The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with. With these words, Robert Taber began a revolution in conventional military thought that has dramatically impacted the way armed conflicts have been fought since the book's initial publication in 1965.

Whether ideological, nationalistic, or religious, all guerrilla insurgencies use similar tactics to advance their cause. War of the Flea's timeless analysis of the guerrilla fighter's means and methods provides a fundamental resource for any reader seeking to understand this distinct form of warfare and the challenge it continues to present to today's armed forces in the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere.

2024 American Book Fest Award Finalist in U.S. History

On July 30, 1902, tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets of New York's Lower East Side to bid farewell to the city's chief rabbi, the eminent Talmudist Jacob Joseph. All went well until the procession crossed Sheriff Street, where the six-story R. Hoe and Company printing press factory towered over the intersection. Without warning, scraps of steel, iron bolts, and scalding water rained down and injured hundreds of mourners, courtesy of antisemitic factory workers. The police compounded the attack when they arrived on the scene; under orders from the inspector in charge, who made no effort to distinguish aggressors from victims, officers began beating up Jews, injuring dozens.

To the Yiddish-language daily Forverts (Forward), the bloody attack on Jews was not unlike those that many Russian Jews remembered bitterly from the old country. But this was America, not Russia, and the Jewish community wasn't going to stand for such treatment. Fed up with being persecuted, New York's Jews, whose numbers and political influence had been growing, set a pattern for the future by deftly pursuing justice for the victims. They forced trials and disciplinary hearings, accelerated retirements and transfers within the corrupt police department, and engineered the resignation of the police commissioner. Scott D. Seligman's The Chief Rabbi's Funeral is the first book-length account of this event and its aftermath.

Shattered Sword [is] a necessary read for anyone interested in the Pacific War.--NYMAS Review

Shattered Sword is the winner of the 2005 John Lyman Book Award for the Best Book in U.S. Naval History and was cited by Proceedings as one of its Notable Naval Books for 2005.

Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange's bestselling Miracle at Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Unlike previous accounts, Shattered Sword makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida's Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, an uncritical reliance upon which has tainted every previous Western account. It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle.

Parshall and Tully examine the battle in detail and effortlessly place it within the context of the Imperial Navy's doctrine and technology. With a foreword by leading World War II naval historian John Lundstrom, Shattered Sword is an indispensable part of any military buff's library.

Shortly after graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1934, Elizabeth Bessie Williamson began working as a temporary secretary at the Laphroaig Distillery on the Scottish island Islay. Williamson quickly found herself joining the boys in the tasting room, studying the distillation process, and winning them over with her knowledge of Scottish whisky.

After the owner of Laphroaig passed away, Williamson took over the prestigious company and became the spokesperson in America for the entire Scotch whisky industry. Impressing clients and showing her passion as the Scotch Whisky Association's trade ambassador, she soon gained fame within the industry.

Whiskey Women tells the tales of the women who created the industry, from Mesopotamia's first beer brewers and distillers to America's rough-and-tough Prohibition bootleggers. Women have long distilled, marketed, and owned significant shares in spirits companies, including Bushmills, Johnnie Walker, and Maker's Mark. Williamson is one of many influential women who greatly influenced Scotch, bourbon, and Irish whiskey. Until now their stories have remained untold.

After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war criminals out of government positions.

Ex-Nazis--people who had been involved in mass murder, drafting antisemitic laws, and the persecution of Hitler's opponents, as well as other depravities--resumed their careers without consequence in the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. Former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These Persil Certificates, named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi's recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, and a whole generation of German government officials with Nazi pasts was never brought to account.

Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes. And with help from the highest levels of West German government and even the CIA, they swept their crimes under the carpet and resurrected their careers. Nazis at the Watercooler illuminates the network of ex-Third Reich loyalists and the U.S. government's complicity that enabled this mass impunity.

What happens when a seasoned journalist and travel writer takes on his most challenging assignment yet--crossing not just continents but also history--by retracing his father's steps on the battlefields of Italy in World War II?

When a slim packet of his father's letters came to light after his mother's death, Bill Thorness began a quest to rediscover his father. Thorness traveled to the World War II battlefields where America's first team of commandos fought. The youngest son of one of those commandos, Thorness gained a sense of the horror his father had kept from his family while standing on the mountain where the First Special Service Force fought. Then, standing on a bridge in Rome, he reflected on the loss his father must have felt in not making it to the end of the campaign to liberate the Eternal City.

In All Roads Lead to Rome Thorness considers his father's decisive moments in battle and beyond, and how he soldiered on as a disabled veteran through his life, raising a family and succumbing to an early death. Alternating between reimagined battle scenes and present-day travels, Thorness explores World War II and family history, the value and limits of memory, the attitudes of war, and our society's inadequate understanding and support of combat veterans, who may return with physical and emotional scars that change them deeply.

