History & Military

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A...

In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began to write what would become a 200-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from Iraq. King, forty-eight, was killed on 14 October, 2006. His son, Jordan, was six months old, and they had spent only two weeks together. A Journal for Jordan is a father's letter to the son he will never see again. In it he gives his boy advice on...

In June of 1876, on a hill above a river called the Little Bighorn, George Armstrong Custer and all 210 men under his direct command were annihilated by 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne. The news of this stunning defeat caused an uproar, and those involved promptly began to point fingers in order to avoid responsibility. Custer, who was conveniently dead, took the brunt of the blame. The truth, however...

Presenting a study of the Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton as well as their most heroic expeditions, the author looks in detail at just how and why their individual reputations have evolved over the course of the last century.

In his highly acclaimed bestseller "Auschwitz", author and broadcaster Laurence Rees tells the definitive history of the most notorious Nazi institution of them all. we discover how Auschwitz evolved from a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners into the site of the largest mass murder in history - part death camp, part concentration camp, where around a million Jews were killed. Rees...

Our perception of Victoria the Queen is coloured by portraits of her older, widowed self - her dour expression embodying the repressive morality propagated in her time. But "Becoming Queen" reveals an energetic and vibrant woman, determined to battle for power. It also documents the Byzantine machinations behind Victoria's quest to occupy the throne, and shows how her struggles did not end when...

An epic book that Kirkus called "world history on a grand scale," Big History begins when the universe is no more than the size of an atom and ends with a twenty-first-century planet inhabited by 6.1 billion people. It's a story that takes in prehistoric geology, human evolution, the agrarian age, the Black Death, the voyages of Columbus, the industrial revolution, and global warming. Along the...

Roads, bridges, dams, railway viaducts, tunnels ...New Zealand is full of amazing feats of engineering. Our number-eight wire mentality has brought about some incredible engineering solutions to create structures and systems to wonder at, from the Manapouri underground power station to Burt Munro's famous Indian motorcycle. Who designed these amazing things? How were they built? What innovative...

Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city,...

Robert F. Kennedy was the first conspiracy theorist about his brother's murder. In this astonishingly compelling and convincing new account of the Kennedy years, acclaimed journalist David Talbot tells in a riveting, superbly researched narrative why, even on 22 November 1963, RFK had reason to believe that dark forces were at work in Dallas and reveals, for the first time, that he planned to...

Known to millions simply as 'Smithy', Sir Charles Kingsford Smith was one of Australia's true twentieth-century legends. In an era in which aviators were superstars, Smithy was among the greatest and, throughout his amazing career, his fame in Australia was matched only by that of Don Bradman. Among other achievements, Kingsford Smith was the first person to fly across the Pacific, he broke the...

In the last decade, two events have transformed the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam. This is the first book to explain the link between these two occurrences. George Crile spent nearly a decade researching and writing this original account of the biggest, most expensive secret war in history: the arming of the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Moving...

The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was simply awesome. What followed them was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war, at times as savage as anything seen on the Eastern Front. As casualties mounted, so too did the tensions between the principal commanders on both sides. Meanwhile,...

This engaging memoir covers the first 25 years of Brian Edward's life in Northern Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s. His father abandoned his wife and son in dramatic circumstances when Brian was still a baby. He grew up in 'lodgings', often cared for by landladies who were mad, bad or simply sad, while his mother was at work. In his early teens Brian desperately tried to track down his...

The Dambusters raid is an unforgettable event in British military history and has passed into legend. On 16 May 1943, nineteen Lancaster bomber crews gathered in the dusk at RAF Scampton. Their brief was to fly at night across occupied Europe and drop specially designed 'bouncing' bombs at a mere 60 feet above water to destroy three crucial and heavily defended dams deep in the German industrial...

Like its acclaimed predecessors, RESTORATION LONDON and DR JOHNSON'S LONDON, this book is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of everyday life - and the conditions in which most people lived - so often ignored in conventional history books. The book begins with the River Thames, which - from its surly water-men to its great occasions - played such a central...

During the nineteenth century the Urewera was a remote but enticing wilderness except for the Maori who lived there, for them it was a sheltering homeland. In 1866-67 large areas were taken by confiscation or forced cession.At the end of the fighting in 1872 the Urewera became an autonomous district, governed by its own leaders. In 1921-22 the Urewera Native Reserve was abolished in law. This...

Its call sign was Fernleaf Cairo, and between 1939 and 1946, around 76,000 Kiwis of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force passed through Maadi Camp. Around 17 kilometres south of Cairo, the camp appeared almost overnight, as this country's permanent overseas base during World War Two. By 1945 the camp had tar-sealed roads, two cinemas, an open-air amphitheatre, canteens, bars, chapels,...

