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  Faces of the Confederacy - An...

  Ronald S. Coddington

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  “Extensive research, fascinating characters . . . The author has done an admirable job of literally placing a face on the ordinary Confederate soldier.” —The Journal of Southern History 
   
  “The history of the Civil War is the stories of its soldiers,” writes Ronald S. Coddington in the preface to Faces of the Confederacy. This book tells the stories of seventy-seven Southern soldiers—young farm boys, wealthy plantation owners, intellectual elites, uneducated poor—who posed for photographic portraits, cartes de visite, to leave with family, friends, and sweethearts before going off to war. Coddington, a passionate collector of Civil War-era photography, conducted a monumental search for these previously unpublished portrait cards, then unearthed the personal stories of their subjects, putting a human face on a war rife with inhuman atrocities. 
   
  The Civil War took the lives of twenty-two of every hundred men who served. Coddington follows the exhausted survivors as they return home to occupied cities and towns, ravaged farmlands, a destabilized economy, and a social order in the midst of upheaval. This book is a haunting and moving tribute to those brave men. 
   
  Like its companion volume, Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories, this book offers readers a unique perspective on the war and contributes to a better understanding of the role of the common soldier. 
   
  “With his meticulous research and a journalist’s eye for good stories, Ron Coddington has brought new life to Civil War photographic portraits of obscure and long-forgotten Confederates whose wartime experiences might otherwise have been lost to history.” —Bob Zeller, cofounder and president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography

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  American Icon George Washington...

  George Washington

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  "It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”“It is better to be alone than in bad company.”“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”“My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw." George WashingtonGeorge Washington was America’s foremost political leader, military general, statesman and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. He commanded Patriot forces in the new nation's vital American Revolutionary War and led them to victory over the British. Washington also presided at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which established the new federal government. For his manifold leadership during the American Revolution, for all of this and more he has been called the "Father of His Country". This is his story.GEOFFREY GIULIANO is the author of thirty two internationally best selling books published by the biggest publishers in the world from 1984 to today. He is also an acclaimed Hollywood film actor, director, designer, and is the voice on over 500 popular audiobooks.Series producer Avalon Giuliano in New York Produced by Alex Franchi in Milan Edited and mixed by Macc Kay in BangkokICON intern Eden Garret GiulianoMusic by Audionautix

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  Invasion Diary

  Richard Tregaskis

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  The Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943 were bloody and pivotal, securing the Mediterranean, capitalizing on the overthrow of Mussolini, and pinning down German troops that could have been used on the Russian Front or in France after D-Day. The men who made the Allied victories in Sicily and Italy possible-soldiers and officers, bombardiers and drivers, doctors and generals-are honored and remembered in these pages by famed war correspondent Richard Tregaskis. His experiences take him from bomb-bay doors over Rome, to the chaotic front lines in Italy, where he nearly died from a shrapnel wound. The uniquely American features of the Second World War are unforgettably inscribed through the pen of Richard Tregaskis.

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  Holly's Hell - Seven Years in a...

  Holly Deane-Johns

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  Holly's Hell is a remarkable story of trauma and redemption. 
  At the age of 29, Holly Deane-Johns was found guilty of attempting to post 15 grams of heroin to Australia from Bangkok. 
  She narrowly avoided the death penalty but received a 31-year prison sentence. 
  Holly spent seven years in a notorious Thai women’s prison, where staying alive was a daily struggle. 
  She learnt Thai and formed enduring friendships with fellow inmates, but faced heartbreak and anguish when some did not survive. 
  Holly overcame her drug addiction for good while she was in prison. 
  After a lengthy battle to obtain a prison transfer, Holly was transferred to a Perth prison in 2007, where she remained for another five years. 
  After her release in 2012, Holly was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. 
  This is the first time she has shared an in-depth account of her life with the world, and it begins with a childhood home that turned violent and dysfunctional.

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  Lek - The Beginning - The Story...

  Owen Jones

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  The Behind The Smile Series is the story of Lek, a bar girl in Pattaya, Thailand. Lek was born the eldest child of four in a typical rice farming family in the northern rice belt of Thailand. A catastrophe occurred out of the blue one day – her father died young with huge debts that the family knew nothing about. Lek was just twenty years of age, and the only one who could prevent the foreclosure of the family farm, and allow her younger sister and two brothers to continue their education. However, the only way she knew how was to go to work in her cousin’s bar in Pattaya. 
  Can a Pattaya bar girl ever go back to being a regular girlfriend or wife? 
  Behind The Smile is a look into one part of Thailand, a country known around the world as `The Land of Smiles`. 
  Lek - The Beginning 
  At twenty-one years of age, Lek, an ordinary, contemporary, farm girl from the northern Thai Rice belt, had to go to Pattaya to work in the leisure industry to help her widowed mother pay off the mortgage to save the farm from foreclosure and keep her siblings in school. This book, The Beginning, shows what her life was like before she had to leave her small, hard-working, but happy village and the only people she had ever known. It depicts the events that made her happy and those that saddened her in her early life from living with her grandmother to surviving with her husband, Tom. At the very last moment, some friends step up to make Lek`s transition to life in Thailand`s number one sex city just that little bit easier.

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  Staying Alive - A collection of...

  Jon Steele

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  John Steele left his family and home at the tender age of 16 to join the Royal Navy. In a select branch of only 200 he subsequently qualified as the youngest Clearance Diver at that time. He then moved on to a life as a commercial oilfield diver and for 22 years worked in the unforgiving depths of the North Sea and Persian Gulf. In 2004 a new industry was opening up. After an intense re-education he secured a job with one of the largest private security companies working with the reconstruction of Iraq. This involved explosive and gunshot filled daily runs deep into the heart of the Mosul and Baghdad red zones at the height of the post war troubles. 
  Security tasks followed in Africa involving Anti-Piracy duties aboard ships off the dangerous Somali coastline. An advisory position was then offered in the Swamp Area around Brass Island in Bayelsa State working with the Nigerian military’s Joint Task Force. 
  He now has a gold prospecting operation 230km above the Arctic Circle in a beautiful but wild part of Finland. He successfully obtained his own gold claim in 2019 which was aptly named “Kaikki Peliin”, or in English, “ALL IN”. 
  As I U-turned, my wheels slipped off the tarmac into the gooey mud and the vehicle hesitated. I slipped into four-wheel drive and gassed it. My vehicle took the brunt of incoming PKM light machine gun and AK47 fire from insurgents hidden in the fruit and veg stand and sand berms. The rounds impacting the vehicle’s armour sounded like sledgehammers and eventually at least one found a weak spot and entered the engine bay. I could feel the engine dying as I desperately tried to move away from the junction. A few seconds later I ended up facing away from the contact point with a dead engine stuck in first gear. I was holding the key down and chugging up the road with flat tyres and moving on the batteries and starter motor!  
  We came to a grinding halt in the middle of the kill zone…

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