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  Exteriors

  Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie

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  In Exteriors, Annie Ernaux concentrates not on the essential details of a relationship with a family member or lover as before but on ephemeral encounters within the larger circle of one's environment and the hundreds of strangers who inhabit it. Here, she captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is, in many ways, the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books, the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, the first in which she is able to leave her past behind.

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  Light-Horse Harry Lee and Robert...

  Charles River Editors

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  Aside from George Washington, many Americans are likely able to name just as many foreign generals on the rebel side as American generals. While names like Lafayette, Pulaski, Kościuszko, and Baron von Steuben are quickly associated with the Revolution, American officers like Nathanael Greene, Anthony Wayne, Horatio Gates, Henry Knox, and Light-Horse Harry Lee are often overlooked. Over 200 years later, Lee is best remembered not for his military or political service, but for being Robert E. Lee’s father, and all the attendant controversy that comes with his son’s legacy. This is unfortunate, given that he was one of the most distinguished individuals of the age. 
  With the exception of George Washington, perhaps the most famous general in American history is Light-Horse Harry’s son, despite the fact Robert E. Lee led the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia against the Union in the Civil War. Lee was imbued with a strong sense of honor and duty from the beginning, and as a top graduate of West Point, Lee had distinguished himself so well before the Civil War that President Lincoln asked him to command the entire Union Army. Lee famously declined, serving his home state of Virginia instead after it seceded. 
  Lee is remembered today for constantly defeating the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the Eastern theater from 1862-1865, considerably frustrating Lincoln and his generals. His leadership of his army led to him being deified after the war by some of his former subordinates, especially Virginians, and he came to personify the Lost Cause’s ideal Southern soldier. His reputation was secured in the decades after the war as a general who brilliantly led his men to amazing victories against all odds.

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  Hard Border

  Darach MacDonald

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  In his travelogue of the abandoned 50-mile route along the Ulster Canal, Darach MacDonald presents a close-up narrative history of Ireland. On his journey through five of Ulster's nine counties, he looks at the confounding realities and identities brought to the boil by history, geography, politics and faith. He traces the region's pivotal role in the story of Ireland; the facts and anomalies of an arbitrary partition, the impact on local communities, especially among minorities marooned on the 'wrong side', as well as uplifting efforts to forge new links and aid the recovery from trauma.Through travelogues, journals, tales and poetry, he examines how the border and its communities have been portrayed through the decades. Above all, these are the stories of tightly knit communities straddling an historically contested line while struggling for survival and recognition in its liminal shadows.

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  The Life of Otho

  Plutarch, Bernadotte Perrin

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  Plutarch picks some of the most interesting Greek politicians and notable figures to write about in his Parallel Lives series, and Otho does not disappoint. From his beginning as an underling of famous emperor Nero, he loses his wife to him and is sent away to govern a town. After Nero, Otho begins to plot his overtaking of the throne. But when he finally gets it – and manages to lose over 40,000 men in battle – his ending is a little less noble.  

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  Daring Young Men - The Heroism...

  Richard Reeves

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  The Second World War had been over for three years when pilots, navigators, and air traffic controllers all over America were recalled to active duty to rescue Berlin. They were there within days and weeks, flying tired planes filled with food, coal, medicine, and mail. Many had bombed the place to rubble in 1944 and 1945. Now they and the British airmen were bringing it survival. Drawing on hundreds of interviews in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, bestselling author Richard Reeves tells the stories of these civilian airmen, the successors to Stephen Ambrose's "Civilian Soldiers," ordinary boys called to extraordinary tasks. 
   
  Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had ordered Berlin blockaded, betting that the Americans, the British, and the French would abandon the city. Many of President Truman's advisers wanted to retreat; others wanted to risk war with the USSR. Truman ordered the Berlin Airlift, neither retreat nor confrontation. It ended only when West Germany was established by the three powers and NATO was born. The Soviets did the backing down. Led by Generals Lucius Clay and Curtis LeMay, the first battle in the Cold War was won. The young men came home again, some of them trying to remember where they had left their cars.

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  Forty-Seven Days - How...

  Mitchell Yockelson

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  The Battle of the Meuse-Argonne stands as the deadliest clash in American history: More than a million untested American soldiers went up against a better-trained and  more experienced German army, costing more than twenty-six thousand deaths and leaving nearly a hundred thousand wounded. Yet in forty-seven days of intense combat, those Americans pushed back the enemy and forced the Germans to surrender, bringing the First World War to an end—a feat the British and the French had not achieved after more than three years of fighting. 
   
   
    
  In Forty-Seven Days, historian Mitchell Yockelson tells how General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing's exemplary leadership led to the unlikeliest of victories. Appointed commander of the American Expeditionary Forces by President Wilson, Pershing personally took command of the U.S. First Army until supplies ran low and the fighting ground to a stalemate. Refusing to admit defeat, Pershing stepped aside and placed gutsy Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett in charge. While Pershing retained command, Liggett reorganized his new unit, resting and resupplying his men, while instilling a confidence in the doughboys that drove them out of the trenches and across no-man's-land.

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