The National Guard and the War on Terror

Check out the CARL catalog for holdings related to the National Guard and its role in the War on Terror. Online Fulltext titles

This book recounts one young National Guard soldier's experience in Iraq: The last true story I'll ever tell by John Crawford

Book description

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition, willingly exchanging one weekend a month and two weeks a year for a free education. But one semester short of graduating and newly married, he was called to active duty and sent to Iraq. Crawford and his unit spent months upon months patrolling the streets of Baghdad, occupying a hostile city. During the breaks between patrols, Crawford began writing nonfiction stories about what he and his fellow soldiers witnessed and experienced. In a voice at once raw and immediate, Crawford's stories chronicle the daily life of a young soldier in Iraq--the excitement, the horror, the anger, the tedium, the fear, the camaraderie. But all together, the stories gradually uncover something more: the transformation of a group of young men, innocents, into something entirely different. --From publisher description.

Related Podcast:

Author and Historian Michael Doubler talks about the National Guard and the War on Terror at the Pritzker Military Library

counterinsurgency iraq

George Washington and Benedict Arnold by LTG(R) Dave Palmer

See CARL Holdings: George Washington and Benedict Arnold by LTG(R) Dave Palmer

Exerpt of Review by Elizabeth Kantor

Dave R. Palmer, former West Point superintendent (and Vietnam veteran), with George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots, has given us a work of military history that reads like a novel and at the same time makes a valuable point about character. The two men whose stories he tells led remarkably parallel lives. Both Washington and Arnold lost their fathers and had to give up early their hopes of education to learn a trade. Both were successful men in civilian life. Both were aggressive, courageous and intelligent officers in the Revolutionary War. But they responded very differently to the envy and mistrust they encountered in their successful military careers. Read full review

Related Podcast

Pritzker Military Library Interview of LTG(R) Palmer 15 Mar 2007

Subject Iraq War - New to CARL in 2007

Click this link to view new titles relating to the Iraq War coming soon or available now at CARL.

Remember you can place a hold on an item currently on order or already checked out. If you're not quite sure how to do that see our 2 minute online tutorial.

countrerinsurgency iraq

US Army campaign in North Africa, WWII

The CARL has recently digitized original operational documents from the US Army campaign in North Africa during World War II. You can select this link to browse these and other North Africa related-items from WWII. Then select the PDF link(s) to view the document(s) that interest you online in their entirety.

Journalist and historian Rick Atkinson has written a Pulitzer Prize winning account of this campaign entitled "An Army at Dawn". Click on this link to see our holdings which include print, audio CD and downloadable MP3 file verisons.

Publisher Description:

In the first volume of his monumental trilogy about the liberation of Europe in WW II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the riveting story of the war in North Africa The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of courage and enduring triumph, of calamity and miscalculation. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. That first year of the Allied war was a pivotal point in American history, the moment when the United States began to act like a great power. Beginning with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algeria, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia. Battle by battle, an inexperienced and sometimes poorly led army gradually becomes a superb fighting force. Central to the tale are the extraordinary but fallible commanders who come to dominate the battlefield: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery, and Rommel. Brilliantly researched, rich with new material and vivid insights, Atkinson's narrative provides the definitive history of the war in North Africa.

book WWII US Army

The Long Road Home: A Story of War by Martha Raddatz

View CARL holdings: The Long Road Home: A Story of War by Martha Raddatz

Extract from Publisher Weekly Book Review: "Violent resistance in post-invasion Iraq kicked into high gear on April 4, 2004, when American troops in Sadr City faced a massive assault that claimed eight soldiers' lives and wounded more than 70 others. Raddatz, an Emmy-winning correspondent for ABC News, clearly aims to equal the storytelling in Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down in her account of the battle, and hits the mark with distinction. Extensive interviews with the commanding officers of the army's 1st Cavalry division and the soldiers pinned down in the streets provide a clear narrative of how U.S. troops, prepared for "a babysitting mission," found themselves in a bloodbath, as efforts to rescue the first soldiers fired upon met with even greater resistance from Mahdi militiamen who did not hesitate to use small children as frontline attackers."

