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BOOK
No Less Than Victory: A Novel of World War II
Jeff Shaara
$12.95

About this product:
Jeff Shaara on No Less Than Victory

In all the stories I’ve written, from the American Revolution, up through World War Two, one of the most gratifying comments I have received from readers has been, "I didn’t know that." Whether writing about Benjamin Franklin or The Red Baron, Robert E. Lee or Black Jack Pershing, my favorite moments have come when a discovery is made, when I can offer the reader some tidbit or episode of history that is an entertaining surprise.

By any pure definition, I am not a historian. My job is not to bathe you with the raw facts and figures, all those things many of us dread when opening the high school history text book. Instead, my goal is to tell you a historically accurate story through the eyes of those special characters, by digging deeply into their memoirs and diaries, letters and the accounts of those who stood beside them. The most satisfying part of that to me is that I do not have to "fudge" history. Unlike Hollywood, where too often filmmakers seem not to trust that an honest historical tale can be sufficiently entertaining, I have been surprised by how the characters themselves, so many of them familiar names, can tell us a true story that not only entertains but reveals something of our past. My job is to be the storyteller, to bring these characters out of their world and into ours. History is not about numbers, but about us.

When I began to tackle the subject of the Second World War, I was concerned that I would be unable to find a story to tell that you did not already know. This is one subject that even Hollywood has (sometimes) treated with an honest hand, magnificent stories that may or may not be genuine history, but at least are honest in their ambitions. What can I add to that? What can I tell you about George Patton or D-Day or the Holocaust that you don’t already know? The answer to that was a surprise to me, and it is my fervent hope that in the trilogy I’ve just completed, it is a surprise to you.

Heroes come in strange packages, and often, the decent and the honorable emerge in places we don’t expect to find them. Throughout my research on World War Two, I was caught off guard many times by the strength of character that came not just from the familiar names, the leaders, but the unfamiliar: the men of the Airborne and the tanks and the men who carried the rifle. I was surprised as well by the enemy, in this case, the Germans. Not every man who obeyed Hitler was simply a goose-stepping monster, and so, some of them, Rommel and Kesselring and von Rundstedt and Speer... add to these stories in ways I did not expect.

Ultimately, the stories I write must entertain, which, when writing about war, can seem terribly inappropriate. World War Two gave us more horror than most of us can possibly absorb. But we must not forget that many did absorb it. Many carry those stories still, often unspoken, unrevealed, those aging GIs whose memories have always been stirred by the sights and smells and the horrific loss. And throughout the horror there are different memories, the uplifting, the humorous, and alongside the tears and the screams there is laughter. It is after all, how the veteran survives.

Their numbers are fewer every day, and as they leave us, many will carry the stories with them. Often, as we watched them grow older, we dared not ask for the tales, cautioned by a parent perhaps, warned against prying or digging too deeply into the old veteran’s silent horror. Even in the name of research, it is not my place to probe where I am not invited. But the history is there for us to explore, the events real, the people true to life, the heroism and the horror a part of their legacy, a legacy we must not forget. It’s the least we can do. --Jeff Shaara

(Photo © Adrian Kinloch)

BOOK
My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World
Jeff Garlin
$10.99

About this product:
Jeff Garlin shares his hysterical and eye-opening journey to reduce his waistline and his carbon footprint during the production of the seventh season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Jeff Garlin has dedicated the filming of an entire season of Curb Your Enthusiasm to completely making over his lifestyle in two major ways--by lightening his physical and his ecological footprints. After many false starts, he believes that writing a book about the experiment is the only possible way to help him lose weight and go green.

The hardest part of the endeavor is overcoming his food addiction--especially when craft service has a constant buffet of everything delicious you could imagine on set. In addition to cutting calories, Jeff accidentally falls into a love affair with pilates, sweats with Richard Simmons, and twice visits the Pritikin Longevity Center, which he says is "rehab for people who eat too much pizza." Larry David’s rooting for him. Jerry Seinfeld’s plotting against him. And his wife is just plain annoyed by everything.

As far as going green, Jeff has always been a big recycler, but he has a lot to learn. For example, actor Ed Begley Jr. is the guy to call if you want to reduce your environmental impact. Jeff does, and it changes everything.

He hopes that being healthy and green becomes a big part of who he is--if not now, when?

