In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima - and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.
Now the son of one of the flag raisers has written a powerful account of six very different men who came together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age 70, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos.
In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of his company. Following these men s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific s most crucial island.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory.
The men in the photo - three were killed during the battle - were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley s father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn t come back.
This program is read by Golden Globe-winning actor Barry Bostwick. Bostwick starred as the Mayor in the hit ABC comedy series Spin City.
John Dean s last New York Times best seller, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W.
Bush, offered the former White House insider s unique and telling perspective on George W. Bush s presidency. Once again, Dean employs his distinctive knowledge and understanding of Washington politics and process to examine the conservative movement s current inner circle of radical Republican leaders, from Capitol Hill to Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street and beyond.
In Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean not only highlights specific right-wing-driven GOP policies but also probes the conservative mind-set, identifying recurring qualities such as the unbridled viciousness toward those daring to disagree with them, as well as the big business favoritism that costs taxpayers billions. Dean identifies specific examples of how court packing is seeking to form a judiciary that is activist by its very nature, how religious piety is producing politics run amok, and how concealed indifference to the founding principles of liberty and equality is pushing America further and further from its constitutional foundations.
By the end, Dean paints a vivid picture of what s happening at the top levels of the Republican Party, a noble political party corrupted by its current leaders who cloak their actions in moral superiority while packaging their programs as blatant propaganda.
Dean, certainly no alarmist, finds disturbing signs that current right-wing authoritarian thinking, when conflated with the dominating personalities of the conservative leadership could take the United States toward its own version of fascism.
China today is visible everywhere: In the news, in the economic pressures battering America, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of China s growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C.
Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global economic order has occurred, and why it already affects us all. How has an enormous country once hobbled by poverty and Communist ideology come to be the supercharged center of global capitalism? What does it mean that China now grows three times faster than the United States?
That China uses 40 percent of the world s concrete and 25 percent of its steel? What is the global impact of 300 million rural Chinese walking off their farms and heading to the cities in the greatest migration in human history? Why do nearly all of the world s biggest companies now have large-scale operations in China?
What does the corporate march into China mean for workers left behind in America, Europe, and the rest of the world?
Meanwhile, what makes China s emerging corporations so dangerously competitive? What could happen when China will be able to manufacture nearly everything, computers, cars, jumbo jets, and pharmaceuticals, that the United States and Europe can, at perhaps half the cost?
How do these developments reach around the world and straight into the lives of all Americans?
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