Related Podcast
C-SPAN's "After Words": Martha Raddatz, author of "The Long Road Home," interviewed by Col. Thomas Hammes, author of "The Sling and the Stone"

Note: if this book is checked out you can place a hold. Not sure how? See our 2 minute online tutorial.

Coming soon to CARL : Trapped in the War on Terror by Ian Lustik

Check the CARL Online Catalog: Trapped in the war on terror by Ian Lustik

Excerpt: University of Pennsylvania Press Description

"Facing the threat of nuclear incineration during the Cold War, America overcame panic about nonexistent communist sleeper cells poised to destroy the country, a panic fueled by the destructive hysteria of McCarthyism. Through careful analysis of the Soviet threat, the nation managed to sustain a productive national life and achieve victory, despite the terrifying daily possibility of catastrophe. This book is inspired by that success. It points the way forward, not toward victory in the War on Terror but to victory over it. The first and most difficult step toward that victory is to know the enemy. In large measure, as Trapped in the War on Terror shows, that means understanding how al-Qaeda is making us our own worst enemy." Read full description.

Video

View author presentation in this Princeton University WMP video

Subject Islam - titles added to our collections 2006 - present

If you'd like to browse a list of titles added to our collections since 2006 relating to some aspect of Islam then simply select this link.

Can't come to the library just now? No problem. Click here to check out these quality online papers, monographs and theses relating to Islam and published in the last 12 months. All of these are available online in fulltext for your convenience.

World War II Operational Documents - Pacific Theater

The CARL Digital Library contains over 300 recently digitized operational documents from World War II including photos, maps, and operational orders and analyses. Click this link to browse a selection of materials covering the war in the Pacific Theater.

Ronald Reagan : Fate, Freedom and the Making of History.

Check CARL holdings : Ronald Reagan: Fate, freedom and the Making of History by John Diggins

Exerpt from New York Times Book Review by Rich Lowry: "Ronald Reagan’s reputation has been rising for so long, it is no longer shocking to read a respected historian hail him as, after Abraham Lincoln, “one of the two or three truly great presidents in American history.” That’s how John Patrick Diggins describes Reagan in a book that is a bid to save him from the dismissiveness of liberal historiography on the one hand and from his conservative worshipers on the other."

Read full review

Related Podcast John Patrick Diggins, C-Span "After Words" interview with George Will

Subject Special forces: selected titles added to our collections 2006 - present

• To dare and to conquer : Special Operations and the destiny of nations, from Achilles to Al Qaeda by Derel Leebaert
• Chasing ghosts : unconventional warfare in American history by John Tierney
• Roughneck Nine-One : the extraordinary story of a Special Forces A-team at war by Frank Antenori
• Special Forces in Iraq : war against Saddam Hussein by Eric Micheletti

Online Fulltext Titles

• A comprehensive transformation strategy for U.S. Special Forces for the 21st century by William Dodge
• SOF enablers : enhancing USSOCOM capabilities with cutting-edge expertise by Kenneth Wright
• United States Special Operations Command strategic issues for the long war by Joseph Wiley
• Creating a NATO special operations force by David Gompert

New at CARL - First into Nagasaki

Find at the CARL: Firstinto Nagasaki

Book Review by Chuck Leddy of the Boston Globe:

One 38-year-old American war correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner George Weller, violated the blackout, becoming the first Western reporter to witness the devastation on the ground . Weller, impersonating a colonel, sneaked into Nagasaki and brazenly demanded the help of Japanese military authorities in writing a report about the bombing. "Colonel" Weller interviewed eyewitnesses, survivors, doctors, and imprisoned Allied POWs and wrote a brilliant series of reports about the decimated city. Read full review

Related Podcast: Pritzker Military Library - Anthony Weller, author and son of respected reporter George Weller, discusses his father's career as a reporter, combat correspondent and how his unique experiences and reports from post-war Japan were censored by military authorities. Click here to listen

