Showing results by narrator "Peter Johnson" in History

On December 7, 1941, as the great battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah lie paralyzed and burning in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A crack team of U.S. Navy salvage divers headed by Edward C. Raymer are hurriedly flown to Oahu from the mainland. Their two-part orders are direct and straightforward: (1) rescue as many trapped sailors and Marines as possible, and (2) resurrect what remains of America's once mighty pacific fleet. Descent Into Darkness tells their story.

Covering the pivotal years 1861-1864, General Ulysses S. Grant leads us in his own words from Fort Sumter to his appointment as commander of all the armies of the North. Grant remembers his experiences with the key players of the day, takes us onto the battlefields, and recounts the twists and turns of fate. Grant was a failed peacetime soldier, failed farmer, failed woodcutter, failed bill collector, and 38-year-old clerk in a harness store in the spring of 1861. By 1864, he was directing all the Union forces.

In his own captivating words, General Ulysses S. Grant describes the Wilderness Campaign, the almost anti-climactic surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. His depiction of the most crucial and hardest-fought battles of the Civil War, the near-disasters, and the bloody triumphs reveals a highly intelligent, profound, thinking man. Grant wrote his memoirs as he lay dying of cancer and completed the manuscript only a week before his death.

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, tells the story of his life in his own words. In this opening volume, Grant covers his early years, including his time at the U.S. military academy at West Point and his service during the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor. Grant wrote his memoirs in order to rescue his family from debt and they were published as he lay dying of throat cancer. Today, they are an American classic.

Revealed for the first time in Racing for the Bomb, Groves played a crucial and decisive role in the planning, timing, and targeting of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Norris offers new insights into the complex and controversial questions surrounding the decision to drop the bomb in Japan and Groves' actions during World War II, which had a lasting imprint on the nuclear age and the Cold War that followed.

Interventions, by Noam Chomsky, is getting new press after the Pentagon banned the book from Guantanamo Bay's prison library. Interventions is Noam Chomsky at his best. Not since his all-time best-selling title, 9/11, published in the Open Media series in 2001, have readers and listeners had a timely, short, affordable Chomsky. Unlike 9/11, Interventions is a writerly work - a series of more than 30 tightly argued essays aimed at various aspects of U.S. power and politics in the post-9/11 world. While critical of U.S. military interventions around the globe, each piece in the book is in itself an intellectual intervention.

Today's copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital revolution that has made copyright - and its violation - a part of everyday life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators, Hollywood, and governments against consumers, pirates, Silicon Valley, and open-access advocates. But while the digital generation can be forgiven for thinking the dispute between, for example, the publishing industry and Google is completely new, the copyright wars in fact stretch back three centuries - and their history is essential to understanding today's battles.

Here is an important book for turbulent times, an accessible and engaging economic history of the world, by the world trade editor of the Financial Times.

Witty, knowledgeable, and fluent, False Economy tells extraordinary stories of economic triumph and disaster, explaining how some countries went wrong while others went right, and why it’s so difficult to change course once you’re on the path to ruin.

A lively history of the Watch and Ward Society - New England's notorious literary censor for over eighty years. Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society - once Boston's unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society's upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays.