In the military, a field manual provides instructions in simple, clear, step-by-step language to help soldiers complete their mission. In the civilian sector, books offer information on everything from fixing a leaky tap to developing an effective workout programme to cooking a good steak. Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual is here to help you navigate your way through the difficulties of leadership by providing a direct, situational, pragmatic how-to guide that anyone can instantly put to use. 

Every leader must be ready and willing to take charge, to make hard, crucial calls for the good of the team and the mission. Something much more difficult to understand is that in order to be a good leader, one must also be a good follower. This is a dichotomy - a Dichotomy of Leadership. It is, as authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin explained in their best-selling first audiobook, Extreme Ownership, “Simple, Not Easy”.

For eight years, far beyond the battlefields of Vietnam and the glare of media distortions, American Green Berets fought a deadly secret war in Laos and Cambodia under the aegis of the top secret Military Assistance Command Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group, or SOG. Go deep into the jungle with five SOG warriors surrounded by 10,000 enemy troops as they stack up the dead to build a human buttress for protection. Witness a Green Beret, shot in the back four times and left for dead, who survives to fight savagely against incredible odds to complete his missions.

It’s a hamster-wheel existence. Stocking warehouse store shelves by day, drinking too much whisky and beer by night. In between, Johnny lives in his childhood home, making sure his alcoholic mother hasn’t drunk herself to death and looking after his idiosyncratic older brother, Arty, whose world revolves around his laundromat job. Rinse and repeat. Then Johnny’s monotonous life takes a tumble. The laundromat where Arty works and the one thing that gives him happiness, is about to be sold.

Admiral William H. McRaven is back with amazing stories of bravery and heroism from his career as a Navy SEAL and commander of America's Special Operations Forces.  

How did the US Navy - the branch of the US military tasked with patrolling the oceans - ever manage to produce a unit of raiders trained to operate on land? And how, against all odds, did that unit become one of the world’s most elite commando forces, routinely striking thousands of miles from the water on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, even Central Africa?

Cameron Hanes discovered his true passion for bowhunting when he was twenty. Inspired by the physical challenges of stalking elk in the Oregon wilderness—traversing mountainous terrain, braving erratic weather, and evading his quarry’s even more dangerous predators—he began an ever-evolving journey of self-improvement. To become the best bowhunter of wild elk, to the caliber he believed he could be, Cam realized he would need more than archery skills.

A Green Beret's gripping memoir of American Special Forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.    

Call Sign Chaos is the account of Jim Mattis’ storied career, from wide-ranging leadership roles in three wars to ultimately commanding a quarter of a million troops across the Middle East. Along the way, Mattis recounts his foundational experiences as a leader, extracting the lessons he has learned about the nature of warfighting and peacemaking, the importance of allies, and the strategic dilemmas - and short-sighted thinking - now facing our nation.

Investigative journalist Matthew Cole tells the story of the most lauded unit, SEAL Team 6, revealing a troubling pattern of war crimes and the deep moral rot beneath authorized narratives. From their origins in World War II, the SEALs have trained to be specialized killers with short missions. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became the endless War on Terror, their violence spiraled out of control. Code Over Country details the high-level decisions that unleashed the SEALs’ carnage and the coverups that prevented their crimes from coming to light.

At 24 years of age, U.S. Army Ranger Sean Parnell was named commander of a forty-man elite infantry platoon - a unit that came to be known as the Outlaws - and was tasked with rooting out Pakistan-based insurgents from a mountain valley along Afghanistan's eastern frontier. Parnell and his men assumed they would be facing a ragtag bunch of civilians, but in May 2006 what started out as a routine patrol through the lower mountains of the Hindu Kush became a brutal ambush.

In 12 Rules for Life, acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of people and resonated powerfully around the world. Now in this long-awaited sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life's meaning comes from reaching out into the domain beyond what we know and adapting to an ever-transforming world.

A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own 11 years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.

During the Vietnam War, a “secret war” was fought across the fence in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, unknown to the media or the public, under the aegis of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’s top secret Studies and Observations Group. SOG’s chain of command for missions and after-action reports extended to the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hazardous Duty is a real-life, hard-hitting nonfiction thriller set in the ruins of Bosnia and the sands of Saudi Arabia, the deadly alleys of Mogadishu and the teeming streets of Port-au-Prince. Colonel Hackworth returns from these new American battlefields to report that the Pentagon is wasting hundred of billions of dollars gearing up to fight the wrong kind of wars, and offers a tough-love critique of American military leadership, interpreting the new post-Cold War conflicts.