New at the CARL - "Ten Days in the Hills" by Pulitzer prize winner Jane Smiley

Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley

• You can listen to the NPR review by Veronique de Turin at this link

Summary provided by publisher:

"A glorious new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley: a big, smart, bawdy tale of love and war, sex and politics, friendship and betrayal—and the allure of the movies. With Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as her model, Jane Smiley takes us through ten transformative, unforgettable days in the Hollywood hills.It is the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards. Max—an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned—and his lover, Elena, luxuriate in bed, still groggy from last night’s red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, and talking about the war in Iraq, recently begun. But soon their house will be full of guests, and guests like these demand attention. There is Max’s ex-wife, “the legendary Zoe Cunningham,” a dazzling half-Jamaican movie star, with her new lover, the enigmatic healer, Paul (fraudulent? enlightened?). Max’s agent, Stoney, a perhaps too easygoing version of his legendary agent father, can’t stay away, and neither can Zoe and Max’s daughter, Isabel, though she would prefer to maintain her hard-won independence. And of course there is the next-door neighbor, Cassie, who seems to know everyone’s secrets.As they share their stories of Hollywood past and present, watch films in Max’s opulent screening room, gossip by the swimming pool, and tussle in the many bedrooms, the tension mounts, sparks fly, and Smiley delivers an exquisitely woven, virtuosic work—a Hollywood novel as only she could fashion it, told with bravura, rich with delightful characters, spiced with her signature wit. _It is a joyful, sexy, and wondrously insightful pleasure."

The CARL's 15 Most Popular NetLibrary Ebooks

NetLibrary offers the most comprehensive collection of eBooks and eContent available online. You can access a wide range of research, reference and reading materials from any location. Here are the 15 most popular ebook titles over the last 24 months. First time using NetLibrary? You can view an Online Demo here.

1. 100 Decisive Battles : From Ancient Times to the Present by Davis, Paul K
2. 50 Weapons That Changed Warfare by Weir, William
3. Rethinking the Nature of War by Duyvesteyn, Isabelle
4. The Real Warren Buffett : Managing Capital, Leading People by O'Loughlin, James
5. Understanding Arabs : A Guide for Westerners by Nydell, Margaret K.
6. The Future of Leadership Development by Murphy, Susan E
7. Cultural Intelligence : A Guide to Working With People From Other Cultures by Peterson, Brooks
8. No Excuse Leadership : Lessons From the U.S. Army's Elite Rangers by Barber, Brace E.
9. America As a Military Power : From the American Revolution to the Civil War byBlack, Jeremy
10. Countries and Their Cultures by Ember, Melvin
11. Lee & Grant : Profiles in Leadership From the Battlefields of Virginia by Bowery, Charles
12. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam by Emerick, Yahiya
13. This Man's Army : A Soldier's Story From the Front Lines of the War On Terrorism by Exum, Andrew
14. World War II : A Student Encyclopedia by Tucker, Spencer
15. Chain of Command : The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Hersh, Seymour M.

NetLibrary Ebook Start Guide

New Book by Dr. James Willbanks (Department of Military History)

Dr. James Willbank, Department of Military History, USACGSC has just recently had his book entitled "The Tet Offensive : a concise history" published by the Columbia University Press. For more details just click on the book jacket cover to visit our catalog.

Other selected works by Dr Willbanks

• The Vietnam War published 2006
• The Battle of An Loc published 2005
• Abandoning Vietnam published 2004

Coming soon to the CARL: Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan

Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan

"What did President Richard M. Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger and Chinese leader Mao Zedong really discuss during their unprecedented February 1972 meeting in Beijing? With surprising frequency, Mao turned the conversation to the subject of women." Read the rest of this review by Orville Schell of the Washington Post 24 Feb 2007.

Read chapter 1 of Nixon and Mao

Related podcast

Author Interview: Nixon and Mao

About the author:

Margaret MacMillan is currently the Provost of Trinity College and Professor of History at the University of Toronto and she is Warden-Designate of St. Antony's College, Oxford. She has written numerous articles and book reviews for both scholarly and non-scholarly publications. Her books include Women of the Raj (1988) and Peacemakers: the Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (2001), published in the United States as Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2002).

