The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

 

 

"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

"The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." ―David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice

Named a most anticipated book of April by The New York Times | The Washington Post | Oprah Daily

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

 

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II by Daniel James Brown

 

 

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism, highlighting the contributions and sacrifices that Japanese immigrants and their American-born children made for the sake of the nation: the courageous Japanese-American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe; their families, incarcerated back home; and a young man who refused to surrender his constitutional rights, even if it meant imprisonment.

They came from across the continent and Hawaii. Their parents taught them to embrace both their Japanese heritage and the ways of America. They faced bigotry, yet they believed in their bright futures as American citizens. But within days of Pearl Harbor, the FBI was ransacking their houses and locking up their fathers. And within months many would themselves be living behind barbed wire.

Facing the Mountain is an unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe. Based on Daniel James Brown's extensive interviews with the families of the protagonists as well as deep archival research, it portrays the kaleidoscopic journey of four Japanese-American families and their sons, who volunteered for 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible.

But this is more than a war story. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to shutter the businesses, surrender their homes, and submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of a brave young man, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best--striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 by Ian W. Toll

 

 

New York Times Bestseller

The final volume of the magisterial Pacific War Trilogy from acclaimed historian Ian W. Toll, “one of the great storytellers of War” (Evan Thomas).

In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana Islands and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower marked a pivotal moment in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in the Pacific had entered its endgame.

Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan, Twilight of the Gods brings to life the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts.

Ian W. Toll’s narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are as gripping as ever, but he also reconstructs the Japanese and American home fronts and takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo, where the great questions of strategy and diplomacy were decided.

Drawing from a wealth of rich archival sources and new material, Twilight of the Gods casts a penetrating light on the battles, grand strategic decisions and naval logistics that enabled the Allied victory in the Pacific. An authoritative and riveting account of the final phase of the War in the Pacific, Twilight of the Gods brings Toll’s masterful trilogy to a thrilling conclusion. This prize-winning and best-selling trilogy will stand as the first complete history of the Pacific War in more than twenty-five years, and the first multivolume history of the Pacific naval war since Samuel Eliot Morison’s series was published in the 1950s.

32 photographs; 20 maps

 

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

 

 

An exploration of how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
 
Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?  
 
In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?”
 
Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

 

2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman

 

 

From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034--and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.

On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris "Wedge" Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand.

So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically outmaneuvering America's most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters--Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians--as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power.

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors' years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid

Ellie & The War On Powder Creek (The Dolan Girls Book 2) by S. R. Mallery

 

 

 Another Rip Roaring, Heart Warming Story of Love, Fear, and Redemption in the Wild West It’s 1891 and The DOLAN GIRLS western romance saga continues. This time it stars the feisty Ellie Dolan Parker, who finds herself caught up in the middle of the Wyoming Cattle Wars. Filled with rich, greedy cattle barons thirsty for prime land, crooked politicians, a major kidnapping, local ranchers in life-threatening danger, Butch Cassidy’s Hole In The Wall hideout, hired ‘guns’ from Texas, a troubled marriage, and a blossoming romance, this story is a colorful portrayal of a forgotten time. A time when these well-known events and their players filled the newspapers.Will Ellie make her mark? Or will she simply become one of the victims?

The Last Bookshop in London: A Novel of World War II by Madeline Martin

 

 

“An irresistible tale which showcases the transformative power of literacy, reminding us of the hope and sanctuary our neighborhood bookstores offer during the perilous trials of war and unrest.”

—KIM MICHELE RICHARDSON, author of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler’s forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and blackout curtains that she finds on her arrival were not what she expected. And she certainly never imagined she’d wind up working at Primrose Hill, a dusty old bookshop nestled in the heart of London.

Through blackouts and air raids as the Blitz intensifies, Grace discovers the power of storytelling to unite her community in ways she never dreamed—a force that triumphs over even the darkest nights of the war.

“A gorgeously written story of love, friendship, and survival set against the backdrop of WWII-era London.”

—JILLIAN CANTOR, author of In Another Time and Half Life

“A love letter to the power of books to unite us, to hold the world together when it’s falling apart around our ears. This fresh take on what London endured during WWII should catapult Madeline Martin to the top tier of historical fiction novelists.”

