5 History / Military eBooks

Brighter than a Thousand Suns
A Pictorial History of the World War II Years
Popular and the Political: Essays on Socialism in the 1980's
The Voyage of the Challenger
Great Mysteries of the 20th Century

Brighter than a Thousand Suns
Harvest Books | English | 1970 | ISBN: 0156141507 | 384 Pages | PDF | 28.7 MB
The story of the scientific research that led to the development of the first atomic bomb still constitutes one of the great dramas of our age. Based on interviews with the major participants and on official documents and transcripts, this is an account of the remarkable men and women who discovered that nuclear fission was possible and then became morally concerned about its implications. They were an iternational fraternity. freely exchanging the fruits of their research, until the beginnings of World War II, when a number of physicists were forced to flee Germany and neighboring countries. Several important German physicists were left behind for the duration of the war. How long would it take before Getmany developed an atom bomb? This crucial question was put to President Roosevelt. The facts about how he was persuaded to end the race to build a bomb and how scientists later failed to stop the use of the bomb are central to this compelling and horrifying narrative, of which perhaps no aspect is more fascinaring than the controversial case of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

A Pictorial History of the World War II Years
Main Street Books | English | 1985 | ISBN: 0385185537 | 319 Pages | PDF | 99.9 MB
Combines a basic history of World War II with more than four hundred captioned photographs, and features charts, maps, and a wealth of specific facts. From the deserts of North Africa to the frozen steppes of Russia, from Iwo Jima to Hiroshima, A Pictorial History of the World War II Years examines all the major military operations and campaigns from the air, sea, and land. Watch German tanks thunder across Poland during the infamous blitzkrieg; sit in the cockpit of Luftwaffe and RAF aircraft; experience the monumental sea battles in the South Pacific; share in the heroic efforts of resistance fighters across Europe; relive the bloody storming of the Normandy beaches on D-Day--and much more. Here are the political giants - Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill - captured both in public and in private. Here too are the mythic military men such as Eisenhower, Patton, MacArthur, Tojo, Montgomery, and Rommel. Perhaps most gripping of all are the photographs of anonymous soldiers in the field and innocent civilian victims trapped in the path of a brutal war. With its concise text and captions, and numerous line drawings and maps that document the tactics, strategies, and goals of both the Axis and the Allies, this is a book for anyone interested in the evolution of war, the power of photography, and the course of history in our age.

Popular and the Political: Essays on Socialism in the 1980's
English | 1981 | ISBN: 0710006276 | PDF | 251 Pages | 4.2 MB
The last year of the decade has, since the war, marked low points for the British left. In 1949, 1969 and 1979, one saw tired and compromised Labour governments trying, without success, to hang on to power; 1959 saw a massive electoral victory by the Conserva-tives.
The cycle of hope followed by disillusion has now swung around three times in thirty-five years and cannot be said to be diminish-ing. In 1949, there was at least some record of solid achievement in health care and social welfare. In 1969, a backdrop of a re-juvenated socialist movement could give promise of new ideas and fresh social forces entering British politics. In 1979, the most conservative of all post-war governments allowed many of the ob-jectives even of social democracy, such as full employment and ex-tending social services, to dribble away before going down before an onslaught based on an open appeal to individual greed.
This failure was all the more marked because of the election in 1974 of a Labour Party which had, in principle, a clearer strategic programme for advancing socialism than any previous Labour govern-ment. This should not be taken as a major compliment, since previous Labour administrations had almost no preconceived strategy. However, the policy of coupling overall economic planning to the development of genuine areas of working-class power via the use of compulsory planning agreements, the National Enterprise Board, and a range of increased trade union rights, whatever its defects, did at least begin to approach the central problem of British socialism; how to prise power away from an entrenched and complex system of capitalist control in the context of a highly developed framework of political democracy.

The Voyage of the Challenger
Doubleday | English | 1972 | ISBN: 0385053215 | 288 Pages | PDF | 53.4 MB
In 1872 HMS Challenger left Portsmouth on a voyage that was to take her round the world, eight times across the Equator, into the Antarctic ice, and over 68,000 nautical miles in a thousand days at sea. She was a three-masted corvette with auxiliary steam, and as well as a crew of 243 she carried a team of scientists led by Professor Wyville Thomson. The voyage of the Challenger was a pioneer expedition of immense importance. It was sponsored by the British Government and organized by the Royal Society in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, where the science of Oceanography was born. The ambitious aim of the voyage was to chart the depths, movement and content of the seas, to scour the oceans for marine life, for clues to climatic phenomena, and for minerals. The naturalists on board - Henry Moseley and John Murray - were observant recorders of life ashore as well as at sea, and the narratives and drawings of the naval officers, Lord George Campbell, Herbert Swire and Richard Channer, provide a sharp picture of three-and-a-half years afloat. Imagine an Australia in which Melbourne could stage an elegant nine-course dinner for Challenger's officers, while at Cape York aborigines lived in such a primitive state of culture that their only shelter, writes Moseley, was a palm leaf. In New Guinea the expedition encountered the opposition of savage cannibal tribes; in a newly awakened Japan they found all the delights of that amazing land; in Hawaii there was a climb into the active crater of Kilauea; in Tierra del Fuego a glimpse of a race soon to become extinct. Eric Linklater has distilled from such events as these a continuous and compelling narrative for the general reader, a book of adventure as well as discovery. He uses the personal journals to give an individual edge to the scientific triumph, and to convey a masterly immediacy to his readers. In 1872 the camera was a recent invention. A darkroom was installed on board the ship, and photographic plates were coated and exposed to bring back a unique record of the voyage. This new narrative is illustrated with photographs made from the original plates, and from the scientists' albums there are many other illustrations which have never before been published.

Great Mysteries of the 20th Century
Readers Digest | English | 2000 | ISBN: 0762102675 | 160 Pages | PDF | 29.5 MB
As the millennium draws to a close, The Eventful Century series presents the vast panorama of the last hundred years - a century that has witnessed the transition from horse-dravvn transport to space travel, and from tlie first telephones to tlie information superhighway.