A shattering novel of courage, heroism, and unbreakable bonds forged in the heat of battle. Green Beret Captain Finn McCulloden and his troops are having a very bad day -- even by the nightmarish standards of Vietnam. They've just been dropped into a meat grinder with orders to reinforce a Special Forces border camp that's about to be overrun by the North Vietnamese. Outnumbered twenty-to-one, beset by treachery from within, and saddled with an incompetent second-in-command, McCulloden knows that all hell is about to break loose. Through one brutal day and night McCulloden and his men fight alongside their native Montagnard allies in a pitched battle of blood and guts against an unwavering foe who never stops coming. The Green Berets can neither give up nor give in, and all will become heroes in the truest sense of the word. But one extraordinary soldier man rises above them all in an ultimate act of valor....

Napalm was invented on Valentine’s Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. It created an inferno that killed over 87,500 people in Tokyo—more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki—and went on to incinerate 64 Japanese cities. The Bomb got the press, but napalm did the work. Robert Neer offers the first history.

When Jake Darren meets Jo Anne Arnout, he's immediately smitten by her beauty. He convinces her to marry him, and the two set out on what's supposed to be a romantic honeymoon in Beirut, Lebanon. But a funny thing happens during their trip: Jake kills Osama bin Laden, not once, but twice. And as if that isn't enough to liven up the adventure, he then has an out-of-body experience on the Himalayan border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even as Jake realizes that he's actually killed imposters, he becomes convinced that God has chosen him to accomplish great things. Meanwhile, the real Osama receives similar messages of greatness from Heaven through the Archangel Gabriel. But this is what Jake gets for marrying the daughter of a Chicago drug dealer with al-Qaeda connections. Of course, it doesn't help that his beautiful mother-in-law was once in love with the most notorious terrorist in the world-before the events of September 11, of course. Despite the raucous ride with familial complications, Jake knows that he must not give up. He must track down the wily terrorist at all costs, so that history will remember him as The Man Who Killed Osama.

A brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic's greatest living author Tab, an itinerant Czech actor, travels around Europe on the theater circuit with his partner, Sońa, and their two young sons, attending festivals and performing plays. Confronted with growing resentment toward foreigners, Tab decides to return home to the banks of the Sázava River southeast of Prague. No sooner has he arrived than Tab finds himself falsely accused of a terrible crime and forced to go on the run with his two sons. Over the course of their peregrinations, dodging authorities by car, foot, and raft, they encounter a motley cast of allies and enemies. Tab's sudden reappearance and just-as-sudden disappearance ripple through the community, catalyzing a chaotic chain of events that reaches a final, raucous crescendo. Hailed as "a picaresque romp of black humor and fantasy" (Times Literary Supplement), this is an unforgettable novel about finding the sparks of humanity even in the bleakest of places, in which love or the longing to find it lie around every bend.

Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive `encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney.

Special Forces veteran John F. Mullins delivers heart-pounding action under fire in his third Men of Valor novel. 1975: With the Vietnam War drawing to a close, Captain James Carmichael begins a new life far from the front lines, in Bad Tölz, Germany. Married to a beautiful Russian émigré and awaiting his first child, Carmichael should be content training the 10th Special Forces for a European conflict that will likely never come. But the peacetime army is unmanageable, plagued by drugs and misbehavior, and Carmichael hungers for something more. That appetite gets fed when he is asked to rescue a P.O.W. being held by the North Vietnamese. It's a deadly proposition with dangerous odds, to which his wife bitterly objects. But Carmichael must answer the call of loyalty and risk everything he has -- on one last mission to bring his men back alive.

Special Forces veteran John F. Mullins continues his series of men at war with a story of explosive action and unrelenting drama -- from the home front to the front lines.... When Lieutenant James "No-Middle-Initial" Carmichael is wounded in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, he is medevacked to the U.S. and nursed back to health by a young medic with whom he falls in love. After two tours, he knows he could ask to be stationed Stateside -- but he has unfinished business in Nam. Back in-country, Carmichael joins the covert Phoenix Program, where his mission is to take out the Viet Cong high command. He proves himself so lethal that the enemy places a price on his head. The Cong are not his only foes. His South Vietnamese "allies" betray him at every turn, even as he begins to doubt his own motives and honor. But when an ultimate act of treachery from within leaves him abandoned and surrounded, Jim Carmichael has only one choice.... Fight or die.