BOOK
The Steel Wave: A Novel of World War II
Jeff Shaara
$4.99

About this product:
General Dwight Eisenhower commands a diverse army that must destroy Hitler’s European fortress. On the coast of France, German commander Erwin Rommel prepares for the coming invasion, as the Führer thwarts the strategies Rommel knows will succeed. Meanwhile, Sergeant Jesse Adams, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne, parachutes with his men behind German lines. And as the invasion force surges toward the beaches of Normandy, Private Tom Thorne of the 29th Infantry Division faces the horrifying prospects of fighting his way ashore on Omaha Beach, a stretch of coast more heavily defended than the Allied commanders anticipate. From G.I. to general, this story carries us through the war’s most crucial juncture, the invasion that altered the flow of the war, and, ultimately, changed history.

BOOK
The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II
Jeff Shaara
$5.52

About this product:
A modern master of the historical novel, Jeff Shaara has painted brilliant depictions of the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and World War I. Now he embarks upon his most ambitious epic, a trilogy about the military conflict that defined the twentieth century. The Rising Tide begins a staggering work of fiction bound to be a new generation’s most poignant chronicle of World War II. With you-are-there immediacy, painstaking historical detail, and all-inclusive points of view, Shaara portrays the momentous and increasingly dramatic events that pulled America into the vortex of this monumental conflict.

As Hitler conquers Poland, Norway, France, and most of Western Europe, England struggles to hold the line. When Germany’s ally Japan launches a stunning attack on Pearl Harbor, America is drawn into the war, fighting to hold back the Japanese conquest of the Pacific, while standing side-by-side with their British ally, the last hope for turning the tide of the war.

Through unforgettable battle scenes in the unforgiving deserts of North Africa and the rugged countryside of Sicily, Shaara tells this story through the voices of this conflict’s most heroic figures, some familiar, some unknown. As British and American forces strike into the “soft underbelly” of Hitler’s Fortress Europa, the new weapons of war come clearly into focus. In North Africa, tank battles unfold in a tapestry of dust and fire unlike any the world has ever seen. In Sicily, the Allies attack their enemy with a barely tested weapon: the paratrooper. As battles rage along the coasts of the Mediterranean, the momentum of the war begins to shift, setting the stage for the massive invasion of France, at a seaside resort called Normandy.

More than an unprecedented and intimate portrait of those who waged this astonishing global war, The Rising Tide is a vivid gallery of characters both immortal and unknown: the as-yet obscure administrator Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose tireless efficiency helped win the war; his subordinates, clashing in both style and personality, from George Patton and Mark Clark to Omar Bradley and Bernard Montgomery. In the desolate hills and deserts, the Allies confront Erwin Rommel, the battlefield genius known as “the Desert Fox,” a wounded beast who hands the Americans their first humiliating defeat in the European theater of the war. From tank driver to paratrooper to the men who gave the commands, Shaara’s stirring portrayals bring the heroic and the tragic to life in brilliant detail.

A new level of accomplishment from this already acclaimed author, The Rising Tide will leave readers eager for the next volume of this superb saga of the war that saved and changed the world.


From the Hardcover edition.

BOOK
To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War
Jeff Shaara
$7.93

About this product:
Jeff Shaara has enthralled readers with his New York Times bestselling novels set during the Civil War and the American Revolution. Now the acclaimed author turns to World War I, bringing to life the sweeping, emotional story of the war that devastated a generation and established America as a world power.

Spring 1916: the horror of a stalemate on Europe’s western front. France and Great Britain are on one side of the barbed wire, a fierce German army is on the other. Shaara opens the window onto the otherworldly tableau of trench warfare as seen through the eyes of a typical British soldier who experiences the bizarre and the horrible–a “Tommy” whose innocent youth is cast into the hell of a terrifying war.

In the skies, meanwhile, technology has provided a devastating new tool, the aeroplane, and with it a different kind of hero emerges–the flying ace. Soaring high above the chaos on the ground, these solitary knights duel in the splendor and terror of the skies, their courage and steel tested with every flight.

As the conflict stretches into its third year, a neutral America is goaded into war, its reluctant president, Woodrow Wilson, finally accepting the repeated challenges to his stance of nonalignment. Yet the Americans are woefully unprepared and ill equipped to enter a war that has become worldwide in scope. The responsibility is placed on the shoulders of General John “Blackjack” Pershing, and by mid-1917 the first wave of the American Expeditionary Force arrives in Europe. Encouraged by the bold spirit and strength of the untested Americans, the world waits to see if the tide of war can finally be turned.