—KAREN ROBARDS, author of The Black Swan of Paris

DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America by David Horowitz

 

 

"Read this disturbing but vital book." — Tucker Carlson

“One of the most intellectually compelling and rational defenses of Christianity’s role in America." — Gov Mike Huckabee

"Exposes the intolerance of many atheists toward those who believe in God. As a Jewish agnostic, I think it is imperative that disbelievers not demonize believers and that believers not demonize disbelievers." — Alan Dershowitz

DARK AGENDA is an extraordinary look into the left’s calculated efforts to create a godless, heathen American society — and how these efforts must be stopped.

And it is written by David Horowitz, a Jew.

A New York Times bestselling author and leading conservative thinker, Horowitz warns that the rising attacks on Christians and their beliefs threaten all Americans — including Jews like himself. The liberal establishment and their radical allies envision a new millennium in which Christianity is banished, Horowitz argues. He says that Judeo-Christian values are at the very root of America’s democracy. Kill off such values and all of our freedoms could perish.

In Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, Horowitz examines how our elites — increasingly secular and atheist — are pushing a radical agenda:

• How the left trashes Christian doctrines critical to the American Republic, much like radical Islam’s war on “infidel” cultures like ours.
• Why the left fights to keep prayer and religion out of public schools, and how those efforts fly in the face of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s intentions.
• How fanatical liberals helped create the religious right by targeting evangelicals and believing Catholics and other conservatives.
• How Barack Obama’s ultra-liberal agenda galvanized the anti-God, anti-religious left.
• The violent and shocking manifesto of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger who advocated the use of dynamite to promote “revolutionary solidarity.”

Filled with stories that demonstrate the mind-numbing reasons behind the secular Left’s smug disdain for Christianity, Horowitz traces the history of religious liberty from the Founding Fathers to now. He shows how the Founding Fathers put aside their own skepticisms about God and religion to write The Declaration of Independence.

Today, he writes Donald Trump’s “genuine love for his country” has galvanized Christians to fight the secular war waged against them — as the president has become a lightning rod for the radical left.

David Horowitz’s powerful new book brings vital insights into the war against Christianity and names the global radicals, leftist Democrats, and money-hungry fat cats of Hollywood and Wall Street responsible for it. Finally, a clear and sensible American voice — one that is not Christian but Jewish — stands up to the twisted rantings of those who want to tear down faith and bedrock of American values. In Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America, David Horowitz delivers an impassioned plea for the restoration of political sanity in America, a perspective that made America great by respecting the faiths of our fathers and mothers.

The Best Book on Politics for Christians in 2019 — The Stream

 

The Strangled Hubris by K T Browne

 

 

To the aristocratic denizens of Gullhaven, Helium is the almost priceless commodity used to lift their airships above the smothering air of the city. To Baron Jasper Brundheim, it is his livelihood. That is until Parliament frames him and seizes his family’s Helium mine for their own. On the run, the young noble must join with other rebels and fight to clear his name. They must flee their beloved city, evade brutal gunsword-wielding soldiers, and find a way to thwart a sinister plot that reaches to the very highest echelons of Gullhaven’s political establishment.

"Gunswords of a gilded age we never got to witness, a depth of courtly intrigue and political high adventure give The Strangled Hubris a sense of mystery and magic long lacking in steampunk storytelling. Compelling, thrilling, and insanely imaginative."

— Nicholas Morine, author of Punish the Wicked: A Dystopian Horror

"The Strangled Hubris is a manically delightful addition to the steampunk canon. The reader is reminded of the outlandish journeys in the work of Terry Bisson, but this tale of a floating palace is a witty and energetic contribution of Keith Browne'sown. If you like stories of political machinations, Browne's your man. If you enjoy knowing winks towards Jane Austin or Blackadder, Browne's equally your man. A confident performance, whatever the weather."

— David Mathew, author of Panic Soup and Ventriloquists

"This is a wonderfully conceived, well-written and satisfying read."

— Laura Knight, author of From Under the Veils of Creation

 

Dispassionate Revenge: The Agathe House Series by Anne Watters

 

 

 

Xavier Whitemore, Viscount St Esher, has lived through the brutality of an abusive family, horrors of war, and the death of his newborn daughter. He grows more reserved, a little colder, understanding war is not the only reason he is a changed man. Never will he be the youth that left England and the betrayal that brought Xavier to wish death.

Muryn Crane knows nothing of war, spies, or the danger that follows her. She has spent years building Agathe House into a home that cares for and helps those returning from the war, wanting to support those wishing to escape the nightmares. The building holds a special place in her heart, not due only to her brother or late husband, but to the one veteran who hates her very existence.

The fates have thrown Xavier and Muryn together to fight a sadistic enemy. Will they be able to protect the family? And, most significantly, can they overlook the passion that will soon engulf the pair?