in 1942-1943, when famine took some two million lives and displaced millions more. Focusing on these war-induced disasters and their aftermath, this book conceptualizes the ecology of war in terms of energy flows through and between militaries, societies, and environments. Ultimately, Micah Muscolino argues that efforts to procure and exploit nature's energy in various forms shaped the choices of generals, the fates of communities, and the trajectory of environmental change in North China.