David Ayer

#1 New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks offers a new take on the Civil Rights Movement, stressing its unexpected use of military strategy and its lessons for nonviolent resistance around the world. “Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change America . . . Riveting.” ―Charles Kaiser, The Guardian In Waging a Good War, the bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a fresh perspective on America’s greatest moral revolution―the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s―and its legacy today. While the Movement has become synonymous with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ethos of nonviolence, Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter, draws on his deep knowledge of tactics and strategy to advance a surprising but revelatory idea: the greatest victories for Black Americans of the past century were won not by idealism alone, but by paying attention to recruiting, training, discipline, and organization―the hallmarks of any successful military campaign. An engaging storyteller, Ricks deftly narrates the Movement’s triumphs and defeats. He follows King and other key figures from Montgomery to Memphis, demonstrating that Gandhian nonviolence was a philosophy of active, not passive, resistance―involving the bold and sustained confrontation of the Movement’s adversaries, both on the ground and in the court of public opinion. While bringing legends such as Fannie Lou Hamer and John Lewis into new focus, Ricks also highlights lesser-known figures who played critical roles in fashioning nonviolence into an effective tool―the activists James Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash, and Septima Clark foremost among them. He also offers a new understanding of the Movement’s later difficulties as internal disputes and white backlash intensified. Rich with fresh interpretations of familiar events and overlooked aspects of America’s civil rights struggle, Waging a Good War is an indispensable addition to the literature of racial justice and social change―and one that offers vital lessons for our own time.

Stealth Boat is a memoir of Gannon McHale's years in the U.S. Navy and of the men he served with in the Submarine Service between 1967 and 1970, and some of what they accomplished and experienced during that time. It is my also his remembrance of what it was like to grow up aboard a nuclear powered Fast Attack Submarine. McHale reported aboard USS Sturgeon (SSN 637) still a boy, and left a young man. This was the most important period in his personal development, and it profoundly affected the way he has lived the rest of his life. For many years any public discussion of the mission of Fast Attack submarines during the Cold War has been strictly guarded. The Freedom of Information Act now allows us to look back at a period in our nation's history that is worth remembering, and the part played by the U.S Submarine Service in winning that war is undeniable. America in the late 1960's was tortured by internal and external conflict. The war in Vietnam was unpopular and the Draft was still in operation.At the age of nineteen millions of young American men faced the probability of being drafted and sent to fight a war that many of them did not believe in. Some fled the country, others were drafted, and many more like the author chose to be proactive about their military service and enlisted. His book focuses on several men who did just that, and in the process became lifelong friends.

A book for finding purpose and strength in times of great despair, the international best-seller is still just as relevant today as when it was first published. “This is a book I reread a lot . . . it gives me hope . . . it gives me a sense of strength.” —Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360/CNN This seminal book, which has been called “one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought” by Carl Rogers and “one of the great books of our time” by Harold Kushner, has been translated into more than fifty languages and sold over sixteen million copies. “An enduring work of survival literature,” according to the New York Times, Viktor Frankl’s riveting account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, and his insightful exploration of the human will to find meaning in spite of the worst adversity, has offered solace and guidance to generations of readers since it was first published in 1946. At the heart of Frankl’s theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for “meaning”) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, Frankl’s classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles. A must-read companion to this classic work, a new, never-before-published work by Frankl entitled Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, is now available in English.