John Boyd was arguably the greatest American military theorist since the sea power strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan at the turn of the 20th Century. Best known for his formulation of the OODA Loop as a model for competitive decision making, Colonel Boyd was also an original thinker in developing tactics for air-to-air combat, designing warplanes, and the fluid, mobile warfare known to the Germans as blitzkrieg and to modern armies as "maneuver warfare." As much as anyone, John Boyd was the architect of the two great campaigns against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, both the 1991 liberation of Kuwait and...

Larger than the state of Rhode Island and laced by a thousand miles of trails, the White Mountains have long been a hiker's paradise. Here is a first-person account of the world that begins where the pavement ends. Fishermen, backpackers, trail-bikers ... goofers, peak baggers, and through hikers ... you'll find them all in the White Mountains, and you'll meet them all in the pages of this compelling book.The year is 1975, when it was still possible to find space in a lean-to shelter, when the Old Man of the Mountains still showed his splendid profile over Franconia Notch, and when hikers...

Olga Greenlaw kept the War Diary of the American Volunteer Group--the Flying Tigers--while those gallant mercenaries defended Burma and China from Japanese aggression during the opening months of the Pacific War. Returning to the United States in 1942, she wrote 'The Lady and the Tigers', which war correspondent Leland Stowe hailed as "an authoritative, gutsy and true to life story of the AVG." Out of print for more than half a century, her book has now been brought up to date by Daniel Ford, author of 'Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers'. What's more, Ford explains...

Annie Crowley was one of eleven children born in the farmhouse at Kilnahone, outside the village of Ballygarvan in the County Cork. There were nearly twenty-four years between the oldest and youngest of the Crowley boys and girls, Their father died a few weeks after young Billy was born, and Jack the eldest emigrated to Australia not long after. Annie was six years old at the time, and a pupil at Ballygarvan National School, where the English language and English history were drilled into Irish children.
Then came the First World War, and Mary Crowley went off to become a nurse in...

This is the story that inspired the acclaimed Burt Lancaster movie, "Go Tell the Spartans." The year is 1964--early days in South Vietnam--and the U.S. Army Raiders have garrisoned a town that the French abandoned ten years before. The Viet Cong attack, and the Americans reinforce. They're not about to repeat the mistakes of the French

'Sad, bawdy, and compelling, ' wrote the "Detroit Free Press." Prophetic, too, of how the larger war would end.

It's the summer of 1964. The bush hat, not the steel helmet, is the favored headgear of the sixteen thousand American advisors in South Vietnam. They love their work, and they're very good at it. How can they possibly fail? Covering their war are a handful of foreign reporters, including novelist Daniel Ford. Armed with a camera and a notebook, he wanders the country on foot and by military transport--helicopter, jeep, landing craft, junk, armored personnel carrier, and an Air Force flare ship--from the Mekong Delta to the Central Highlands. Once or twice a week, or whenever he is reunited...

"The High Country Illuminator created Avalon by climbing to the fourth tower of old Number One lift and crying: 'Lest there be light '"

Thus begins the madcap adventure of a ski-bum winter toward the end of the 1960s. HCI is otherwise known as George Togalok, a Native American from the Salt River Canyon country. Around him assemble cunning Silver Fox, brainy Duke University, the Outt-keepers, Max, Max's Buddy, some fluffy birds, and other young slackers who want nothing more from life than the chance to ski the fluffy white powder of the Colorado Rockies. "The writing is adept," marveled...

When young Eddie Gillespie discovers a World War II airplane in the jungle, with a grinning skeleton at the controls, he sets a story in motion. Two American fighter pilots in the Chinese Air Force, with their English and Burmese girlfriends, and a Japanese suicide pilot whose name happens to mean "tree of the sun"--they clash at Rangoon, while the British empire falls about their ears. Here is a story of the Flying Tigers, immortalized by their exploits in Southeast Asia in the opening months of the Pacific War, as told by a man uniquely qualified to write about those stirring times....