"Their stories, however, also reflect experiences that are universal to all veterans: the lasting bonds created among fellow soldiers; the shock of entering combat for the first time; the sense of loss from seeing friends killed or wounded. The veterans have different opinions about the necessity of war, but they agree that war is not a glorious adventure. It's a hellhole.
The game begins again in this gripping follow-up to “exciting, clever” (Booklist) The Gauntlet that’s a futuristic Middle Eastern Zathura meets Ready Player One! Four years after the events of The Gauntlet, the evil game Architect is back with a new partner-in-crime—The MasterMind—and the pair aim to get revenge on the Mirza clan. Together, they’ve rebuilt Paheli into a slick, mind-bending world with floating skyscrapers, flying rickshaws run by robots, and a digital funicular rail that doesn’t always take you exactly where you want to go. Twelve-year-old Ahmad Mirza struggles to make friends at his new middle school, but when he’s paired with his classmate Winnie for a project, he is determined to impress her and make his very first friend. At home while they’re hard at work, a gift from big sister Farah—who is away at her first year in college—arrives. It’s a high-tech game called The Battle of Blood and Iron, a cross between a video game and board game, complete with virtual reality goggles. He thinks his sister has solved his friend problem—all kids love games. He convinces Winnie to play, but as soon as they unbox the game, time freezes all over New York City. With time standing still and people frozen, all of humankind is at stake as Ahmad and Winnie face off with the MasterMind and the Architect, hoping to beat them at their own game before the evil plotters expand Paheli and take over the entire world.
Presents the twenty most crucial battles of all time, explaining how each conflict represents a historical epoch that triggered profound transformations and significantly shaped the development of the modern world.
A single day in the heat of armed conflict can shape the future of the world. Throughout history, individual battles have inspired the birth of nations, the devastation of cultures and the triumph of revolutions. Yet while some battles rise up as the cornerstones of history, others fade in our cultural memory, forgotten as minor skirmishes. Why is this so? What makes a battle "important"? Celebrated veteran and military expert Michael Lee Lanning offers a provocative response with The Battle 100: The Stories Behind History's Most Influential Battles. Lanning ranks history's 100 greatest battles according to their influence, both immediate and long-term. Thought-provoking and controversial, Lanning's rankings take us to the heart of the battles and reveal their true greatness.
This book presents the statistics, tactics, purpose and outcome of over 500 major land battles over 3000 years of warfare. Each entry follows a standard tabular lay out for easy usage. There are appendices on key commanders a nd first use of weapons. '
The historian and founder of the Anglo-Zulu War Historical Society presents his groundbreaking account of the Battle of Isandlwana. The story of the British Army’s defeat at Iswandlwana in 1879 has been much written about, but never with the detail and insight revealed by the research of Dr. Adrian Greaves. In reconstructing the dramatic and fateful events, Greaves draws on newly discovered letters, diaries and papers of survivors and other contemporaries. These include the contemporary writings of central figures such as Henry Harford, Lt Henry Carling of the Royal Artillery, August Hammar and young British nurse Janet Wells. These historical documents, coupled with Greaves’s own detailed knowledge of Zululand, enable him to paint the most accurate picture yet of this cataclysmic battle that so shamed the British establishment. We learn for the first time of the complex Zulu decoy, the attempt to blame Colonel Durnford for the defeat. Greaves uncovers evidence of another “Fugitives’ Trail” escape route taken by battle survivors, as well as the identity of previously unknown escorts for Lieutenants Coghill and Melville, both awarded Victoria Crosses for trying to save the Colors.
Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lackedtriumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020) - conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in"irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure - victory and defeat - in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipatedinsurgencies, and strategic stalemate.War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold incommon as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.
A trio of friends from New York City find themselves trapped inside a mechanical board game that they must dismantle in order to save themselves and generations of other children in this action-packed debut that’s a steampunk Jumanji with a Middle Eastern flair. Nothing can prepare you for The Gauntlet… It didn’t look dangerous, exactly. When twelve-year-old Farah first laid eyes on the old-fashioned board game, she thought it looked…elegant. It is made of wood, etched with exquisite images—a palace with domes and turrets, lattice-work windows that cast eerie shadows, a large spider—and at the very center of its cover, in broad letters, is written: The Gauntlet of Blood and Sand. The Gauntlet is more than a game, though. It is the most ancient, the most dangerous kind of magic. It holds worlds inside worlds. And it takes players as prisoners.
