David De Vries
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One autumn evening, shortly after ending a ten-year stint as a pop-music columnist for the Montreal Gazette, Eric Siblin attended a concert at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music. There, something unlikely happened: he fell in love with a piece of classical music — Bach's cello suites. Part biography, part music history, and part literary mystery, The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic stories: The first features Johann Sebastian
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When his older sister Els, a Resistance fighter, is arrested by the Gestapo, thirteen-year-old Dirk takes his little sister, Anna, across the war-torn Netherlands seeking their father, who is also in the Dutch Resistance. Includes an interview with the author, discussion questions, and timeline.
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On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, one of the turning points of World War II. Within six months, the invasion bogged down on the outskirts of Moscow, and the Eastern Front proved to be the decisive theater in the defeat of the Third Reich. Ever since, most historians have agreed that this was Hitler's gravest mistake. In Hitler's Great Gamble, James Ellman argues that while Barbarossa was a gamble and perverted...
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Bennett was one of several journalists to fly a night raid over Berlin in November 1943. This is the vivid testimony of an American journalist shot down over Berlin. After he was captured in Berlin, he was taken on a tour of Germany and shown what the civilian population was being subjected to. Bennett spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft I, where he started the newspaper POW WOW, secretly read by 9,000 prisoners. Bennett's experiences led him...
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The rough-and-tumble life of Special Forces vet and Sixties pop star Barry Sadler
The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn't "Paint It Black" or "Yellow Submarine"--it was "The Ballad of the Green Berets," a hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam vet Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. But Sadler's clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, and guns. Unable to score...
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Immediately after the armistice was signed in November, 1918, an American journalist asked Paul von Hindenburg who won the war against Germany. He was the chief of the German General Staff, co-architect with Erich Ludendorff of Germany's Eastern Front victories and its nearly war-winning Western Front offensives, and he did not hesitate in his answer. "The American infantry," he said. He made it even more specific, telling the reporter that the final...
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"A Fortune Best Book of the Year" Tonio Andrade is professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. His books include The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton), and How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century. He lives in Decatur, Georgia.
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Deep within the Amazon rainforest, a secret lurks. A secret that could change the world.
...A secret worth killing for.
When her company discovers a remarkable hidden message in the dreaming brains of her subjects, Dr. Amanda Meron unknowingly invites disaster unto her company. The clues seem to be pointing her to one of the remote places on the planet:
The Amazon Rainforest.
When Harvey "Ben" Bennett gets a hint that the nefarious organization...
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A door in the ice is discovered in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica.
And it just opened...
Hidden beneath a sheet of ice, Draconis Industries has been working on a powerful new technology.
Harvey Bennett and his new team are sent in to shut them down, but what they find inside is far more sinister than they could have imagined.
Worst of all, an army of Chinese soldiers - hoping to get their hands on the tech - are at their heels.
The Ice Chasm...
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He was murdered for a secret - one he took to his grave.
200 years later, that secret is haunting him again.
Meriwether Lewis was murdered. The organization behind it has been growing quietly in the shadows.
And only Harvey Bennett and the CSO can stop them.
Harvey "Ben" Bennett is back, and he's not alone. His new team - the Civilian Special Operations - is putting the finishing touches on their new headquarters when they receive a call: There's...
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The prewar history of the Japanese intelligence community demonstrates how having power over much, but insight into little can have devastating consequences. Its postwar history-one of limited Japanese power despite growing insight-has also been problematic for national security.
In Special Duty Richard J. Samuels dissects the fascinating history of the intelligence community in Japan. Looking at the impact of shifts in the strategic environment,...
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Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed . . . and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today's masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history.
Thomas C. Foster-the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating...
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THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY excavates the real story behind America's dealings with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs of a national security state. Washington's secret funding of the Mujahedin provoked the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. With guns and money, the United States has ever since sustained the extremists, including Osama...
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By the early 1970s, practically everyone under a certain age liked rock music, but not everyone liked it for the same reasons. We typically associate the sounds of classic rock 'n' roll with youthful rebellion by juvenile delinquents, student demonstrators, idealistic hippies, or irreverent punks. But in this insightful and timely book, author George Case shows how an important strain of rock music from the late 1960s onward spoke to and represented...
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May, 1989. The two nuclear superpowers are finally talking peace, but not everyone in the Soviet Union seeks such resolution. Senior Soviet ministers and generals conduct a coup to seize power and prevent the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. To cover up their plot and capitalize on the resulting chaos, they invade West Germany, setting off a chain of events and the Third World War. Across Europe, soldiers and spies are drawn into the conflict....
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In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany's leading historian of the twentieth century's first great catastrophe explains the war's origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora's Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the everyday tactics of dynamic movement and slow attrition, the...
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A bracing account of a war that lingers in our collective memory as both ambiguous and unjustly ignored. For Americans, it was a discrete conflict lasting from 1950 to 1953 that has long been overshadowed by World War II, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. But as Bruce Cumings eloquently explains, for the Asian world the Korean War was a generations-long fight that still haunts contemporary events. And in a very real way, although its true roots and...
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It was one of the most concentrated surges of creativity in the history of civilization. Between 1390 and 1537, Florence poured forth an astonishing stream of magnificent artworks. But Florentines did more during this brief period than create masterpieces. As citizens of a fractious republic threatened from below, without, and within, they also were driven to reimagine the political and ethical basis of their world, exploring the meaning and possibilities...
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On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than sixty feet in length and with a wingspan of forty feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.
Radar has been in use since the 1930s and was essential...
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A witty and charming account of the wildly entertaining Elsie de Wolfe in 1950s Hollywood, recounted by her dear friend, the beloved creator of Madeline.
Ludwig Bemelmans's charming intergenerational friendship with the late-in-life "First Lady of Interior Decoration" provides an enormously enjoyable nostalgia trip to the sun-soaked glamour of Los Angeles, where de Wolfe surrounded herself with classic movie stars and a luminous parade of life's...