A world away from the killing fields of France was a battle that could have changed the face of history. Over the course of 1917, German bombers threatened to engulf London in firestorms - a portent of the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain over twenty years later. They were determined to bring London to its knees. The First Blitz took place over eight nights in 1917, but it was the second...

Les Carlyon's Gallipoli is one of the most successful, and critically acclaimed, works of Australian non-fiction published in the last decade. Carlyon's book brilliantly captures the tragedy of the Gallipoli campaign, and grippingly tells the story of what was to become Australia's national myth. It is the product of meticulous scholarship and research, it is writing of the highest quality, but...

"Nothing can alter what happened now: Anzac stood and still stands for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance that will never admit defeat." - World War I correspondent Charles Bean. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was a series of deadly battles followed by a brilliantly executed retreat. In just eight months, more than 11,000...

Mohandas Gandhi and Winston Churchill: India's moral leader and Great Britain's greatest Prime Minister. Born five years and seven thousand miles apart, they became embodiments of the nations they led. Both became living icons, idolized and admired around the world. Today, they remain enduring models of leadership in a democratic society. Yet the truth was Churchill and Gandhi were bitter enemies...

Provides an accessible, highly-illustrated introduction to 30 of history's most famous battles, including Marathon, Hastings, Agincourt, Saratoga, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Gettysburg, the Somme, Stalingrad, D-Day and many many more.

How We Saw The War will retell to a new generation of New Zealanders how their mothers and grandmothers learned where their loved ones were and what they were doing during World War II. It will republish newspaper stories from the time which reported on the activities of New Zealand soldiers in the Middle East and the Pacific, North Africa and Italy; in the air and at sea. From Michael Joseph...

Sir Howard Kippenberger is widely acknowledged as the ideal of a New Zealand citizen-soldier and our foremost soldier-scholar; a country lawyer and provincial intellectual who became a national figure as New Zealanders made the transition from colonials to a forthright nationhood. As a military leader, editor and author he was one of the prime movers in that process. His democratic style of...

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the...

In 1893, wearing white camellias meant you supported women’s right to vote - a red camellia in your lapel signalled the opposite. In 1893 New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote, a milestone of which we are justly proud, but it wasn’t easily achieved. The struggle was protracted and often bitter. The resolve and strength of the women involved were sorely tested,...

This remarkably ambitious book tells the story of the great social and political catastrophe that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1945. In a period of almost continuous upheaval society was transformed by two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust and the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Combining a powerful narrative with profound analysis, acclaimed historian Robert Gellately...

Renowned historian Michael King (1945-2004) presents a comprehensive and searching documentary of Maori culture and society, and Maori-Pakeha contact, conflict and co-operation. From the earliest daguerreotype around 1852 to the strong protest images of the 1990s, King records and analyses changes and upheaval in the commentary that is always intelligent and objective. This book leaves the reader...

Charles Upham was the great New Zealand war hero. He was one of the few people in history to have won the Victoria Cross twice, setting new standards of personal heroism during World War II. A quietly spoken sheep farmer from Canterbury, at the front in Crete and North Africa, he destroyed enemy machine-gun posts single-handed and led a frontal assault on enemy guns. He then spent the rest of the...

In August 1944, Hans Georg Klamroth was executed for his part in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Wibke Bruhns, his youngest daughter, was six years old at the time. Decades later, watching a documentary about the events of 20 July, images of her father in the Third Reich People's Court appeared on the screen - and she realises she never knew him. In "My Father's Country", Bruhns tells of...

On February 13, 2003, a plane carrying three American military contractors - Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes, and Keith Stansell - crashed in the mountainous jungle of Colombia. Dazed and shaken, they awoke battered and covered in blood with automatic rifles pointing at their faces. As of that moment they belonged to the terrorist organization known as the FARC, the military arm of the Colombia...

Presenting New Zealand is a visually sumptuous and informative account of how the country has developed into the independent nation that the rest of the world recognises today. Starting with the huge rifts of prehistoric times that tore it apart from Gondwana, the book traces the arrival of the first Polynesian canoes, the exploration and settlement by Europeans and the modern-day social,...

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the world was left wondering about its destiny. Russia is still an enormous power with a population exceeding 140 million, immense military resources and giant energy reserves - in short, a vast land full of promise and opportunity. Russia has the potential to be a force of stability or a force of turmoil, but when it comes to global affairs, can she be persuaded...

