By: Richard Holmes
Paperback Edition

In this useful and gripping study, an English military biographer examines the forces which operate upon fighting men in and out of battle. Holmes presents numerous well-organized anecdotes that range from Waterloo to the Falklands, often deliberately blurring the distinction between wars in order to show their common factors. Although the book is drawn exclusively from secondary sources, it contains a wealth of insights useful to professional students. His observations on the role of females in combat zones are timely, if unsurprising to most veterans. As a work of lay psychology, the book surpasses John Ellis's The Sharp End ( LJ 2/15/81). Raymond L. Puffer, U.S. Air Force History Prog., Los Angeles

By: Sun Tzu
Paperback Edition

Capturing the literary quality of The Art of War--its lucid, epigrammatic, almost poetic style--as well as its philosophical and strategic content, John Minford's new translation presents the core text in two different formats. First, the unadorned thirteen chapters allow readers to form their own first impressions of the ancient words of wisdom ascribed to Sun-tzu. Then the same text appears with extensive running commentary from the canon of traditional Chinese commentators and others, providing context and subtext to the work.

By: David Halberstam
Paperback Edition

"[The] most comprehensive saga of how America became involved in Vietnam. It is also the Iliad of the American empire and the Odyssey of this nation's search for its idealistic soul. The Best and the Brightest is almost like watching an Alfred Hitchcock thriller." -- The Boston Globe

By: John Grider Miller
Paperback Edition

This is the true story of the legendary Vietnam War hero John Ripley, who braved intense enemy fire to destroy a strategic bridge and stall a major North Vietnamese invasion into the South in April 1972. Told by a fellow Marine, the account lays bare Ripley's innermost thoughts as he rigged 500 pounds of explosives by hand-walking the beams beneath the bridge, crimped detonators with his teeth, and raced the burning fuses back to shore, thus saving his comrades from certain death.

By: Gerald H. Turley
Out of print

By: Guy Sajer
Hardcover Edition

This book recounts the horror of World War II on the eastern front, as seen through the eyes of a teenaged German soldier. At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer’s war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery. As a member of the elite Gross Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov.

By: General Bernard Trainor and Michael R. Gordon
Paperback Edition

The chief Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times and a retired three-star Marine Corps general join forces to bring us the definitive history of the Persian Gulf conflict and its aftermath. Based on years of interviews with senior allied officials in the Persian Gulf, Western Europe, and the United States, this absorbing narrative history takes us behind the scenes in Washington and Riyadh�and reveals the debates, the power struggles, and the personalities that shaped the course of the war.

By: Thucydides
Paperback Edition

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling the author's ambitious claim that the work "was done to last forever."

By: Michael Shaara
Fiction Hardcover Edition

By: Matthew B. Ridgway
Paperback Edition

In December 1950 General Matthew B. Ridgway replaced General Walton Walker as commander of the Eighth Army, and in April 1951 he succeeded Douglas MacArthur as supreme commander of the United Nations forces in Korea and supreme commander of the United States Far East Command. In this spirited book, General Ridgway describes how he took a dispirited army and rebuilt it in a few short months, leading it into battle against the Chinese and North Korean forces, forcing them back over the 38th parallel and �victory.