The Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the Opium War of 1839-42. What happened? In The Gunpowder Age, Tonio Andrade offers a compelling new answer, opening a fresh perspective on a key question of world history: why...

Based on interviews of military veterans by the authors, this book explains why so many of our American military heroes—those willing to put their lives on the line to protect the United States—now question if our nation is still the country they fought for. What is happening to our country? This question is heard more and more frequently these days as Americans worry about the unrelenting attacks by so-called progressives on the foundation, core...

Explains the roots of Japanese militarism leading to World War II.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Winds of War and The Caine Mutiny, this saga spans from 1948 to 1967, the early decades of the state of Israel as it fights for its life, outmatched and surrounded by enemies-the first of the two-part epic that concludes with The Glory. Zev Barak, Sam Pasternak, Don Kishote, and Benny Luria are all officers in the Israeli army, caught up in the sweep of history, fighting the desperate desert battles...

The harrowing story of one of history's most compelling military campaigns.
In An Army at Dawn—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—Rick Atkinson provided a dramatic and authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa. Now, in The Day of Battle, he follows the American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943, attack Italy two months later, and then fight their way, mile by bloody mile, north toward...

In the first volume of a remarkable trilogy, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson provides the definitive history of the war in North Africa. The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. An Army at Dawn begins on the eve of Operation TORCH, the daring amphibious invasion of Morocco and Algeria. After three days of hard fighting against the French, American...

A novel of army life in the calm before Pearl Harbor: A New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award winner, and “one of the great books of our time” (Newsday).
 At the Pearl Harbor army base in 1941, Robert E. Lee Prewitt is Uncle Sam’s finest bugler. A career soldier with no patience for army politics, Prewitt becomes incensed when a commander’s favorite wins the title of First Bugler....