Thorness steps into his father's shoes to revisit his story and finish that walk into Rome, weaving an account that is part travelogue, part history, and part memoir about the ravages of war.

A unique, compelling read.--Midwest Book Review

Revolutionary War officer Nathan Hale, one of America's first spies, said, Any kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary. A statue of Hale stands outside CIA headquarters, and the agency often cites his statement as one of its guiding principles. But who decides what is necessary for the public good, and is it really true that any kind of service is permissible for the public good? These questions are at the heart of James M. Olson's book, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying.

Olson, a veteran of the CIA's clandestine service, takes readers inside the real world of intelligence to describe the difficult dilemmas that field officers face on an almost daily basis. Far from being a dry theoretical treatise, this fascinating book uses actual intelligence operations to illustrate how murky their moral choices can be. Readers will be surprised to learn that the CIA provides very little guidance on what is, or is not, permissible. Rather than empowering field officers, the author has found that this lack of guidelines actually hampers operations. Olson believes that U.S. intelligence officers need clearer moral guidelines to make correct, quick decisions. Significantly, he believes these guidelines should come from the American public, not from closed-door meetings inside the intelligence community. Fair Play will encourage a broad public debate about the proper moral limits on U.S. intelligence activities.

The most successful film franchise of all time, Star Wars thrillingly depicts an epic multigenerational conflict fought a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the Star Wars saga has as much to say about successful strategies and real-life warfare waged in our own time and place. Strategy Strikes Back brings together more than thirty of today's top military and strategic experts, including generals, policy advisors, seasoned diplomats, counterinsurgency strategists, science fiction writers, war journalists, and ground-level military officers, to explain the strategy and the art of war by way of the Star Wars films.

Each chapter of Strategy Strikes Back provides a relatable, outside-the-box way to simplify and clarify the complexities of modern military conflict. Strategy Strikes Back gives Star Wars fans and aspiring military minds alike an inspiring and entertaining means of understanding many facets of modern warfare in a book as captivating as Star Wars itself.

2020-21 Reader Views Literary Award, Gold Medal Winner
2021 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal Winner
2020 National Jewish Book Award, Finalist
2020 American Book Fest Best Book Awards Finalist in the U.S. History category
2020 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Finalist

In the wee hours of May 15, 1902, three thousand Jewish women quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Convinced by the latest jump in the price of kosher meat that they were being gouged, they assembled in squads of five, intent on shutting down every kosher butcher shop in New York's Jewish quarter.

What was conceived as a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Customers who crossed the picket lines were heckled and assaulted and their parcels of meat hurled into the gutters. Butchers who remained open were attacked, their windows smashed, stock ruined, equipment destroyed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent women to local hospitals and to court. But soon Jewish housewives throughout the area took to the streets in solidarity, while the butchers either shut their doors or had their doors shut for them. The newspapers called it a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party.

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 tells the twin stories of mostly uneducated women immigrants who discovered their collective consumer power and of the Beef Trust, the midwestern cartel that conspired to keep meat prices high despite efforts by the U.S. government to curtail its nefarious practices. With few resources and little experience but steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful, vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow.

A comprehensive and impressively written history of the Korean War.--Washington Post

Selected for the 2019 Commandant's Professional Reading List

Updated with maps, photographs, and battlefield diagrams, this special fiftieth anniversary edition of the classic history of the Korean War is a dramatic and hard-hitting account of the conflict written from the perspective of those who fought it. Partly drawn from official records, operations journals, and histories, it is based largely on the compelling personal narratives of the small-unit commanders and their troops. Unlike any other work on the Korean War, it provides both a clear panoramic overview and a sharply drawn you were there account of American troops in fierce combat against the North Korean and Chinese communist invaders. As Americans and North Koreans continue to face each other across the 38th Parallel, This Kind of Warcommemorates the past and offers vital lessons for the future.

In 1918 a famed general of the Russian White Army battled through the Red Army to save Emperor Nicholas II--but he arrived too late. The Romanovs had already been murdered.

In this thrilling true-life detective story, we follow Anna, the general's courageous young daughter, who fled across the continent and boarded a ship with her husband to escape the bloodshed. Beneath her bunk was a box, and in this box lay grisly evidence of what had become of Russia's royal family, the Romanovs. Generations later, Anna's grandson Peter Sarandinaki set out to finish his great-grandfather's mission to find the Romanovs' remains, enlisting searchers and scientists to finally piece together the answers to some of history's most perplexing questions: What really happened to Tsar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, and their children? And what about the tsar's brother, Mikhail, who simply disappeared?

