"First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited"--Title page verso.

The founder of Blackwater offers the gripping true story of the world’s most controversial military contractor. In 1997, former Navy SEAL Erik Prince started a business that would recruit civilians for the riskiest security jobs in the world. As Blackwater’s reputation grew, demand for its services escalated, and its men eventually completed nearly 100,000 missions for both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was a huge success except for one problem: Blackwater was demonized around the world. Its employees were smeared as mercenaries, profiteers, or worse. And because of the secrecy requirements of its contracts with the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA, Prince was unable to correct false information. But now he’s finally able to tell the full story about some of the biggest controversies of the War on Terror, in a memoir that reads like a thriller.

"It has been described as the most exclusive Club in the world, but the entrance fee is something most men would not care to pay and the conditions of membership are arduous in the extreme." -- Sir Archibald McIndoe.

A truly inspiring tale about the history of the Guinea Pig Club. Plastic surgery was in its infancy before the Second World War — the most rudimentary techniques were known only to a few surgeons worldwide. The Allies were tremendously fortunate in having the maverick surgeon Archibald McIndoe operating at a small hospital in East Grinstead in the south of England. After arguing with his superiors, McIndoe set up a revolutionary new treatment regime and rightly secured his group of patients, dubbed the Guinea Pig Club, and honoured place in society. Based on extensive research into official records and moving first-person recollections, this extraordinary book brings home the heroism and triumphs of this courageous band of men and contains updated material on how their example is inspiring today’s wounded veterans.

How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.

Mustafah Dhada's compelling account of Guinea's struggle for independence from Portuguese rule. A Cape Verdian agronomist fully committed to nationalist unity in Luso-Africa and to the independence of Guinea, Amilar Lopes Cabral helped form the African Independence Party of Guinea Verde (PAIGC) (Partido Africano da Guine e Cabo). Through PAIGC's efforts, a nationalist army was established, a guerilla war was launched, and a protracted drive for a nation-state mounted. WARRIORS AT WORK addresses for the first time key questions regarding the fight to free Guinea: Was the PAIGC the only nationalist movement to emerge in Guinea? Was the mobilisation drive and nationalist war a straightforward march to victory with the PAIGC calling the shots? Was the campaign for statehood instigated solely to forge a new social order? Dhada cuts through revolutionary rhetoric to reveal a remarkable human drama fought at the front lines and beyond.

In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century. Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism. While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens—and often upsets—our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.