Download or read book Incendiary written by Chris Cleave and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself. In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, a woman mourns the loss of her husband and son at the hands of one of history’s most notorious criminals. And in appealing to their executioner, she reveals the desperate sadness of a broken heart and a working-class life blown apart.

Download or read book Greek Fire Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs written by Adrienne Mayor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A comprehensive look at WMD's antecedents, from flamethrowers of the Peloponnesian War to plague-bearing booby traps.... Rich and entertaining." -Newsweek Featuring a new introduction by the author. Flamethrowers, poison gases, incendiary bombs, the large-scale spreading of disease... are these terrifying agents and implements of warfare modern inventions? Not by a long shot. Weapons of biological and chemical warfare have been in use for thousands of years, and Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs, Adrienne Mayor's fascinating exploration of the origins of biological and unethical warfare draws extraordinary connections between the mythical worlds of Hercules and the Trojan War, the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides, and modern methods of war and terrorism. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs will catapult readers into the dark and fascinating realm of ancient war and mythic treachery-and their devastating consequences.

Download or read book Incendiary written by Michael Cannell and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the specter of terrorism haunted the public imagination, a serial bomber stalked the streets of 1950s New York. The race to catch him would give birth to a new science called criminal profiling. Grand Central, Penn Station, Radio City Music Hall—for almost two decades, no place was safe from the man who signed his anonymous letters “FP” and left his lethal devices in phone booths, storage lockers, even tucked into the plush seats of movie theaters. His victims were left cruelly maimed. Tabloids called him “the greatest individual menace New York City ever faced.” In desperation, Police Captain Howard Finney sought the help of a little known psychiatrist, Dr. James Brussel, whose expertise was the criminal mind. Examining crime scene evidence and the strange wording in the bomber’s letters, he compiled a portrait of the suspect down to the cut of his jacket. But how to put a name to the description? Seymour Berkson—a handsome New York socialite, protégé of William Randolph Hearst, and publisher of the tabloid The Journal-American—joined in pursuit of the Mad Bomber. The three men hatched a brilliant scheme to catch him at his own game. Together, they would capture a monster and change the face of American law enforcement.

Download or read book Napalm written by Robert M. Neer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Napalm, incendiary gel that sticks to skin and burns to the bone, came into the world on Valentine’s Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. On March 9, 1945, it created an inferno that killed over 87,500 people in Tokyo—more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It went on to incinerate sixty-four of Japan’s largest cities. The Bomb got the press, but napalm did the work. After World War II, the incendiary held the line against communism in Greece and Korea—Napalm Day led the 1950 counter-attack from Inchon—and fought elsewhere under many flags. Americans generally applauded, until the Vietnam War. Today, napalm lives on as a pariah: a symbol of American cruelty and the misguided use of power, according to anti-war protesters in the 1960s and popular culture from Apocalypse Now to the punk band Napalm Death and British street artist Banksy. Its use by Serbia in 1994 and by the United States in Iraq in 2003 drew condemnation. United Nations delegates judged deployment against concentrations of civilians a war crime in 1980. After thirty-one years, America joined the global consensus, in 2011. Robert Neer has written the first history of napalm, from its inaugural test on the Harvard College soccer field, to a Marine Corps plan to attack Japan with millions of bats armed with tiny napalm time bombs, to the reflections of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a girl who knew firsthand about its power and its morality.

Download or read book Fire and Fury written by Randall Hansen and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller An enlightening and utterly convincing re-examination of the allied aerial bombing campaign and of civilian German suffering during World War II–an essential addition to our understanding of world history. During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. Much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly. Focusing on the crucial period from 1942 to 1945, and using a compelling narrative approach, Fire and Fury tells the story of the American and British bombing campaign through the eyes of those involved: military and civilian command in America, Britain, and Germany, aircrew in the sky, and civilians on the ground. Acclaimed historian Randall Hansen shows that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, was wedded to an outdated strategy whose success had never been proven; how area bombing not only failed to win the war, it probably prolonged it; and that the US campaign, which was driven by a particularly American fusion of optimism and morality, played an important and largely unrecognized role in delivering Allied victory.

Download or read book How to Fight Fire Bombs written by United States. Office of Civilian Defense and published by . This book was released on 1942 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inferno written by Edwin P. Hoyt and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did the bombing of Japan's cities—culminating in the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—hasten the end of World War II? Edwin Hoyt, World War II scholar and author, argues against the U.S. justification of the bombing. In Inferno, Hoyt shows how the United States bombed without discrimination, hurting Japanese civilians far more than the Japanese military. Hoyt accuses Major General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force leader who helped plan the destruction of Dresden, of committing a war crime through his plan to burn Japan's major cities to the ground. The firebombing raids conducted by LeMay's squadrons caused far more death than the two atomic blasts. Throughout cities built largely from wood, incendiary bombs started raging fires that consumed houses and killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. The survivors of the raids recount their stories in Inferno, remembering their terror as they fled to shelter through burning cities, escaping smoke, panicked crowds, and collapsing buildings. Hoyt's descriptions of the widespread death and destruction of Japan depicts a war machine operating without restraint. Inferno offers a provocative look at what may have been America's most brutal policy during the years of World War II.

Download or read book Restricted Data written by Alex Wellerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-09 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--

Download or read book The Fire written by Jörg Friedrich and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the final phase of the World War II, the Allies launched a bombing campaign that inflicted unprecedented destruction on Germany. This work attempts to document life under the Allied bombing, and renders the annihilation of cities such as Dresden.

