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History and Current Events May 2025 |
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The fate of the generals : MacArthur, Wainwright, and the epic battle for the Philippines
by Jonathan Horn
"For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forcedhim to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing even when it meant becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese. In The Fate of the Generals, bestselling author Jonathan Horn brings together the story of two men who won the same medal but found honor on very different paths. MacArthur's journey would require a daring escape with his wife and young child to Australia and then years of fighting over the thousands of miles needed to make it back to the Philippines, where he would fulfill his famous vow only to see the city he called home burn. Wainwright's journey would take him from the Philippines to Taiwan and Manchuria as his captors tortured him in prisons and left him to wonder whether his countrymen would ever understand the choice he had made to surrender for the sake of his men. A story of war made personal based on meticulous research into letters and diaries including boxes of previously unexplored papers, The Fate of the Generals is a vivid account that raises timely questions about how we define honor and how we choose our heroes, and is destined to become a classic of World War II history"
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Looking at women looking at war : a war and justice diary
by Viktoriëiìa Amelina
A novelist and mother when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the author became a war crimes researcher, chronicling the women of the resistance, documenting the war until dying at 37 in the Donetsk region from a Russian cruise missile. Illustrations.
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America, Amâerica : a new history of the New World
by Greg Grandin
This sweeping history of the Western Hemisphere from a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian re-examines the intertwined destinies of North and South America, challenging traditional narratives and revealing a complex and dynamic relationship shaped by conflict, cooperation and mutual influence. Illustrations. Maps.
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Money, Lies, and God : Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
by Katherine Stewart
An acclaimed author takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, backroom strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, providing a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the United States, the“engine of unreason” roiling American culture and politics.
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Fight : inside the wildest battle for the White House
by Jonathan Allen
"The authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Shattered provide a revelatory, inside look at the Biden, Harris, and Trump camps during the 2024 battle for the White House, arguably the most consequential contest in American history. The ride was so wild that it forced a sitting president to drop his re-election bid, a once and future president to survive felony convictions and a would-be assassin's bullet, and a vice president, unexpectedly thrust into the arena, to mount an unprecedented 107-day campaign to lead the free world. Fight is the backstage story of bloodsport politics in its rawest form--the clawing, backstabbing, and rabble-rousing that drove Donald Trump into the White House and Democrats into the wilderness. At every turn, the combatants went for the jugular, whether they were facing down rivals in the other party or their own. Bestselling authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes give readers their first graphic view of the characters, their motivations, and their innermost thoughts as they battled to claim the ultimate prize and define a political era. Based on real-time interviews with more than 150 insiders--from the Trump, Harris, and Biden inner circles, as well as party leaders and operatives--Fight delivers the vivid and stunning tale of an election unlike any other"
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Waste wars : the afterlife of your trash
by Alexander Clapp
"An investigative account that exposes the hidden realities of the multibillion-dollar global garbage trade, revealing how waste is smuggled and sold across continents, often with dire consequences for vulnerable communities"
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The killing fields of East New York : the first subprime mortgage scandal, a white-collar crime spree, and the collapse of an American neighborhood
by Stacy Horn
"In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and true crime, Stacy Horn sheds light on how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly devastated East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that wouldcome to be known as the Killing Fields. On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker's death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin? The answer can be found two decades earlier. In response to redlining and discriminatory housing practices, the Johnson administration passed the Housing and Urban Development Act in 1968. The Federal Housing Authority aimed to use this piece of legislation to help low-income families of color finally achieve homeownership. But they could never have predicted how banks, lenders, realtors, and corrupt FHA officials themselves would use the newly passed law to make victims of the very people they were supposed to help, and the devastation they would leave in their wake. A compulsively readable hybrid of true crime and investigative journalism, The Killing Fields of East New York reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots. Following the dual threads of the hunt for the network of criminals behind the first subprime mortgage scandal and the ensuing downfall of East New York, Stacy Horn weaves a compelling narrative of government failure, a desperate community, and ultimately the largest series of mortgage fraud prosecutions in American history. The Killing Fields of East New York deftly demonstrates how different types of crime areprofoundly entangled, and how the crimes committed in nice suits and corner offices are just as destructive as those committed on the street"
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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