From Blackjack Pershing to the Marine in the trenches, from the Red Baron to the American pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, To the Last Man is written with the moving vividness and accuracy that characterizes all of Shaara’s work. This spellbinding new novel carries readers–the way only Shaara can–to the heart of one of the greatest conflicts in human history, and puts them face-to-face with the characters who made a lasting impact on the world.


From the Hardcover edition.

BOOK
Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume (Vol 1)
Jeff Smith
$26.35

About this product:
An American graphic novel first! The complete 1300-page epic adventure from start to finish in one deluxe trade paperback. Three modern cartoon cousins get lost in a pre-technological valley, speanding a year there making new friends and out-running dangerous enemies. Their many adventures include crossing the local people in The Great Cow Race, and meeting a giant mountain lion called RockJaw: Master of the Eastern Border. They learn about sacrifice and hardship in The Ghost Circles and finally discover their own true natures in the climatic journey to The Crown of Horns.

BOOK
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel
Geoff Dyer
$9.99

About this product:
Book Description
A wildly original novel (what else would we expect from this fearless and funny writer?) that explores the underbelly of erotic fulfillment and spiritual yearning.

Every two years the international art world descends on Venice for the opening of the Biennale. Among them is Jeff Atman—a jaded, dissolutely resolute journalist—whose dedication to the cause of Bellini-fuelled party-going is only intermittently disturbed by the obligation to file a story. When he meets Laura, he is rejuvenated, ecstatic. Their romance blossoms quickly but is it destined to disappear just as rapidly?

Every day thousands of pilgrims head to the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, the holiest Hindu city in India. Among their number is a narrator who may or may not be the Atman previously seen in Venice. Intending to visit only for a few days he ends up staying for months, and finds—or should that be loses?—a hitherto unexamined idea of himself, the self. In a romance he can only observe, he sees a reflection of the kind of pleasures that, willingly or not, he has renounced. In the process, two ancient and watery cities become versions of each other. Could two stories, in two different cities, actually be one and the same story?

Nothing Geoff Dyer has written before is as wonderfully unbridled, as dead-on in evocation of place, longing, and the possibility of neurotic enlightenment, as irrepressibly entertaining as Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.
About the Author
Geoff Dyer is the author of three previous novels and five nonfiction books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. The winner of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography (for The Ongoing Moment), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award, Dyer lives in London.

Questions for Geoff Dyer

Q: What is this book about?

A: At the risk of being cowardly, I'll take refuge behind a line from one of Kerouac’s letters: "It's my contention that a man who can sweat fantastically for the flesh is also capable of sweating fantastically for the spirit." (See also answer to question 4.)

Q: Is it a modern twist on Death in Venice? If not, what's up with the title?

A: Yes, the first part is a version of the Mann novella--the opening sentence is ripped straight out of the opening line of the original--but mine operates at a far lower cultural level. His protagonist is a world-famous composer, mine is a hack journalist. And whereas in the Mann, Aschenbach's obsession with the young boy, Tadzio, is tied up with some quest for ideal beauty, in my book the romance with Laura is very carnal and hedonistic--though that could itself be said to represent some kind of ideal.

Q: Why Venice and Varanasi?

A: They're actually very similar: both are water-based, old, with crumbling palaces facing onto either the Grand Canal or the Ganges with alleys and narrow streets leading off into darkness and sudden oases of brilliant light. And both, in their ways, are pilgrimage sites. I'm not the first person to be struck by the similarities. There are quite a few occasions in his Indian Journals when Ginsberg is so stoned walking by the Ganges that he thinks he's in Venice, strolling along the Grand Canal!

Q: Are the two parts of the book, two stories in two different cities, or are they the same story? How are they linked? One early reviewer claimed that the protagonist in each story wasn't the same person, but two people--is it the same person or not?

