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Showing posts with the label History

Atom Bomb to Santa Claus: What have the Americans ever done for us?

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Three cheers for the ingenious, inventive, United States of America! From the kitchen to the office to outer space, America has been at the forefront of the advances of the human race for the last two centuries. It's given birth to more new products, devices, medicines, leisure pursuits, sports, musical genres, and vehicles than any other country or people ancient or modern. More Nobel prize winners come from these shores than the next five countries combined. Atom Bomb to Santa Claus celebrates the country's pioneering drive by describing some of its greatest innovations and some of its greatest – and most surprising – inventors. It challenges the imagination to know that the same country that gave the world the artificial heart and e-mail, also originated sliced bread and Chinese fortune cookies. Guaranteed to entertain and enlighten, Atom Bomb to Santa Claus is an amazing chronicle of some of America's most important and imaginative creations. Purchase on Amazon ...

Burma: The Forgotten War by Jon Latimer

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Through festering jungle and across burning plains to high mountains and lazy rivers, the Burma campaign of the Second World War involved the longest retreat in British history, and the longest advance; long-range penetration miles behind enemy lines, vicious hand-to-hand fighting, and the horrors of forced labour The Figureheads of the campaign were singular characters like Slim, Mountbatten, Stilwell and Wingate; while its ranks were dominated by ordinary soldiers gathered ‘like a whirlpool from the ends of the earth’ - from Britain, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, West, East and South Africa, but overwhelmingly from India. Jon Latimer draws these disparate strands together in a gripping narrative that encompasses everything from the widest political developments to detailed tactical operations. His focus is the experiences of thousands of ordinary people whose lives were transformed by this south-east Asian maelstrom, many of whom feel that they were forgotten. Burma ensu...

Weird War 2 by Richard Denham

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Welcome to the wonderfully weird World War Two... The Second World War was the bloodiest on record. It was the first total war in history when civilians - men, women and children - were on the front line as never before. With so many millions involved, the rumour machine went into overdrive, tall stories built on fear of the unknown. With so much at stake, boffins battled with each other to build ever more bizarre weapons to outgun the enemy. Nazi Germany alone had so many government-orchestrated foibles that they would be funny if they were not so tragic. Parachuting sheep? Pilot pigeons? Rifles that fire round corners? Men who never were? You will find them all in these pages, the weird, wonderful and barely believable tales from World War Two. Purchase on Amazon About the Author Richard is the co-author of the popular 'Britannia' series with M. J. Trow. These books follow a group of soldiers and their descendants through the madness of a chain of events whic...

Debut release: "Everything is Normal" the life and times of a Soviet kid by Sergey Grechishkin

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Everything is Normal offers a lighthearted worm’s-eye-view of the USSR through the middle-class Soviet childhood of a nerdy boy in the 1970s and ’80s. A relatable journey into the world of the late-days Soviet Union, Everything is Normal is both a memoir and a social history—a reflection on the mundane deprivations and existential terrors of day-to-day life in Leningrad in the decades preceding the collapse of the USSR. Sergey Grechishkin’s world is strikingly different, largely unknown, and fascinatingly unusual, and yet a world that readers who grew up in the United States or Europe during the same period will partly recognize. This is a tale of friendship, school, and growing up—to read Everything is Normal is to discover the very foreign way of life behind the Iron Curtain, but also to journey back into a shared past. Purchase here Life's journey took Sergey Grechishkin from a communal flat in Leningrad, through studies in China and France, and on to top banking...