Washoe County Library System

Born to a distinguished family steeped in military tradition, raised on stories of wartime and ancestral heroes, Anthony Loyd longed to experience war from the front lines?so he left England at the age of twenty-six to document the conflict in Bosnia. For the following three years he witnessed the killings of one of the most callous and chaotic clashes on European soil, in the midst of a lethal struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims....

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. Killing the Rising Sun takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made...

Reviews the life and battles of General George S. Patton, a West Point graduate who led American troops to key victories in both World Wars.

Explores the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, describing how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been used in the service of war, from early celestial navigation to satellite-enabled warfare.

Describes how the Enlightenment and the French Revolution led to the first total war in history during the age of Napoleon, when embodiments of modern-day warfare such as conscription, guerrilla warfare, and unconditional surrender made their first appearance.

"A psychologically gripping descent into the eerie realm of drone warfare, led by one pilot's risky quest to expose its darkest secrets. As an F-16 fighter pilot, Darwin Cole was a family man on top of his world. Now he's a washout-drunk and alone in a trailer in the Nevada desert, and haunted by what he saw on the display of the Predator drone he "piloted," especially by the memory of an Afghan child running for her life. He reluctantly teams up...

Since its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has grown to become the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science research and development agency. Created by President Eisenhower to prevent another Sputnik, and to focus primarily on defensive programs against nuclear weapons, the agency--and its imagination and scope--has expanded enormously with each passing year....

Alan Axelrod identifies 18 smaller wars that led to great changes in history, from the Afghan Civil War that precipitated the rise of the Taliban history, from the Afghan Civil War that precipitated the rise of the to the Algerine War in 1815, seen as the first war on terror, to King Philip's War in 1675 that, in proportion to the population at the time, was the costliest war in American history and changed the colonies forever. Axelrod takes a fascinating...