"The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact,...

"When America entered World War II in 1941, [it] faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry...

"Berlin, September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war. One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer and anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot, charting his relationship with his agent, friend, and sometimes lover, an Irishman named Frank Pike. In De Groot's narrative, Pike is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison...

The author of Storm Clouds Over the Pacific, 1931—1941 chronicles Japan's dramatic reversal of fortune as Allied forces gained advantage during WWII. In early 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were advancing on all fronts, humiliating Allied forces throughout the Pacific. In a matter of months, Japan had conquered an area larger than Hitler's empire at its apex. Hawaiians and Australians feared a future under Hirohito. The fate of half of...

Spanning the sweep of the twentieth century, We Must Be Brave explores the fierce love that we feel for our children and the power of that love to endure. Beyond distance, beyond time, beyond life itself. "This stirring debut will work its way indelibly into your heart." --Georgia Hunter, author of We Were the Lucky Ones One woman. One little girl. The war that changed everything. December 1940. In the disorderly evacuation of Southampton, England,...

After the unprecedented destruction of the Great War, the world longed for a lasting peace. The victors, however, valued vengeance even more than stability and demanded a massive indemnity from Germany in order to keep it from rearming. The results, as eminent historian Norman Stone describes in this authoritative history, were disastrous. In World War Two, Stone provides a remarkably concise account of the deadliest war of human history, showing...

"1939. As the wife of the King George VI and the mother of the future queen, Elizabeth--"the queen mother"--shows a warm, smiling face to the world. But it's no surprise that Hitler himself calls her the "Most Dangerous Woman in Europe." For behind that soft voice and kindly demeanor is a will of steel. Two years earlier, George was thrust onto the throne when his brother Edward abdicated, determined to marry his divorced, American mistress Mrs. Simpson....

"1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents in the amid the horrors of the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, Poland, during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her mother are forced to seek refuge in the sewers beneath the city. Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. While on an errand in the market, she...

"Sisters Vera and Marya were brought up as good Soviets: obedient despite hardships of poverty and tragedy, committed to communist ideals, and loyal to Stalin. Several years after fighting on the Eastern front, both women find themselves deep in the mire of conflicts shaping a new world order in 1947 Berlin. When Marya, an interpreter, gets entangled in Vera's cryptic web of deceit and betrayal, she must make desperate choices to survive - and protect...

Tells the true story of a British soldier who was held in a POW labor camp in the summer of 1944 and willingly smuggled himself into the Buna-Monowitz concentration camp--known as Auschwitz III--to witness firsthand the cruelty there.