“One hell of a book! The real stuff that proves the U.S. Marines are the greatest fighting men on earth!” Leon Uris Robert Leckie signed up for service with the United States Marines on January 5, 1942. Wake Island had fallen and America was still reeling from the tragedy of Pearl Harbor. This vivid and personal account of one marine’s journey through the course of the war in the Pacific in World War Two. Leckie provides vivid, and at times humorous, details of his training in South Carolina, through to being assigned to first terrifying duties as a fighting marine. He was thrust into the heat of battle at Guadalcanal before seeing action across many islands of the Pacific until he was eventually wounded and evacuated from the island of Peleliu. Yet this fascinating autobiography is not simply about Leckie’s fighting life over the duration of the war as it also records the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers, the adventures that he enjoyed during his time off service in Melbourne, Australia, along with the day to day life of a normal marine. “Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem. Robert Leckie’s theme is the purely human experience of war in the Pacific, written in the graceful imagery of a human being who — somehow — survived.” Tom Hanks This work is essential reading for anyone interested in uncovering the voice of a true marine who saw some of the bloodiest battles of World War Two. Along with E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleiu and Okinawa this book formed the basis for the HBO miniseries The Pacific. Robert Leckie was an American author and historian. His service with the 1st Marine Division in World War Two as a machine gunner and a scout greatly influenced his later work. Helmet for my Pillow was first published in 1957 and Leckie passed away in 2001.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific—the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom HanksIn The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation.An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division—3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic.Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man.“In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns

The definitive chronicle of the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II, Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy is now together in one boxed set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light\nFrom the War in North Africa to the Invasion of Normandy, the Liberation Trilogy recounts the hard fought battles that led to Allied victory in Second World War. Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author Rick Atkinson brings great drama and exquisite detail to the retelling of these battles and gives life to a cast of characters, from the Allied leaders to military rifleman in combat. His accomplishment is monumental: the Liberation Trilogy is the most vividly told, brilliantly researched World War II narrative to date.\nWINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Selected for the 2019 Commandant's Professional Reading List Updated with maps, photographs, and battlefield diagrams, this special fiftieth anniversary edition of the classic history of the Korean War is a dramatic and hard-hitting account of the conflict written from the perspective of those who fought it. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, it is based largely on the compelling personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. Unlike any other work on the Korean War, it provides both a clear panoramic overview and a sharply drawn "you were there" account of American troops in fierce combat against the North Korean and Chinese communist invaders. As Americans and North Koreans continue to face each other across the 38th Parallel, This Kind of War commemorates the past and offers vital lessons for the future.

“The greatest of our Civil War novels” (New York Times) reissued for a new generation As the United States prepares to commemorate the Civil War’s 150th anniversary, Plume reissues the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel widely regarded as the most powerful ever written about our nation’s bloodiest conflict. MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville tells the story of the notorious Confederate Prisoner of War camp, where fifty thousand Union soldiers were held captive—and fourteen thousand died—under inhumane conditions. This new edition will be widely read and talked about by Civil War buffs and readers of gripping historical fiction.

“My favorite historical novel . . . A superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant.”—James M. McPherson In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty were also the casualties of war. Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—the dramatic story of the battleground for America’s destiny. Praise for The Killer Angels “Remarkable . . . a book that changed my life . . . I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.”—Ken Burns “Shaara carries [the reader] swiftly and dramatically to a climax as exciting as if it were being heard for the first time.”—The Seattle Times“Utterly absorbing.”—Forbes

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines.From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

Currahee! A Screaming Eagle at Normandy. Donald R. Burgett is a real Screaming Eagle, who jumped with that famed division at Normandy and survived to tell the tale. His memoir vividly portrays the tragic chaos of war: the blood and sweat, the glory and tears of one of the greatest battles of all time. Currahee! (this was the battle cry and motto of his regiment) begins with jump training and explodes in drama as they are parachuted into Normandy with orders to take and hold the high ground behind the beaches. It contains unforgettable incidents. The author's almost dispassionate tone goes a long way toward explaining a particular set of psychological defenses which enabled these men to do their duty and-for some of them-to survive with their sanity intact. Currahee! is the only book on World War II that General Dwight D. Eisenhower ever endorsed, calling it "a fascinating tale of personal combat" that "portrays the courage, endurance, initiative and fighting qualities of an American soldier on a European battlefield of World War II." Currahee! was originally published to critical acclaim in 1967. Donald R. Burgett holds the title of being the first enlisted man to write and publish on the Airborne.

In 1975, James Jones—the American author whose novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line had made him the preeminent voice of the enlisted man in World War II—was chosen to write the text for an oversized coffee table book edited by former Yank magazine art director Art Weithas and featuring visual art from World War II. The book was a best seller, praised for both its images and for Jones’s text, but in subsequent decades the artwork made it impossible for the book to be reproduced in its original form, and it fell out of print and was forgotten. This edition of WWII makes available for the first time in more than twenty years Jones’s stunning text, his only extended nonfiction writing on the war that defined his generation. Moving chronologically and thematically through the complex history of the conflict, Jones interweaves his own vivid memories of soldiering in the Pacific—from the look on a Japanese fighter pilot’s face as he bombed Pearl Harbor, so close that Jones could see him smile and wave, to hitting the beach under fire in Guadalcanal—while always returning to resounding larger themes. Much of WWII can be read as a tribute to the commitment of American soldiers, but Jones also pulls no punches, bluntly chronicling resentment at the privilege of the officers, questionable strategic choices, wartime suffering, disorganization, the needless loss of life, and the brutal realization that a single soldier is ultimately nothing but a replaceable cog in a heartless machine. As the generation that fought and won World War II leaves the stage, James Jones’s book reminds us of what they accomplished—and what they sacrificed to do so.

Forgotten Soldier recounts the horror of World War II on the eastern front, as seen through the eyes of a teenaged German soldier. At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer’s war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery. As a member of the elite Gross Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov. Sajer's German footsoldier’s perspective makes The Forgotten Soldier a unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitor said "may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited." Now it has been handsomely republished containing fifty rare German combat photos of life and death at the eastern front. The photos of troops battling through snow, mud, burned villages, and rubble-strewn cities depict the hardships and destructiveness of war. Many are originally from the private collections of German soldiers and have never been published before. This volume is a deluxe edition of a true classic.

A biography of the two gifted Civil War commanders from a New York Times–bestselling author: “A great story . . . History at its best” (Publishers Weekly). Their names are forever linked in the history of the Civil War, but Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant could not have been more dissimilar. Lee came from a world of Southern gentility and aristocratic privilege while Grant had coarser, more common roots in the Midwest. As a young officer trained in the classic mold, Lee graduated from West Point at the top of his class and served with distinction in the Mexican–American War. Grant’s early military career was undistinguished and marred by rumors of drunkenness. As commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, Lee’s early victories demoralized the Union Army and cemented his reputation as a brilliant tactician. Meanwhile, Grant struggled mightily to reach the top of the Union command chain. His iron will eventually helped turn the tide of the war, however, and in April 1864, President Abraham Lincoln gave Grant command of all Union forces. A year later, he accepted Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Court House. With brilliance and deep feeling, New York Times–bestselling author Gene Smith brings the Civil War era to vivid life and tells the dramatic story of two remarkable men as they rise to glory and reckon with the bitter aftermath of the bloodiest conflict in American history. Never before have students of American history been treated to a more personal, comprehensive, and achingly human portrait of Lee and Grant.

The story of the author and his wife's two-month safari in East Africa in the 1950s. Ruark's philosophies are intertwined in the hunting stories to make unforgettable reading.

Gone are the days of simple-solid and softpoint-bullets for a mere dozen-and-a-half African calibers. The sheer number of products on the market today staggers the mind and bewilders even experienced hunters. Boddington presents his information in clearly explained, bite-size pieces that we can digest, and in the process he gives us a solid understanding of what works and what doesn't. Many writers proclaim their knowledge of African hunting, but few have the true in-depth experience that comes from thousands of days afield. Boddington's Safari Rifles II is a rare gem of a book, offering solid information based on vast experience and insight gathered over the last thirty years of hunting on the Dark Continent.

The popularity of rifles designed to take big game has never been greater. Terry Wieland, a widely recognized firearms expert, explores in detail the rifles and calibers that are drawing attention. This second edition covers what has changed in the field since the first edition was published-new calibers, new cartridges, new guns, new actions-and includes new material on action and barrel manufacture, tracing the production of a fine, custom-made, big-bore rifle.

2014 Reprint of 1948 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. John Howard 'Pondoro' Taylor (1904 - 1969) was a big-game hunter of Irish descent. In Africa he experimented extensively using different types of rifles and calibers, which made him an expert in big game rifles. He is credited with developing the 'Taylor KO Factor' and wrote several now classic books. As a professional ivory hunter with some thirty years of continuous living in the African bush, John Taylor used and tested all the various calibers of British, American and German rifles, and with them killed many species of big game found on the continent of Africa. Taylor's discussion on the practical application of ballistics includes doubles, magazines, and single-shots; the practical value of steel-jacketed bullets versus those covered with cupronickel; the faults of copper-tubed bullets; the actual effects of softpoint bullets with varying degrees of lead exposure; the necessity of modern bullets that will really stand up to the requirements when fired into heavy animals; and many other valuable tips and explanations about cartridges and rifles. Remains a classic work.