Other works by this author:

Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World

New from the Council on Foreign Relations: Hidden Iran

Check the CARL online catalog for our holdings of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic by Ray Tekeyh

Watch Ray Takeyh discuss his new book on this CFR Events Video.
Or select this link for just the audio portion

Excerpt of Book Summary (provided by the publisher)
"A leading expert explains why we fail to understand Iran and offers a new strategy for redefining this crucial relationship. Ray Takeyh, a leading expert on Iran’s politics and history, has written a groundbreaking book that demystifies the Iranian regime and shows how the fault lines of Iran’s domestic politics serve to explain its behavior. In Hidden Iran, he explains why this country has so often confounded American expectations and why its outward hostility does not necessarily preclude the normalization of relations. Through a clearer understanding of the competing claims of Muslim theology, republican pragmatism, and factional competition, he offers a new paradigm for managing our relations with this rising power."
Author Bio
Book Review - Published in Foreign Affairs, New York: Nov/Dec 2006 Vol. 85, Iss. 6; pg. 142

The Edgar Awards - Mystery Writers of America

The 2007 Award Nominees have been announced and finalists will be chosen on 26 April. Below are award nominees available at the CARL. For a complete list of nominees select this link.

• The king of lies by John Hart (Audio File)
• The virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard

• The pale blue eye by Louis Bayard
• A field of darkness [audio CD] by Cornelia Read

On the lighter side: what do the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley have in common?

The Stones and Bob Marley along with 23 others have been added this year to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry which is charged with preserving sound recordings that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States."

Since its inception in 2000 the National Registry has grown to some 225 recordings. This years' 25 choices selected by the Librarian of Congress include Paul Simon's "Graceland" (1986), Sarah Vaughn's "Live in Japan" (1973), "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones (1965), Franklin Roosevelts "Address to Congress" (8 Dec 1941), and an episode of the "Lone Ranger" from 1937. Click here to see all the 2006 selectees.

If you'd like your voice heard (pardon the pun) for the 2007 Registry you can make up to 10 nominations. Simply complete this online form to cast your vote.

Fort Leavenworth History in photos and text

Want to get a peak at some Fort Leavenworth history? Then click here to check out these photos and text available completely online. There's lots to see!

New at the CARL: Steven Johnson's "The Ghost Map"

The ghost map : the story of London's most terrifying epidemic--and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world by Steven Johnson

View the author interview on Book TV

Publisher description: An account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London, and an exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease in cities. In the summer of 1854, a devastating cholera outbreak seized London just as it was emerging as a modern city; more than 2 million people packed into a ten-mile circumference, a hub of travel and commerce, continually pushing the limits of infrastructure that's outdated as soon as it's updated. Author Johnson chronicles Snow's day-by-day efforts as he risked his own life to prove how the epidemic was being spread. When he created the map that traced the pattern of outbreak back to its source, Dr. Snow didn't just solve a pressing medical riddle--he established a precedent for the way modern city-dwellers, city planners, physicians, and public officials think about the spread of disease and the development of the modern urban environment

Subject Counterinsurgency: titles added to our collections - 2006 to present

Recent books on counterinsurgency available at CARL

• Fighting the War on Terror : a counterinsurgency strategy by James Corum
• Insurgency and counter-insurgency in Iraq by Ahmed Hashim
• Afghanistan and the troubled future of unconventional warfare by Hy Rothstein
• Counterinsurgency and the global war on terror : military culture and irregular war by Robert Cassidy
• On "other war" : lessons from five decades of Rand counterinsurgency research by Austin Long
• Air power in the new counterinsurgency era by Alan Vick

Online Fulltext Titles

• Irregular enemies and the essence of strategy : can the American way of war adapt? by Colin Gray
• Training indigenous forces in counterinsurgency : a tale of two insurgencies by James Corum
• Learning from Iraq : counterinsurgency in American strategy by Steven Metz
• Strategic challenges for counterinsurgency and the global war on terrorism by Williamson Murray
• Revisiting counterinsurgency : a manoeuvrist response to the 'War on Terror' for the Australian Army by J.C. Blaxland
• The vital role of intelligence in counterinsurgency operations by David Clark
• Irregular warfare : perhaps not so "irregular" by Frank Miller