Set against the disparate backdrops of the Russian Revolution and the twenty-first century's leading DNA laboratories, In Search of the Romanovs weaves together historical records, forensic science, and the diaries, recollections, and experiences of Sarandinaki's own family. Follow Sarandinaki as he fits together the final fragments of the mystery: a piece of topaz jewelry, a blood-stained shirt once worn by Tsar Nicholas II, the fabled Sokolov box, and clandestine initials carved into a tree. A riveting and deeply personal story, In Search of the Romanovs reveals hidden truths in the legends about the murder and disappearance of Russia's most famous royal family.

Shattered Sword [is] a necessary read for anyone interested in the Pacific War.--NYMAS Review

Shattered Sword is the winner of the 2005 John Lyman Book Award for the Best Book in U.S. Naval History and was cited by Proceedings as one of its Notable Naval Books for 2005.

Many consider the Battle of Midway to have turned the tide of the Pacific War. It is without question one of the most famous battles in history. Now, for the first time since Gordon W. Prange's bestselling Miracle at Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully offer a new interpretation of this great naval engagement. Unlike previous accounts, Shattered Sword makes extensive use of Japanese primary sources. It also corrects the many errors of Mitsuo Fuchida's Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, an uncritical reliance upon which has tainted every previous Western account. It thus forces a major, potentially controversial reevaluation of the great battle.

Parshall and Tully examine the battle in detail and effortlessly place it within the context of the Imperial Navy's doctrine and technology. With a foreword by leading World War II naval historian John Lundstrom, Shattered Sword is an indispensable part of any military buff's library.

The concept of the farmer and shopkeeper pulling rifles off pegs on the wall to fight the British has been the typical image of the American minuteman. The fact that he may have had military training and drilled--and that April 19, 1775 was not his first battle--usually goes unmentioned. Winner of the American Revolution Round Table Award, The Minute Men will be of keen interest to those curious about the true history of some of America's first soldiers.

At the risk of succumbing to hyperbole, Basketball on Paper is a revolutionary strike for statistical analysis of the game of basketball. . . . There has never been a basketball book quite like [it].--Hoopsworld.com

Journey inside the numbers for an exceptional set of statistical tools and rules that can help explain the winning, or losing, ways of a basketball team. Basketball on Paper doesn't diagram plays or explain how players get in shape, but instead demonstrates how to interpret player and team performance. Dean Oliver highlights general strategies for teams when they're winning or losing and what aspects should be the focus in either situation.

He describes and quantifies the jobs of team leaders and role players, then discusses the interactions between players and how to achieve the best fit. Oliver conceptualizes the meaning of teamwork and how to quantify the value of different types of players working together. He examines historically successful NBA teams and identifies what made them so successful: individual talent, a system of putting players together, or good coaching. Oliver then uses these statistical tools and case studies to evaluate the best players in history, such as Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Charles Barkley and how they contributed to their teams' success. He does the same for some of the NBA's oddball players-Manute Bol, Muggsy Bogues, and Dennis Rodman and for the WNBA's top players.

Basketball on Paper is unique in its incorporation of business and analytical concepts within the context of basketball to measure the value of players in a cooperative setting. Whether you're looking for strategies or new ideas to throw out while watching the ballgame at a sports bar, Dean Oliver's Basketball on Paper will give you amazing new insights into teamwork, coaching, and success.

Aramís Calderón was eleven in 1992 when federal marshals conducted a nighttime raid at the Baton Rouge apartment where he lived with his mother and four siblings. They were searching for Aramís's father, who had escaped from a nearby federal prison. Once satisfied with the answers from Aramís's mother, the marshals departed. At daybreak, so did Aramís's family--and drove toward a rendezvous with his father, who had fled to South Florida. Thus began an eight-month ordeal of constant moves, family aliases, and drug deals.

As Calderón shares, Fugitive Son is not a love letter to his father, whom he sees even after his death as an unethical, toxic, and incredibly complex man. Rather, Calderón's memoir explores how his father's undeniable love for his family despite drug addiction, lawlessness, and toxic masculinity informed Aramís's rebellious decision to join the Marines, and how all this shaped his determination to become the father he wished his own had been.

Selected for the 2019 Commandant's Professional Reading List, Assignment: Pentagon takes the reader on an insider's tour of the Pentagon, describing how the headquarters for the world's largest multinational corporation functions. The reader gains insights into how this bureaucracy functions as well as the stresses and strains inherent to such a complex organization. Now in its fifth edition, Assignment: Pentagon remains the best practical guide for anyone who works for the Pentagon or any other large bureaucracy.

