Книги, похожие на «John Lanchester, Empire of the Sun»

War is foreverThe people on Earth no longer remember how the human race was nearly obliterated centuries earlier during the terror visited upon them by the merciless Xul. But the Star Marines, thirty thousand light years from home, know all too well the horror that still lives.In the year 2886, in the midst of the intergalactic war that has been raging non-stop for nearly a decade, the unthinkable has occurred. Intelligence has located the gargantuan hidden homeworld of humankind's dedicated foe, the brutal, unstoppable Xul.The time has come for the courageous men and women of the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force to strike the killing blow. But misguided politics on an Earth that no longer supports their mission could prove the Marine's greatest enemy—as they plunge bravely into the maelstrom of conflict . . . and into the heart of a million-year-old mystery.

Extreme Survivors tells the illustrated story of 60 of the most daring escapes, famous shipwrecks, and ultimate survival stories. These are astonishing stories of human endurance and endeavour.The statistics, descriptions, archive photographs and illustrative maps will give the reader a full understanding of how Joe Simpson crawled to safety in the South American Andean mountains, how Anthony Farrar-Hockley evaded capture after the Battle of Imjin River in the Korean War and how Shackleton’s men survived the incredible journey by boat to South Georgia.Sixty of the world's greatest survival stories. Here is a selection of them:Survival Stories• The Miracle of Stairway B, and how 16 people managed to escape death in the Twin Towers on 9/11.• The infamous story of the Montevideo rugby union team’s plane crash in the Andes, and their subsequent admission of cannibalism – 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the crash.Prison Escapes• Mary Queen of Scots and her escape from a remote Scottish castle.• Three men pull off what is possibly the only successful escape from Alcatraz.• Henri Charrière’s (Papillon) five escape attempts from the Devil’s Island penal colony.Wartime Escapes• The story of Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist who escaped the genocide of Pol Pot.• How the German soldier Cornelius Rost escaped from a labour camp in Siberia and trekked for 3 years to Iran.Shipwrecks• Ernest Shackleton’s incredible journey to South Georgia to save every man on an expedition.• The story of 18 year old William Shotton and how he navigated his ship after most of the crew perished from a mystery disease in 1893.Hostage Situations• Naheeda Bi’s ten years in captivity after her notorious tribal kidnapping in Pakistan.• The dramatic rescue of Íngrid Betancourt by Colombian security forces after six years as a hostage.

A masterly narrative history of the climactic battles of the Second World War, and companion volume to his bestselling ‘Armageddon’, by the pre-eminent military historian Max Hastings.The battle for Japan that ended many months after the battle for Europe involved enormous naval, military and air operations from the borders of India to the most distant regions of China. There is no finer chronicler of these events than the great military historian Max Hastings, whose gripping account explores not just the global strategic objectives of the USA, Japan and Britain but also the first-hand experiences of the airmen, sailors and soldiers of all the countries who participated in the Far East and the war in the Pacific.The big moments in the story are chosen to reflect a wide variety of human experience: the great naval battle of Leyte Gulf; the under-reported war in China; the re-conquest of Burma by the British Army under General Slim; MacArthur's follies in the Philippines; the Marines on Iwojima and Okinawa; LeMay's fire-raising Super-fortress assaults on Japan; the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the kamikaze pilots of Japan; the almost unknown Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria in the last days of the war, as Stalin hastened to gather the spoils; and the terrible final acts across Japanese-occupied Asia.This is classic, epic history – both in the content and the manner of telling.