Military Disasters

When she first went to sea in April of 1961, the US nuclear submarine Thresher was the most advanced submarine at sea, built specifically to hunt and kill Soviet submarines. In The Death of the USS Thresher, renowned naval and intelligence consultant Norman Polmar recounts the dramatic circumstances surrounding her implosion, which killed all 129 men onboard in history's first loss of a nuclear submarine.

In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor’easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril, setting the stage for one of the most heroic rescue stories ever lived. On February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, were in the same horrifying predicament. Built with “dirty steel,” and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split in two, leaving the dozens of men on board utterly at the Atlantic’s mercy.

To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias - communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia - they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant.

A decade after the Cold War, a violent explosion sent the Russian submarine Kursk to the bottom of the Barents Sea. The Russians claimed an outdated torpedo caused the incident and refused help from the West while 23 survivors died before they could be rescued. When Russian naval officers revealed evidence of a collision with a US spy sub, Vladimir Putin squelched the allegations and fired the officers. In Spies of the Deep, W. Craig Reed shatters the lies told by both Russian and US officials and exposes several shocking truths.

At the beginning of 1940, Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. Despite Hitler's grand ambitions and the successful early stages of the Third Reich's advances into Europe, Frank McDonough convincingly argues that Germany was only ever a middle-ranking power and never truly stood a chance against the combined forces of the Allies.

The year is 2026. The US military has a new weapon in its arsenal: an intelligent life-form so versatile that it can not only create a new generation of weapons but can become a weapon itself - entering a host’s body to manipulate (or kill) them. Admiral James Curtiss is tasked with deploying the new weapons, first in Cuba, then Venezuela, then China. But the news of the military’s breakthrough has gotten out and there are menacing forces trying to steal it. What’s more, a single man has somehow harnessed the new power and has become something more than human - godlike.

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite many words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with Road to Disaster. Historian Brian VanDeMark draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson.

Taking Love and Law Seriously Adam Reynolds has earned a solid reputation as a K9 handler for the Army. He and his partner, Valor, have become experts in searching for bombs, so when he is offered the chance to train at the elite, Disaster City Search and Rescue facility, he jumps at the chance. What he doesn’t expect is to fall for one of the female instructors. Clara Burnette is a decorated K9 instructor at Disaster City Search and Rescue. As a woman in a mostly male-dominated profession, she knows it’s never a good idea to get involved with a fellow cop. The problem is, she can’t ...

Evasive maneuvers – break hard right! Ryan ‘Reaper’ Merrick had a good reason to jump at the offer of a fake relationship as the beautiful stranger suggested. This would be an easy way to keep a crazy matchmaker off his back. All of his friends were happily married, so they assumed he should be. Fine. Whatever. Besides, being married for thirty days was nothing, wasn’t it? Caution! Grab the handles and punch out! Sophie Lane inherited the bed-and-breakfast, but only if she was married. She had to have a husband by Friday, or the family estate would be liquidated. The idea of losing ...

Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement reveals all of the eye-opening details of Clausen's investigation and is a damning account of massive intelligence failure. To this day, the story surrounding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stokes controversy and conspiracy theories. This book provides conclusive evidence that shows how the US military missed so many signals and how it could have avoided the events of that fateful day.

Across the world, the United States recalls troops to combat civil unrest after the biggest economic meltdown in history. Marine Sergeant Ronaldo Salvatore’s platoon comes home to a powder keg that could ignite a civil war. While some see the coming collapse as the end, others see opportunity. Fleeing Naples after rival crime lords decimated his family, Don Antonio Moretti settles in Los Angeles to rebuild his criminal empire. But he is far from alone in his ambitions.

A new fire rescue officer needing to prove his place on the team, a model struggling to make a career, and a fire that brings the high school loner back into the life of his secret crush. Clark Voclain is a a skilled fire rescue officer and after finishing training at the Disaster City Search and Rescue Academy, he and his K9 partner are offered a permanent position. When they're assigned to help with a structure fire at the largest mall in all of Texas, he's surprised to find out that his high school crush is reported missing in the fire. Roselyn Lewis just got the biggest modeling gig of ...

In the spring of 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the 19th century.

The world's worst air disaster happened more than 40 years ago on a remote Atlantic Ocean island, when two fully loaded 747 passenger jets collided after a horrendous series of human errors. One of the jets, KLM Flight 4805, was traveling more than 150 miles an hour and was within seconds of lifting off when it crashed into Pan Am Flight 1736 taxiing in its path. The loss of lives was staggering - 583 dead. The crash happened after a lengthy series of major and minor human errors. In the intervening years, has aviation advanced to the point that such a disaster can't happen again?

In the best-selling tradition of Indianapolis and In Harm’s Way comes a “captivating...gripping” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) account of the USS Plunkett - a US Navy destroyer that sustained the most harrowing attack on any Navy ship by the Germans during World War II, later made famous by John Ford and Herman Wouk.

A former FBI K9 handler, his childhood best friend who’s now a state senator, and a series of bombs threatening to tear the state capital apart. Amanda Winslow aspires to change the world through politics. She spent the past sixteen years working her way up to the position of state senator, no easy task for a low-income, born and bred, Texan girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Encouraging her along the way is her best friend, Jesse Dixon, who spent years traveling all over the country, first with the FBI, and then with the elite Disaster City Search and Rescue team, combating domestic...

A joyful Noel… Levi Edwards grumpily donned the Santa suit, going undercover to take down the notorious drug lord that the department had been chasing for almost two years. This was all a perfect setup, a chance to slip in unnoticed, infiltrate the upper echelon, with no one asking questions. After all, who would ever suspect that the jolly ol’ elf was leading the covert sting operation? And one angry elf… Hope Espinoza couldn’t believe she was being coerced into being an elf at the corporate Christmas party. The obnoxious costume was over the top and not exactly how she wanted to ...

A minor seismic disturbance in a remote section of the Pacific causes barely a ripple of concern for Kai Tanaka, acting director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu. But when an airliner en route from LA to Sydney vanishes in the same location, Kai is the first to realize that a mysterious explosion has unleashed a series of massive waves destined to obliterate Hawaii. In just one hour, Kai will lose all he has ever known - including his wife and daughter - unless he can save them from nature's most destructive force.

The Sentinels narrowly escaped the collapsing edge of the Divide. They have mustered a few other surviving Sentinels, but with no engines they have no way to leave the edge of the universe before they starve. Adequin Rake has gathered a team to find the materials they'll need to get everyone out. To do that they're going to need new allies and evade a ruthless enemy. Some of them will not survive.

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry....