John Willard Toland

Captured by History is an autobiography like none other in recent years, for few historians have interviewed as many men and women who helped shape the most momentous events of our century than John Toland. Here, for the first time, Toland reveals how he found these key players and how he persuaded them to talk to him. From disgraced Japanese generals to the German doctor who nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler, Toland's sources are remarkable for what they reveal about their subjects. It was Toland's ability to listen, more than anything else, that persuaded those he interviewed to divulge secrets and stories they would tell no one else. Toland's unorthodox approach to history came from his early desire to be a playwright. Toland found that he saw history as a play, with narrative structure and drama, not as a dry series of dates and names. The result was a series of landmark works such as Infamy; The Rising Sun, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1970 and reflected his ability, with the help of his Japanese wife, to open doors normally closed to Westerners in Japan; In Mortal Combat; The Last 100 Days; and his best-selling biography of Adolf Hitler. Written by one of our last witnesses to the terrible and deracinating conflicts that split the world asunder at mid-century, Captured by History is an astonishing personal story of a hugely inquisitive man who became a historian not by accident or design, but by fate; a man who succeeded in chronicling the most tumultuous events of our century.

A collection of essays from swearing to incest and everything else under the sun, lighthearted but with the underlying seriousness typical of Graves. A valuable insight into social customs between the two World Wars.

GIFT LOCAL 04-26-2003 $19.95.

Adolf Hitler unleashed a nightmare of terror in Europe that changed the course of history and forever altered our conception of human nature. But how is it possible to understand Hitler? Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet begins to answer that question by providing the first analysis of Hitler's life by a trained MD and practicing psychiatrist. Fritz Redlich, M.D., provides a full-length biography of Hitler, focusing especially on his medical and mental history and showing us precisely how Hitler's physical and mental health influenced his beliefs and behavior.

For thirteen violent months in the 1930s, John Dillinger and his gang swept through the Midwest. The criminals of the Depression robbed almost at will (the Indiana State Police had only 41 members, including clerks and typists). Dillinger's daring escapes-single-handed at Crown Point jail or through the withering machine gun fire of FBI agents at Little Bohemia Lodge-and his countless bank robberies excited the imagination of a despondent country. He eluded the lawmen of a half-dozen states and the growing power of the FBI, earning him the dubious honor of Public Enemy Number One and captivating Americans to the present day. His brief but significant career is vividly chronicled here in extraordinary detail, as is the entire outlaw era of Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, and Machine Gun Kelly. The author conducted hundreds of interviews; his research took him through thirty-four states, into the cells where Dillinger was confined, and into every bank he robbed. The Dillinger Days is the inside account of a desperate and determined war between the law and the lawless, a struggle that did not end until a unique set of circumstances led to Dillinger's bloody death outside a Chicago movie house.

A compelling standalone dark fantasy set in a gritty post-WWI Britain which has been overrun by the fae, from the award-winning author of Altered Carbon. The Great War was supposed to be the war to end all wars—and maybe it would have been, had an even greater, otherworldly foe not arisen to extinguish the conflict. Overnight, as guns blazed away in France and Flanders, village after village in the quiet British countryside were swallowed by the Forest. And within the Forest lurk the Huldu—an ancient fae race, monstrous in their inhumanity, who have decided that mankind’s ascendency over the world can endure no longer. Enter Duncan Silver. Scarred by the war, fueled by a rage deeper than the trenches in which he once fought, Duncan is determined to show the Huldu that the world is not theirs for the taking. Armed with a cut-down trench gun filled with iron shot and a deadly iron knife, Duncan will stop at nothing to return the children the Huldu have stolen from the arms of their families. No matter how many Huldu he may have to slaughter along the way. But when he is hired by a mother to return her four-year-old daughter, Miriam—taken by the Huldu six months past and replaced with a Changeling—all hell breaks loose. Miriam is a pawn in a much bigger game for dominance than Duncan ever expected, and several long-buried secrets from his past are about to be violently resurrected.

Investigates the military, political, and historical remifications of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, examining the unpreparedness of the United States, the cover-up following the disaster, and other important aspects of the attack and its effects.