A: Well, these are huge questions and this, in fact, is what the book is about. By asking questions like these the reader is hopefully confronted by several more, about what kind of unity the book has, about the ways in which a novel might be capable of generating an aesthetic unity of experience that is not narrative-driven. Regarding the person in each part, I'll opt for what governments call the N.C.N.D. response, neither confirming nor denying. It is never made clear whether the un-named narrator in Varanasi is the same as the protagonist in Venice. And although sequentially it comes afterwards, there is nothing in the book to suggest that part 2 comes chronologically after part 1. I actually wanted to subtitle the book "A Diptych" but was dissuaded by my handlers. I didn't mind: it so obviously is a diptych there's no need to call it one!

Q: You've clearly spent a lot of time in Venice and Varanasi. Have any of Jeff's adventures happened to you?

A: Yes, I've been to three biennales and spent a big chunk of time in Varanasi. As I've said elsewhere, I like writing stuff that's only an inch from life but all the art--and, for me, all the fun--is in that inch.

BOOK
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Jeff Sharlet
$9.12

About this product:

They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.

Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world.

BOOK
The Glorious Cause
Jeff Shaara
$4.19

About this product:
In Rise to Rebellion, bestselling author Jeff Shaara captured the origins of the American Revolution as brilliantly as he depicted the Civil War in Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. Now he continues the amazing saga of how thirteen colonies became a nation, taking the conflict from kingdom and courtroom to the bold and bloody battlefields of war.

It was never a war in which the outcome was obvious. Despite their spirit and stamina, the colonists were outmanned and outfought by the brazen British army. General George Washington found his troops trounced in the battles of Brooklyn and Manhattan and retreated toward Pennsylvania. With the future of the colonies at its lowest ebb, Washington made his most fateful decision: to cross the Delaware River and attack the enemy. The stunning victory at Trenton began a saga of victory and defeat that concluded with the British surrender at Yorktown, a moment that changed the history of the world.

The despair and triumph of America’s first great army is conveyed in scenes as powerful as any Shaara has written, a story told from the points of view of some of the most memorable characters in American history. There is George Washington, the charismatic leader who held his army together to achieve an unlikely victory; Charles Cornwallis, the no-nonsense British general, more than a match for his colonial counterpart; Nathaniel Greene, who rose from obscurity to become the finest battlefield commander in Washington’s army; The Marquis de Lafayette, the young Frenchman who brought a soldier’s passion to America; and Benjamin Franklin, a brilliant man of science and philosophy who became the finest statesman of his day.

From Nathan Hale to Benedict Arnold, William Howe to “Light Horse” Harry Lee, from Trenton and Valley Forge, Brandywine and Yorktown, the American Revolution’s most immortal characters and poignant moments are brought to life in remarkable Shaara style. Yet, The Glorious Cause is more than just a story of the legendary six-year struggle. It is a tribute to an amazing people who turned ideas into action and fought to declare themselves free. Above all, it is a riveting novel that both expands and surpasses its beloved author’s best work.


From the Hardcover edition.

BOOK
Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Jeff Lindsay
$4.29

About this product:
Meet Dexter Morgan. He's a highly respected lab technician specializing in blood spatter for the Miami Dade Police Department. He's a handsome, though reluctant, ladies' man. He's polite, says all the right things, and rarely calls attention to himself. He's also a sociopathic serial killer whose "Dark Passenger" drives him to commit the occasional dismemberment.

Mind you, Dexter's the good guy in this story.

Adopted at the age of four after an unnamed tragedy left him orphaned, Dexter's learned, with help from his pragmatic policeman father, to channel his "gift," killing only those who deal in death themselves. But when a new serial killer starts working in Miami, staging elaborately grisly scenes that are, to Dexter, an obvious attempt at communication from one monster to another, the eponymous protagonist finds himself at a loss. Should he help his policewoman sister Deborah earn a promotion to the Homicide desk by finding the fiend? Or should he locate this new killer himself, so he can express his admiration for the other's "art?" Or is it possible that psycho Dexter himself, admittedly not the most balanced of fellows, is finally going completely insane and committing these messy crimes himself?

Despite his penchant for vivisection, it's hard not to like Dexter as his coldly logical personality struggles to emulate emotions he doesn't feel and to keep up his appearance as a caring, unremarkable human being. Breakout author Jeff Lindsay's plot is tense and absorbing, but it's the voice of Dexter and his reactions to the other characters that will keep readers glued to Darkly Dreaming Dexter, as well as making it one of the most original and highly recommended serial killer stories in a long time. --Benjamin Reese