Книги, похожие на «Glenn Davis, Occupation Without Troops»

Pulitzer prize nominee and William Hill award-winning writer Thomas Hauser’s tribute to Ali, the greatest sporting icon the world has ever seen.Few global personalities have commanded an all-encompassing sporting and cultural audience like Muhammad Ali. Many have tried to interpret in words his impact and legacy. Now, Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest allows us to more fully appreciate the truth and understand both the man and the ways in which he helped recalibrate how the world perceives its transcendent figures.In this companion volume to his seminal biography of Ali, New York Times bestselling author Thomas Hauser provides an updated retrospective of Ali’s life. Relying on personal insights, interviews with close associates and other contemporaries of Ali, and memories gathered over the course of decades on the cutting edge of boxing journalism, Hauser explores Ali in detail inside and outside the ring.Muhammad Ali has attained mythical status. But in recent years, he has been subjected to an image makeover by corporate America as it seeks to homogenise the electrifying nature of his persona. Hauser argues that there has been a deliberate distortion of what Ali believed, said, and stood for, and that making Ali more presentable for advertising purposes by sanitising his legacy is a disservice to history and to Ali himself.Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest strips away the revisionism to reveal the true Ali, and, through Hauser’s assembled writing and hitherto unpublished essays, recounts the life journey of a man universally recognised as a unique and treasured world icon.

A masterly history of the Dambusters raid from bestselling and critically acclaimed Max Hastings. Operation Chastise, the overnight destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams in north-west Germany by the RAF’s 617 Squadron, was an epic that has passed into Britain’s national legend. Max Hastings grew up embracing the story, the classic 1955 movie and the memory of Guy Gibson, the 24-year-old wing-commander who won the VC leading the raid. In the 21st Century, however, Hastings urges that we should review the Dambusters in much more complex shades. The aircrew’s heroism was wholly authentic, as was the brilliance of Barnes Wallis, who invented the ‘bouncing bombs’. But commanders who promised their young fliers that success could shorten the war fantasised wildly. What Germans call the Möhnekatastrophe imposed on the Nazi war machine temporary disruption, rather than a crippling blow. Hastings vividly describes the evolution of Wallis’ bomb, and of the squadron which broke the dams at the cost of devastating losses. But he also portrays in harrowing detail those swept away by the torrents. Some 1,400 civilians perished in the biblical floods that swept through the Möhne valley, more than half of them Russian and Polish women, slave labourers under Hitler. Ironically, Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris gained much of the credit, though he opposed Chastise as a distraction from his city-burning blitz. He also made what the author describes as the operation’s biggest mistake – the failure to launch a conventional attack on the Nazis’ huge post-raid repair operation, which could have transformed the impact of the dam breaches upon Ruhr industry. Chastise offers a fascinating retake on legend by a master of the art. Hastings sets the dams raid in the big picture of the bomber offensive and of the Second World War, with moving portraits of the young airmen, so many of whom died; of Barnes Wallis; the monstrous Harris; the tragic Guy Gibson, together with superb narrative of the action of one of the most extraordinary episodes in British history.