War And The Breed

By David Starr Jordan, former chancellor of Stanford University, who concluded that World War I was destroying the finest elements of European youth, eliminating them before they could pass on their genes to another generation ¿ and thereby irreparably damaging the genetic quality of the population. His heart-wrenching text is illustrated with a selection of photographs of young officers killed in the First World War while he was actually writing his book, who left few or no children behind them. His work is prophetic in that the fiercely selective genetic losses of the finest and bravest in World War II added to the enormous losses in World War I. The loss of so many young and unmarried pilots and air crew, for example, is clearly reflected in the lower caliber of the overall present-day population of most European countries, and has contributed to the decline of Europe into its current of economic and cultural decadence. Hardback, 128 pp.

From the blistering jungles of Vietnam to the far-flung battlefields of the African Congo, they faced the turmoil of a new era. It was a different kind of war. But the courage and skill of these young fighting men were an American tradition. Like their fathers before them, they rose up to the ultimate challenge of military valor, holding their own in a storm of clashing cultures. They were America's new breed. The proudest and the best...

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“Eugene Sledge became more than a legend with his memoir, With The Old Breed. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific—the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp.”—Tom Hanks NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In The Wall Street Journal, Victor Davis Hanson named With the Old Breed one of the top five books on epic twentieth-century battles. Studs Terkel interviewed the author for his definitive oral history, The Good War. Now E. B. Sledge’s acclaimed first-person account of fighting at Peleliu and Okinawa returns to thrill, edify, and inspire a new generation. An Alabama boy steeped in American history and enamored of such heroes as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene B. Sledge became part of the war’s famous 1st Marine Division—3rd Battalion, 5th Marines. Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. Here is what saved, threatened, and changed his life. Here, too, is the story of how he learned to hate and kill—and came to love—his fellow man. “In all the literature on the Second World War, there is not a more honest, realistic or moving memoir than Eugene Sledge’s. This is the real deal, the real war: unvarnished, brutal, without a shred of sentimentality or false patriotism, a profound primer on what it actually was like to be in that war. It is a classic that will outlive all the armchair generals’ safe accounts of—not the ‘good war’—but the worst war ever.”—Ken Burns

One man and his four-legged friends go to war in Afghanistan; a ten-year battle against enemies seen and unseen In Afghanistan, sometimes all that stands between coalition troops and death or serious injury is a dog. Highly trained dogs and their handlers search for improvised explosive devices or hidden weapons out on patrol with combat troops. It’s a perilous job, often putting them right in the firing line, and making them high priority targets for the Taliban insurgents they’re fighting. Shane Bryant, a former Australian Army dog handler, spent 10 years in Afghanistan, working with elite American special forces alongside his four-legged buddies, Ricky and Benny, and managing teams of dogs and handlers. War Dogs is Shane's story – a riveting tale of handlers and their dogs in combat, and a brutally honest account of how a decade as a contract warrior took its toll on Shane’s personal life and his mental health, and how he found hope again.