Mostrando resultados por narrador "Mark Sando" en Todas las categorías

In 1940, native West Texan Roy H. Elrod joined the Marine Corps. By the time his unit, the 8th Marine Regiment, went into the fight at Guadalcanal, he was commanding a platoon of 37 mm gunners. They endured Japanese attacks, malarial tropical weather, and starvation rations. His combat leadership earned him a Silver Star and a battlefield promotion. Based on more than 50 hours of interviews, this book is a view of the war from the perspective of a young Marine infantry officer, a job that had an extremely low survival potential.

We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care? Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970.

In 1944 and 1945, Tom Faulkner was a B-24 pilot flying out of San Giovanni airfield in Italy as a member of the 15th Air Force of the US Army Air Forces. Only 19 years old when he completed his 28th and last mission, Tom was one of the youngest bomber pilots to serve in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. Between September 1944 and the end of February 1945, he flew against targets in Hungary, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Yugoslavia.

Midway, the most famous naval battle in American history, has been the subject of many excellent books. However, none satisfactorily explain why the Japanese lost that battle, given their overwhelming advantage in firepower. While no book may ever silence debate on the subject, Midway Inquest answers the central mystery of the battle.

How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization.

The Lord of the Rings is intended to be applicable to the real world of relationships, religion, pleasure, pain, and politics. Tolkien himself said that his grand tale of wizards, orcs, hobbits, and elves was aimed at truth and good morals in the actual world.

Near the end of the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott and fellow moonwalker James Irwin conducted a secret ceremony unsanctioned by NASA: they placed on the lunar soil a small tin figurine called The Fallen Astronaut, along with a plaque bearing a list of names. By telling the stories of those sixteen astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the quest to reach the moon between 1962 and 1972, this book enriches the saga of humankind's greatest scientific undertaking, Project Apollo, and conveys the human cost of the space race.

Highlighting men and women across the globe who have dedicated themselves to pushing the limits of space exploration, this book surveys the programs, technological advancements, medical equipment, and automated systems that have made space travel possible. Beginning with the invention of balloons that lifted early explorers into the stratosphere, Ted Spitzmiller describes how humans first came to employ lifting gasses such as hydrogen and helium.

Since 1985, more than 500 overweight teenagers have come to Camp Wašíču looking to lose weight, gain self-confidence, and turn their lives around. Phillip McCracken arrives, weighing in at almost 400 pounds; but the baggage he carries from the past affects him much more deeply than the numbers of the scale. When a homicidal maniac hell-bent on revenge attacks, Phillip will be forced to either find the courage to save the people around him or fall victim to his own self-doubt...and possibly a machete.

If, as Wallace Stegner said, the national park is “the best idea we ever had,” the rail-trail is certainly a close runner-up. Part transportation corridor, part park, the rail-trail has revolutionized the way America creates high-quality, car-free pathways for bicyclists, runners, walkers, equestrians, and more.

Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of color.

During the period between about AD 1000 and 1425, a thriving Native American culture known to archaeologists as the Middle Cumberland Mississippian lived along the Cumberland River and its tributaries in today’s Davidson County. This book is the first public-facing effort by legitimate archaeologists to articulate the history of what happened here before Nashville happened.

Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the US Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields.

“Mr. Kendall, in the past few months there have been a number of doctors who have mysteriously disappeared, or whose deaths were either alleged to be accidents, or were suicides, or they were actually murdered.” Kendall made a mental note to find out about these "other doctors". “A number of doctors you said. How many are we talking about?” Mrs. Eaton thought for a few moments. “To my knowledge there have been at least eight cases in the past six months. There may be a whole lot more that I know nothing about.”

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb in downtown Oslo, Norway. He didn't stop there, traveling several hours from the city to ambush a youth camp while the rest of Norway was distracted by his earlier attack. The evidence suggests a startling truth: that this was the work of one man, pursuing a mission he was convinced was just. As George Michael demonstrates in Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance, they are not isolated cases. Rather, they represent the new way warfare will be conducted in the twenty-first century.

Tom Kendall, a down-to-earth private detective, is asked to investigate the death of a young newspaper reporter. The evidence shows quite clearly that it was an accident: a simple, dreadful accident. That is the finding of the coroner and the local police. Furthermore, there were two witnesses. They saw the whole thing. But was it an accident, or was it something more sinister? Against a backdrop of a viral epidemic slowly spreading from Central America, a simple case soon places Kendall up against one of the largest drug companies in the country.

Among the operations known as Plan Bodyguard, the deception devised to cover the Allies’ Normandy landing, was the little known but critical Plan Zeppelin, the largest and most complex of the Bodyguard plans. Zeppelin, in conjunction with the Mediterranean Strategy, succeeded in pinning down sixty German divisions from southern France to the Balkans in time for D-Day. This was the work of “A” Force, Britain’s only military organization tasked with carrying out both strategic and tactical deception in World War II.

At midnight on January 24, 1954, the last step was taken in the armistice to end the war in Korea. That night, the neutral Indian guards who had overseen the prisoner of war repatriation process abandoned their posts, leaving their charges to make their own decisions. The vast majority of men allowed to choose a new nation were Chinese and North Koreans who elected the path of freedom. There were smaller groups hoping that the communist bloc would give them a better life.

Engaging the Evil Empire dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals.

Since the late '70s, histories of rock music have either ignored or marginalized the progressive rock era. In part, this has occurred because rock music criticism has taken an almost completely sociological turn, with little or no interest in musical form itself. In Listening to the Future, Bill Martin argues that it is a musical and political mistake to ignore this period of tremendous creativity, a period that still finds resonance in rock music today.