Eminently readable, Assignment: Pentagon is the essential guide for the newly assigned military person, fresh civilian, or interested outsider to the Pentagon's informal set of arrangements, networks, and functions that operate in the service and joint service world. With updated information about jobs and Pentagon vernacular, this fifth edition delivers a wealth of practical advice and helpful hints about surviving the challenges of working in the Building. If you've been assigned to the Pentagon or are starting work for any large company, you need to read Assignment: Pentagon.

Grappling with centuries-old feuds, defeating a shrewd insurgency, and navigating the sometimes paralyzing bureaucracy of the U.S. military are issues that prompt sleepless nights for both policymakers in Washington, DC and soldiers at war, albeit for different reasons. Few, however, have dealt with these issues in the White House situation room and on the front line. Michael G. Waltz has done just that, working as a policy advisor to Vice President Richard B. Cheney and also serving in the mountains of Afghanistan as a Green Beret, directly implementing strategy in the field that he helped devise in Washington.

In Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret's Battles from Washington to Afghanistan, Waltz shares his unique firsthand experiences, revealing the sights, sounds, emotions, and complexities involved in the war in Afghanistan. Waltz highlights the policy issues that plagued the war effort, from the drug trade to civilian casualties, to a lack of resources in comparison to Iraq, to the overall coalition strategy. He points out that stabilizing Afghanistan and the region remains crucial to national security and that a long-term commitment to Afghanistan is imperative if the United States is to remain secure.

Michael G. Waltz ​represents North Central Florida in Congress and is a colonel in the National Guard, a combat-decorated Green Beret, and a former White House and Pentagon policy advisor. He served more than twenty-six years in the U.S. Army and as a member of Congress was heavily involved with assisting Americans and Afghans during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Peter Bergen is the author of four books about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, including, most recently, Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.

Public interest in Adolf Hitler and all aspects of the Third Reich continues to grow as new generations ponder the moral questions surrounding Nazi Germany and its historical legacy. One aspect of Nazism that has not received sufficient attention from historians of the Third Reich is the doctrine's origins in the Thule Society and its covert activities. A Munich occult group with a political agenda, the Thule Society was led by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a German commoner who had been adopted by nobility during a sojourn in the Ottoman Empire. After returning to Europe, Sebottendorff embraced a form of theosophy that stressed the racial superiority of Aryans. The Thule Society attempted to establish an anti-Semitic, working-class front for disseminating its esoteric ideas and founded the German Workers' Party, which Hitler would later transform into the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party. Several of the society's members eventually assumed prestigious posts in the Third Reich. David Luhrssen has written the first comprehensive study of the society's activities, its cultural roots, and its postwar ramifications in a historical-critical context. Both general readers and academics concerned with European cultural and intellectual history will find that Hammer of the Gods opens new perspectives on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.

Bourbon whiskey has made a surprising contribution to American legal history. Tracking the history of bourbon and bourbon law illuminates the development of the United States as a nation, from conquering the wild frontier to rugged individualism to fostering the entrepreneurial spirit to solidifying itself as a nation of laws. Bourbon is responsible for the growth and maturation of many substantive areas of the law, such as trademark, breach of contract, fraud, governmental regulation and taxation, and consumer protection. In Bourbon Justice Brian Haara delves into the legal history behind one of America's most treasured spirits to uncover a past fraught with lawsuits whose outcome, surprisingly perhaps, helped define a nation.

Approaching the history of bourbon from a legal standpoint, Haara tells the history of America through the development of commercial laws that guided our nation from an often reckless laissez-faire mentality, through the growing pains of industrialization, and past the overcorrection of Prohibition. More than just true bourbon history, this is part of the American story.

Gen. David McMurtrie Gregg (1833-1917) was one of the ablest and most successful commanders of cavalry in any Civil War army. Pennsylvania-born, West Point-educated, and deeply experienced in cavalry operations prior to the conflict, his career personified that of the typical cavalry officer in the mid-nineteenth-century American army. Gregg achieved distinction on many battlefields, including those during the Peninsula, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Bristoe, Overland, and Petersburg campaigns, ultimately gaining the rank of brevet major general as leader of the Second Division, Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac.

The highlight of his service occurred on July 3, 1863, the climactic third day at Gettysburg, when he led his own command as well as the brigade of Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer in repulsing an attempt by thousands of Confederate cavalry under the legendary J. E. B. Stuart in attacking the right flank and rear of the Union Army while Pickett's charge struck its front and center.

Historians credit Gregg with helping preserve the security of his army at a critical point, making Union victory inevitable. Unlike glory-hunters such as Custer and Stuart, Gregg was a quietly competent veteran who never promoted himself or sought personal recognition for his service. Rarely has a military commander of such distinction been denied a biographer's tribute. Gregg's time is long overdue.