Akron Public Library

"At age twenty-four, Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England one day, despite the fact he had just lost his first election campaign for Parliament. He believed that to achieve his goal he must do something spectacular on the battlefield. Despite deliberately putting himself in extreme danger as a British Army officer in colonial wars in India and Sudan, and as a journalist covering a Cuban uprising...

This is the true story of an extraordinary love affair. In 1904, British Army officer Arthur Hart-Synnot was sent to Japan to learn the language. Arthur met Masa Suzuki at the Officers' Club and was immediately smitten. Masa had grown up among shopkeepers and craftsmen in working-class of Tokyo. She had left school at age fourteen to work and was a dutiful Japanese daughter. But her feelings for Arthur were so powerful that she was willing to risk...

As a humanitarian, he helped aid workers heal orphaned children in Rwanda and lived in camps alongside Bosnian refugees. As a warrior, he excelled at the hardest military training in the world and teamed up with fellow SEALs to hunt al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. In this adaptation of his memoir, The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens brings his adventures to life for teens, sharing stories of friendship, struggle, and hard-earned wisdom. His exciting...

"From the National Book Award-winning and best-selling author Timothy Egan comes the epic story of one of the most fascinating and colorful Irishman in nineteenth-century America. The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against...

The Civil War examined from the point of view of the officers of the army and navy on both sides of the conflict, including field officers, staff officers, engineers, and medical officers. Includes full-color illustrations of uniforms, weapons, and equipment.

"Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp -- Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruelest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying...

From a decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award Finalist, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. "War hath determined us ..." - John Milton, Paradise Lost Toward the beginning of Places and Names , Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq, and whose connections to the...

"A groundbreaking journey tracing America's forgotten path to global power-and how its legacies shape our world today-told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine. Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, "The Fighting Quaker" went-serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of...

On an August morning in 1960, Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a helium balloon twenty miles above Earth, hurtling down at over 400 miles per hour. The little-known story of the men whose scientific experiments laid critical groundwork for NASA's manned space program, a decade before President Kennedy committed the nation to sending a man to the moon.

"The founder of the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons program, aka "TOPGUN," shares the untold story of how he and eight other young pilots revolutionized the art of aerial combat and created the center for excellence and incubator of leadership that thrives to this day."--Provided by publisher.