Forget everything you think you know about the making of the most powerful man on the planet. President Barack Obama's triumph was not inevitable: it was the end product of a brilliant, calculated, convention-defying political campaign. In a race that will be talked about for years to come, he faced down his rivals with ruthless focus and efficiency. "Race of a Lifetime" is the gripping inside...

Making use of every possible contemporary source - diaries, memoirs, advice books, government papers, almanacs, even the Register of Patents - Liza Picard presents an enthralling picture of how life in London was really lived in the 1600s: the houses and streets, gardens and parks, cooking, clothes and jewellery, cosmetics, hairdressing, housework, laundry and shopping, medicine and dentistry,...

Two ships set out in search of a missing continent: the St Jean-Baptiste, a French merchant ship commanded by Jean de Surville, and The Endeavour, a small British naval vessel captained by James Cook. Distinguished historian Geoffrey Blainey tells the story of these rival ships and the men who sailed in them. Just before Christmas 1769, the two captains were almost close enough to see one another...

When British and American forces invaded Iraq in April 2003, their intelligence operations got to work looking for the WMD their governments had promised us were there. They quickly realised no such weapons existed. Instead they become faced with an ever-increasing spiral of extremism and violence that was almost impossible to understand, let alone contain. This book tells the story of what...

Conflict is an inevitable part of life, according to this ancient Chinese classic of strategy, but everything necessary to deal with conflict wisely, honorably, victoriously, is already present within us. Compiled more than two thousand years ago by a mysterious warrior-philosopher, "The Art of War" is still perhaps the most prestigious and influential book of strategy in the world, as...

Brigadier-General Herbert Hart landed at Gallipoli on 26 April 1915, commanded the Wellington Battalion during the closing stages of that campaign, then served as a battalion and brigade commander on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918. Throughout the war he kept a diary, in which he recorded his experiences in the great battles on Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele. Hart's diary is now...

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia...This work presents an epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia. "The Fatal Shore" is the prize-winning,...

The Great War is Les Carlyon's extraordinary account of the Anzacs on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918. It combines a brilliant overview of this immense conflict with telling detail, stories, letters and diaries that breathe life into those terrible battles of 90 years ago. Carlyon has produced a masterpiece that takes the reader from the generals formulating strategy to the troops fighting...

How did a 19 year-old, middle-class, Catholic girl from Munich become Hitler's mistress and what kept him faithful until the end of their lives? Was her appeal sexual, domestic, political - or did he really love her? This biography of Eva Braun is the first in English for 40 years. Angela Lambert has dug deep into Eva's background and brought into sharp focus a fascinating and unexpected...

New Zealand was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled by humankind. It was also the first to introduce a full democracy. Between those events, and in the century that followed the franchise, the movements and the conflicts of human history have been played out more intensively and more rapidly in New Zealand than anywhere else on Earth. This title tells that story in all its...

In this provocative and fascinating book Professor Kerry Howe traces dozens of explanations and theories of both pre-Maori and pre-European settlement and assesses each one. At the same time he places them in their intellectual, historical and cultural context. The book uses maps and illustrations and scholarly research but is carefully written for a general lay audience and is not an academic...

Sent by Germany on a suicide mission to the far side of the world, the warship Wolf was a formidable and ingenious commerce-raider. Her task was to inflict maximum destruction on Allied shipping using all the latest technology of warfare - torpedoes, mines, cannons, smokescreens, wireless receivers, even a seaplane. It was an assignment so secret that she could never pull in to port or transmit...

They were the best of enemies - dedicated, skilled and deadly. In the night skies above wartime Germany an RAF navigator-bomber from New Zealand and a Luftwaffe pilot seek out their targets, testing the gap between success and their own destruction as they cross each other's paths. The odds are heavily against either of them making it through the war, but as this sobering realisation displaces...

Like her previous books, this book is the product of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life - and the conditions in which most people lived - so often left out of history books. This period of mid Victorian London covers a huge span: Victoria's wedding and the place of the royals in popular esteem; how the very poor lived, the underworld, prostitution, crime, prisons...

From the earliest days of European settlement in New Zealand, argues historian Danny Keenan, Maori struggled to hold on to their land. Tensions began early, arising from disputed land sales. When open conflict between Maori and Imperial forces broke out in the 1840s and 1860s, the struggles intensified. For both sides, land was at the heart of the conflict. When the fighting was over, the 'wars'...

WEDLOCK is the remarkable story of the Countess of Strathmore and her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary Eleanor Bowes was one of Britain's richest young heiresses. She married the Count of Strathmore who died young, and pregnant with her lover's child, Mary became engaged to George Gray. Then in swooped Andrew Robinson Stoney. Mary was bowled over and married him within the week. But...