Ocean State Libraries

The liberation of Europe and defeat of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. Sixty years after America joined the struggle, Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the Allied victory without a grasp of what unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943, where American officers learned how to lead, soldiers learned how to hate, and an army learned what it takes to vanquish a formidable...

In "American Gun", the deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a SEAL. Chris Kyle uses these guns as a window on United States history, making the sweeping argument that the American story has been tied to and shaped by the gun.

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. This book takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant...

This comprehensive account of American military history also considers political, economic, and cultural factors involved.

A sweeping epic of Israel from its founding to the Six-Day War, from the #1 NewYork Times-bestselling author: “Full of excitement.”—Entertainment Weekly
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...

Beau Geste and his two brothers join the Foreign Legion after their family's Blue Water sapphire disappears.

On November 5, 1942, a U.S. cargo plane on a routine flight slammed into the Greenland ice cap. Four days later, a B-17 on the search-and-rescue mission became lost in a blinding storm and also crashed. Miraculously, all nine men on the B-17 survived. The U.S. military launched a second daring rescue operation, but the Grumman Duck amphibious plane sent to find the men flew into a severe storm and vanished. Mitchell Zuckoff offers a spellbinding account...

"Follows the Allied armies from the July 1943 invasion of Sicily to the June 1944 liberation of Rome." --

Examines the history of American warfare from the Civil War through Vietnam and the Cold War, looking at the experiences of both leaders and the led and how American democracy defines itself through these conflicts.

"[This book] tells the story of the Eternal City--from the early Roman Republic through the Renaissance and the Reformation to Mussolini and the German occupation in World War Two--through pivotal moments that defined its history"--Amazon.com.