Akron Public Library

Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL, recounts his life and military experiences, discusses his record for the most career sniper kills in United States military history and the bounty placed on his head by Iraqi insurgents, provides an eye-witness account of war in Iraq, shares the strains of war on his marriage and family, and honors his fellow soldiers.

"The First Calvary Division came under surprise attack in Sadr City on Sunday, April 4, 2004. More than seven thousand miles away, their families awaited the news for forty-eight hellish hours -- expecting the worst. In this powerful, unflinching account, Martha Raddatz takes readers from the streets of Baghdad to the home front and tells the story of that horrific day through the eyes of the courageous American men and women who lived it." -- Back...

Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was seventeen. Two years later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer. In this extraordinary and harrowing memoir, readers march along one GI's tour of duty. Smithson avoids writing either prowar propaganda or an antimilitary polemic, providing instead a fascinating, often humorous-and occasionally devastating-account of the motivations and life of a contemporary soldier.

This true account follows twenty-three Marines of First Recon, in a platoon that spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This elite unit, nicknamed "First Suicide Batallion", took the fight directly to the enemy by racing ahead of American battle forces, literally driving into suspected ambush points from the opening days of the invasion until the fall of Baghdad.

Few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict around the world than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has changed the way we watch the news. In this memoir, he offers an unstinting, up-close view of the most harrowing crises of our time, and the profound impact they have had on his life." "After growing up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Cooper felt a magnetic pull toward the unknown, an attraction to the far corners...

Private First Class Jessica Lynch retells the events surrounding her capture by Iraqi soldiers in March 2003, and her rescue by American troops.

When Sgt. Mills and the rest of the 1st Battalion flew into Iraq in April, 2004, they were soon fighting for their lives. "Sniper One" is a breathtaking chronicle of endurance, camaraderie, dark humor, and courage in the face of relentless, lethal assault.

In the first memoir from a young soldier who deserted from the war in Iraq, Joshua Key offers a vivid and damning indictment of what we are doing there. Key, a young husband and father from a conservative background, enlisted in 2002 to lift his family out of poverty. A year later, he found himself participating in a war that was not the campaign against evildoers he had expected. He saw Iraqi civilians beaten, shot, and killed for little or no provocation....

A former captain in the Marines' First Recon Battalion, who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, reveals how the Corps trains its elite and offers a point-blank account of twenty-first-century battle. Only one Marine in a hundred qualifies for Recon, charged with working clandestinely, often behind enemy lines. Fick's training begins with a hellish summer at Quantico, and advances to the pinnacle--Recon--four years later, on the eve of war with Iraq. Along...

An on-the-ground commander describes his brigade's first year in Iraq after the U.S. forces seized Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and explains what went right and wrong as the U.S. military confronted an insurgency, in a firsthand analysis of success and failure in Iraq.