Desperate Mission

This book is the story of the former Hungarian Zionist leader, Joel Brand, as told to Alex Weissberg, author of The Accused, which told of his experiences as a prisoner of the Soviet secret police. Most of Desperate Mission: Joel Brand’s Story (1958) is devoted to an account of how Brand came to be in a position to negotiate with the Nazis for the lives of a million human beings and what he did to carry out his incredible mission. Written with all the passion of a man who was entrusted with an almost hopeless mission and had to sit by impotently watching the horrible consequences of its failure, Brand believed that goods and promises which would not have prolonged the fighting ability of the Wehrmacht by a single day might have prevented the slaughter of the 400,000 Jews from Hungary and the untold number from other countries who were put to death in the last year of Hitler’s regime.

The Empire has risen. The Jedi Order has been destroyed. As far as the Emperor is concerned, the Jedi are all but extinct. But on the remote planet of Tatooine, one Jedi Master remains: Obi-Wan Kenobi. Devastated by the loss of his fellow Jedi - and th betrayal of his former apprentice Anakin - Obi-Wan has been left with one last task: to watch over and protect a young child named Luke. When Obi-Wan finds out that a former Jedi apprentice has survived, he must make a painful decision: whether to stay on Tatooine or go on one last, desperate mission - right into the heart of the Empire.

A classic! First time in digital format! This is the story of the most incredible mission of World War II, born in desperation and carried out with foolhardy courage and at the cost of brave men's lives: Mission Aphrodite! A real-life, aerial Guns of Navarone scheme that called for volunteers to guide B-17 drone planes packed with explosives into the Nazi V-2 rocket bases. The mission that cost Joe Kennedy, Jr., his life. The award-winning author of thirty-three books, Jack Olsen’s books have published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. Olsen's journalism earned the National Headliners Award, Chicago Newspaper Guild's Page One Award, commendations from Columbia and Indiana Universities, the Washington State Governor's Award, the Scripps-Howard Award and other honors. He was listed in Who's Who in America since 1968 and in Who's Who in the World since 1987. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "an American treasure." Olsen was described as "the dean of true crime authors" by the Washington Post and the New York Daily News and "the master of true crime" by the Detroit Free Press and Newsday. Publishers Weekly called him "the best true crime writer around." His studies of crime are required reading in university criminology courses and have been cited in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. In a page-one review, the Times described his work as "a genuine contribution to criminology and journalism alike." Olsen is a two-time winner in the Best Fact Crime category of the Mystery Writer’s of America, Edgar award.

JAMES AND ALEX have barely anything in common anymore—least of all their experiences in high school, where James is a popular senior and Alex is suddenly an outcast. But at home, there is Henry, the precocious 10-year-old across the street, who eagerly befriends them both. And when Alex takes up running, there is James’s friend Nathen, who unites the brothers in moving and unexpected ways.

After the events of Episode III, Obi-Wan Kenobi finds himself adrift in the galaxy . . . with Darth Vader on his trail.

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth. Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity." A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

A. T. Mahan (1840-1914), der wohl bekannteste amerikanische Stratege der Marine des 19. Jahrhunderts, bietet mit diesem Buch aus dem Jahre 1902 eine Auflistung und Darstellung einiger bedeutender Marineoffiziere, die dem Autor besonders wichtig erschienen. Es handelt sich hierbei um eine englischsprachige Ausgabe.