Download or read book The Bomber Mafia written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “truly compelling” (Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war—from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History. In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

Download or read book Fu go written by Ross Coen and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Near the end of World War II, in an attempt to attack the United States mainland, Japan launched its fu-go campaign, deploying thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary and high-explosive bombs designed to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere and drift to the west coast of North America. After reaching the mainland, these fu-go, the Japanese hoped, would terrorize American citizens and ignite devastating forest fires across the western states, ultimately causing the United States to divert wartime resources to deal with the domestic crisis. While the fu-go offensive proved to be a complete tactical failure, six Americans lost their lives when a discovered balloon exploded. Ross Coen provides a fascinating look into the obscure history of the fu-go campaign, from the Japanese schoolgirls who manufactured the balloons by hand to the generals in the U.S. War Department who developed defense procedures. The book delves into panic, propaganda, and media censorship in wartime. Fu-go is a compelling story of a little-known episode in our national history that unfolded virtually unseen. Purchase the audio edition.

Download or read book Words on Fire written by Helio Fred Garcia and published by Radius Book Group. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The consequences of incendiary rhetoric are predictable. This is what author Helio Fred Garcia argues and warns us about in Words on Fire. The El Paso terrorist attack finally brought to the forefront broader public recognition that leaders who dehumanize and demonize groups, rivals, or critics create conditions where citizens begin to accept, condone, and even commit acts of violence. Leaders of all kinds use language to move people, and this book is about how they do it. The Work focuses on Donald Trump’s use of language that dehumanizes others, and how his use of dehumanizing language can provoke “lone wolves” to commit acts of violence, a type of violent extremism known as stochastic terrorism. Garcia’s goal is to sound the alarm about this insidious spur to violence by spelling out the mechanisms by which it works so that leaders, citizens, journalists, and others can recognize it when it occurs and hold leaders accountable. The Work is a timely analysis of leadership communication applied to the current political and social climate that will find a long-term audience with engaged citizens, civic leaders, and in the business, military, academic, and religious communities with which the author has deep ties. Garcia provides responsible leaders not just with techniques to recognize when they are using language in ways that may lead to negative consequences, but with ways to stop, redirect their focus, and stay on the high ground. And he provides citizens, civic leaders, journalists, and others with a framework to recognize potentially violence-provoking rhetoric so they can hold leaders accountable for it with twelve warning signs that rhetoric may provoke violence.

Download or read book Little Bee written by Chris Cleave and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of people have read, discussed, debated, cried, and cheered with Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee girl whose violent and courageous journey​ puts a stunning face on the worldwide refugee crisis​. “Little Bee will blow you away.” —The Washington Post The lives of a sixteen-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British woman collide in this page-turning #1 New York Times bestseller, book club favorite, and “affecting story of human triumph” (The New York Times Book Review) from Chris Cleave, author of Gold and Everyone Brave Is Forgiven. We don’t want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn’t. And it’s what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

Download or read book Hiroshima written by John Hersey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Download or read book Field Manual written by United States. Department of the Army and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bat Bomb written by Jack Couffer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Inside information on a wondrously droll, highly classified yarn from WWII . . . A well-told, stranger-than-fiction tale that could make a terrific movie.” —Kirkus Reviews The plan: attach small incendiary bombs to millions of bats and release them over Japan’s major cities. As the bats went to roost, a million fires would flare up in remote crannies of the wood and paper buildings common throughout Japan. When their cities were reduced to ashes, the Japanese would surely capitulate . . . Told here by the youngest member of the team, this is the story of the bat bomb project, or Project X-Ray, as it was officially known. In scenes worthy of a Capra or Hawks comedy, Jack Couffer recounts the unorthodox experiments carried out in the secrecy of Bandera, Texas, Carlsbad, New Mexico, and El Centro, California, in 1942-1943 by “Doc” Adams’ private army. This oddball cast of characters included an eccentric inventor, a distinguished Harvard scientist, a biologist with a chip on his shoulder, a movie star, a Texas guano collector, a crusty Marine Corps colonel, a Maine lobster fisherman, an ex-mobster, and a tiger. The bat bomb researchers risked life and limb to explore uncharted bat caves and “recruit” thousands of bats to serve their country, certain that they could end the war with Japan. And they might have—in their first airborne test, the bat bombers burned an entire brand-new military airfield to the ground. For everyone who relishes true tales of action and adventure, Bat Bomb is a must-read. Bat enthusiasts will also discover the beginnings of the scientific study of bats.

Download or read book Almanac of American Military History 4 volumes written by Spencer C. Tucker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-11-21 with total page 2561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This almanac provides a comprehensive, chronological overview of all American military history, serving as the standard reference work of its type. Almanac of American Military History is yet another reference work from acclaimed historian Dr. Spencer C. Tucker and ABC-CLIO, offering an unprecedented resource for a wide range of students and researchers. A comprehensive, four-volume title, this almanac traces all of American military history from the European voyages of discovery through 2011, chronicling the pivotal moments that have shaped the United States into the country it is today. In addition to documenting key events, this title presents biographies of more than 250 key individuals and provides information on more than 250 historically significant technologies and weapons systems. A detailed glossary is included, as are discussions of ranks and military awards and decorations. Divided into conflict periods, each chapter includes a detailed chronology, reference-entry sidebars, statistical information, primary-source documents, and a bibliography.