“Eminently readable, and more shotgun info than you can use in a lifetime.” —David E. Petzal, Deputy Editor, Field & Stream Magazine.Let expert Bob Brister offer you advice, instructions, and solutions to every situation a shotgunner might face. Based on years of tests, meticulous study of data, and a lifetime of experience, his advice will help any shooter make every shot count.A veritable encyclopedia of the shotgun for the modern shooter and outdoorsman, Shotgunning details the selection of guns, loads, and chokes; required leads (translated into “bird lengths” for easier shooting recognition); shot velocity and penetration; the effects of recoil on the shooter; wind and temperature effects on shotshells; and much more. Data analysis puts blithely held truths to the test. Myths are debunked, and Brister’s conclusions are supported with hundreds of photographs, lending Shotgunning an authority that many recent, worthwhile books on the subject cannot claim. Chapters include:\nShotgun Etiquette\nThe Pump-Action Gun\nWhy a Two-Barreled Gun\nThe Modern Autoloader\nHow to Make Your Gun Fit\nRecoil and Balance\nBarrels, Chokies, and Forcing Cones\nStock Answers\nThe Fine Art of Waterfowl Shooting\nUpland Gunning\nTrap and Skeet\nAnd much more!\n\nBrister brightly and boldly presents his readers with the science of shotgunning, but he never forgets the art that makes shooting a sport. Shotgunning is an elegant and educational mélange—a unique and invaluable guidebook that any shotgunner must own.Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for hunters and firearms enthusiasts. We publish books about shotguns, rifles, handguns, target shooting, gun collecting, self-defense, archery, ammunition, knives, gunsmithing, gun repair, and wilderness survival. We publish books on deer hunting, big game hunting, small game hunting, wing shooting, turkey hunting, deer stands, duck blinds, bowhunting, wing shooting, hunting dogs, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Covers rifle construction, custom stocks, ammunition, ballistics, shooting accuracy, big-game hunting, telescopic sights, and handloading

Bad cooking ruins more camping trips—America’s most popular outdoor vacation activity—than anything else except rain. The Great American Camping Cookbook offers the delectable remedy: a camp cook’s guide to the fresh, natural “comfort foods” of the good old days. Whether your camp is a civilized weekend cottage, a rustic hunting or fishing cabin, or a primitive canoeing or backpacking bivouac, this book can help anyone make meals as vibrant as the outdoors itself.Start the day with Wild Rice Pancakes or fresh-baked Cornmeal Blueberry Biscuits. Sit down to a classic shore lunch of Beer-Battered Smallmouth, Campfire Potatoes and Hush Puppies, or simple sorrel-stuffed trout. On rainy days, simmer up a pot of real Corn Chowder or Camp-Style Bean Soup. For memorable main courses, serve up a substantial Modernized Brunswick Stew, Blackened Yellow Perch, or Sautéed Walleye with wild rice and mushrooms. For side dishes, try fresh Camp-Baked Beans, spit-roasted Acorn Squash, or Sand-Baked Potatoes. Then savor a legendary Hot Buttered Rum or Camp Old-Fashioned as a nightcap.In addition to recipes, The Great American Camping Cookbook offers a wealth of easy-to-follow advice on making perfect camp coffee and camp breads, calculating food portions, and composing provisions lists to assure variety and avoid forgotten essentials. The colorful history of American camp food and cooking—from the Jamestown settlement, Lewis and Clark, and Daniel Boone to Ernest Hemingway and John McPhee—adds fascinating lore to this essential guide to eating well in the great outdoors.

The 40th anniversary edition of the classic Vietnam memoir―featured in the PBS documentary series The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick―with a new foreword by Kevin PowersIn March of 1965, Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed at Danang with the first ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history’s ugliest wars, he returned home―physically whole but emotionally wasted, his youthful idealism forever gone.A Rumor of War is far more than one soldier’s story. Upon its publication in 1977, it shattered America’s indifference to the fate of the men sent to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. In the years since then, it has become not only a basic text on the Vietnam War but also a renowned classic in the literature of wars throughout history and, as the author writes, of "the things men do in war and the things war does to them.""Heartbreaking, terrifying, and enraging. It belongs to the literature of men at war." ―Los Angeles Times Book Review