A remarkable eyewitness account of the most brutal combat of the Pacific War, from Peleliu to Okinawa, this is the true story of R.V. Burgin, the real-life World War II Marine Corps hero featured in HBO®'s The Pacific. “Read his story and marvel at the man...and those like him.”—Tom Hanks When a young Texan named R.V. Burgin joined the Marines 1942, he never imagined what was waiting for him a world away in the Pacific. There, amid steamy jungles, he encountered a ferocious and desperate enemy in the Japanese, engaging them in some of the most grueling and deadly fights of the war. In this remarkable memoir, Burgin reveals his life as a special breed of Marine. Schooled by veterans who had endured the cauldron of Guadalcanal, Burgin’s company soon confronted snipers, repulsed jungle ambushes, encountered abandoned corpses of hara-kiri victims, and warded off howling banzai attacks as they island-hopped from one bloody battle to the next. In his two years at war, Burgin rose from a green private to a seasoned sergeant, fighting from New Britain through Peleliu and on to Okinawa, where he earned a Bronze Star for valor. With unforgettable drama and an understated elegance, Burgin’s gripping narrative stands alongside those of classic Pacific chroniclers like Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge—indeed, Burgin was even Sledge’s platoon sergeant. Here is a deeply moving account of World War II, bringing to life the hell that was the Pacific War.

An unvarnished and moving memoir of a Marine veteran who fought his way across the Pacific Theater of World War II and whose story is featured in the HBO series "The Pacific."

The unsurpassed satirist of the ancient era was a young Syrian named Lucian, who, writing in Greek in the second century a.d., combined wit, irony, fearless candor, and exuberant comic fantasy to create the triumphantly irreverent dialogues and stories contained in this book. His genial mockery, aimed at man's omnipresent feelings, has never gone out of date. The jabs he gave the hypocrites; grandstanders, fakers and boobs of the ancient world can just as appropriately be administered to their counterparts in the modern world.Lucian's most typical genre is a parody of a Platonic dialogue, in which Zeus, Hermes, Eros, and other Olympians jabber in undivine harassment as some clever mortal (who very much resembles Lucian) is about to make scandalous fools of them. He also excelled at straight narrative, his two most famous tales being the elaborate science fiction spoof; "A True Story," and an old folk tale retold outrageously, "Lucius the Ass." His works were the product of an unrelentingly rational and skeptical mind, and have had an incalculable effect on writers and painters through the ages.Until this volume, the English language reader of today to appreciate the importance and intelligence of Lucian. No volume of representative selections in translation is in print. There are satisfactory versions of the complete works, but the reader who takes this long will most likely lose a good deal of the sting of Lucian's needle. Lionel Cassen also illustrates the full range of Lucian's subject matter and various literary forms and when translating tried to focus on the Greek spirit as opposed to the literal meaning.