New at CARL - Moscow 1941: a City and its People at War

Find at CARL: Moscow 1941 : a city and its people at war by Rodric Braithwaite Click here to read book summary Review by Andrey Slivaka, Washington Post 24 Dec 2006: Excerpt: What was existence like in Stalin's Moscow at the most fraught moment in the Soviet Union's weird history, when the German army was miles away from overrunning the city, with possibly genocidal results? This question, among others, is addressed by Rodric Braithwaite's Moscow 1941, a fascinating account of the Eastern Front's crucial showdown, the Battle of Moscow. The altercation the book treats was World War II's biggest, involving 7 million participants on both sides (Stalingrad, by comparison, involved 4 million) and an area of operations "the size of France." It was also, arguably, the war's most important battle; outside Moscow, the Nazis suffered their first military defeat. After it failed to overrun the Bolshevik capital, Braithwaite writes, the Wehrmacht no longer seemed invincible. "In their hearts," he writes, "many Germans already knew that, if the Battle of Moscow was not the beginning of the end, it was most certainly the end of the beginning." Read rest of the full review Related podcast BBC Interview with the author Rodric Braithwaite

New Electronic Titles - Government Printing Office

Here are a couple notable defense-related electronic titles published last month by the Government Printing Office. These are both in PDF format and require Adobe Acrobat reader to view.

A nation at war Seventeenth Annual Strategy Conference, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks

The new totalitarians social identities and radical Islamist political grand strategy, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks

What the critics are saying: Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings"

Simon Schama's newest work "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution" has been nominated as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. (Winner to be announced in March).

Select this link to see what the critics are saying about his work.

Publisher Description: In response to a declaration by the last royal governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves--Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom--escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.--

Other works by Simon Schama at the CARL:

A History of Britain

A History of Britain on VHS: Complete Collection

Citizens: a Chronicle of the French revolution

Related Podcasts

Hidden Histories of Slavery - Simon Schama talks about his new book on NPR

NYT Book Review Critic discusses Schama's "Rough Crossings"

Historian Arthur Schlesinger: Life and Works

Acclaimed historian Arthur Schlesinger died yesterday in New York at the age of 89. Here is an excerpt of his obituary by Douglas Martin published in the International Herald Tribune: "Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Arthur Schlesinger exhaustively examined the administrations of two prominent presidents, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, against a vast background of regional and economic rivalries. He strongly argued that strong individuals like Jackson and Roosevelt could bend history. The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy to use in writing his own history became, after the president's assassination, grist for Schlesinger's own "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House," winner of both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966." Click here to read full obituary. We have some 23 books available here at the CARL by Arthur Schlesinger including: (Select any link to go to our catalog)

• Pulitzer Prize 1946 for The Age of Jackson
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography 1966 and the National Book Award for A Thousand Days
• Winner National Book Award 1973 for Robert Kennedy and his times
• The Imperial Presidency published 1973
• A Life in the 20th Century published in 2002

• Read reviews of all these works and others at this link.

Google Search Tips

Print off or bookmark this excellent list of Google search tips prepared by Nancy Stimson, Outreach Services Librarian, UCSD Biomedical Library. These tips include strategies for limiting your results to authoritative sources and placing your search terms in a context that better ensures desired results.

Stimson makes two further points well worth heeding:

1. "People usually search Google by using the main search box or the Google toolbar, and often miss the advanced search page, command search capability, and other Google tools."

2. "Not everything can be found in Google. The “invisible web” often isn’t searched, as well as, obviously, materials that aren’t online. There are benefits in trying other search engines. Also, local, public and academic libraries have many valuable resources readily available, which people should explore."

If you have access to You Tube at home you can watch Stimson' s Interview on KPBS, San Diego Public Television entitled Power Searching on Google