The “fast-paced, fascinating, often shocking” account of hired guns and their heroic adventures in hotspots around the world—includes photos (Milwaukee Journal). Merc is a classic; first published in 1979, its characters and stories are as vivid and worthy of retelling today. American soldiers of fortune have seen action on nearly every battlefield in history—from the Revolutionary War to modern times, men like John Early, a member of the famed Selous Scouts who hunted terrorists in Rhodesia. They fight because they enjoy combat, for causes in which they passionately believe, for money, or simply for adventure. The mercs profiled in this book range from West Point graduates and Harvard poets to former CIA agents and ex-cons. They are men like William Morgan, a guerrilla leader in the Cuban uprising against Fulgencio Batista, later imprisoned and executed by Fidel Castro; David Marcus, raised in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, who went on to a brilliant career in law and reform politics and died in 1947 fighting for the survival of a tiny new nation called Israel; William Brooks, Vietnam Special Forces veteran who, down and out in a cheap Paris hotel, joined the French Foreign Legion and ended up in a remote African outpost where he lived on Coke, salt tablets, and paregoric while fighting Somali insurgents; and George Bacon, an ex-CIA operative in Laos with mysterious connections, who died fighting Cubans in Angola. Because their private histories parallel the larger history of unconventional warfare and political upheaval, Merc provides insight into global conflicts—but most of all it is a fast-paced, eye-opening account of a little-known but fascinating way of life.

Ron Liversedge could hardly wait for the call from the International Brigades. A veteran of the Great War, Canada's Great Depression, and scores of battles for social justice, he wanted to get to Spain to fight against Franco's attack on the young Spanish republic. It was the spring of 1937; Liversedge was nearly 40. The call came on May Day. Liversedge left Vancouver, on a clandestine journey through late depression North America, to a ship spiriting his fellow fighters to Europe, to an immediate brush with death when he is torpedoed by a fascist submarine, to rudimentary training of the international volunteers in Spain. Ill prepared and ill equipped, Liversedge in the Mackenzie Papineau battalion are thrown into withering front line action at Fuentes de Ebro and a grinding succession of battles, steadily beaten back by the fascist onslaught, to the final exodus from Barcelona. Liversedge's memoir of those two years, written in the 1960's, is a riveting, soldier's-eye account of life and death at the front, of the fascinating panoply of characters drawn to the Spanish struggle, of the ravages of the war on Spain and its people, and of the reasons that drove thousands of Canadians to volunteer. After almost half a century, Ronald Liversedge's illuminating account, richly annotated and illustrated, appears for the first time.

The production of this book represents a culmination for me of some 25 years of interest in the field of personality and substance use and abuse. In choosing the field of substanceuse and abuse for the focus of our research, all of the investi- tors collaborating in this research have been sustained by the awareness that the work we are doing has an important purpose. Substance abuse continues to have enormous impacts on individuals and families,and prevention and treatment - proaches developed to date have not always been as successful as we would hope to see. New advances in our fundamental understanding of the causal mec- nisms involved in the development ofaddiction may be necessary to advance our success in developing new forms of prevention and treatment for alcohol and drug abuse. The work in this book builds on the work of numerous previous investi- tors who have been drawn to investigate this topic. As you will notice in the extensive reference list, there have been hundreds of articles published on this topic. Although each of these references has added a small piece to our und- standing of the relationship between personality and alcohol abuse, the majority of these studies have been done on clinical samples and often involved no control groups or poorly matched control groups. Several important previous longitu- nal investigations have been conducted,but these investigations have usually not included general population samples or comprehensivepersonality test batteries.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, this is the story of the Canadians who went to fight in that epic conflict.