Wars are not fought by politicians and generals--they are fought by soldiers. Written by a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, Not a Gentleman's Waris about such soldiers--a gritty, against-the-grain defense of the much-maligned junior officer. Conventional wisdom holds that the junior officer in Vietnam was a no-talent, poorly trained, unmotivated soldier typified by Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy. Drawing on oral histories, after-action reports, diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Ron Milam debunks this view, demonstrating that most of the lieutenants who served in combat performed their duties well and effectively, serving with great skill, dedication, and commitment to the men they led. Milam's narrative provides a vivid, on-the-ground portrait of what the platoon leader faced: training his men, keeping racial tensions at bay, and preventing alcohol and drug abuse, all in a war without fronts. Yet despite these obstacles, junior officers performed admirably, as documented by field reports and evaluations of their superior officers. More than 5,000 junior officers died in Vietnam; all of them had volunteered to lead men in battle. Based on meticulous and wide-ranging research, this book provides a much-needed serious treatment of these men--the only such study in print--shedding new light on the longest war in American history.

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political results of these traumatizing experiences in the twentieth century.

In this masterful narrative, acclaimed historian Giles MacDonogh chronicles Adolf Hitler's consolidation of power over the course of one year. Until 1938, Hitler could be dismissed as a ruthless but efficient dictator, a problem to Germany alone; after 1938 he was clearly a threat to the entire world. It was in 1938 that Third Reich came of age. The Fuhrer brought Germany into line with Nazi ideology and revealed his plans to take back those parts of Europe lost to ''Greater Germany'' after the First World War. From the purging of the army in January through the Anschluss in March, from the Munich Conference in September to the ravages of Kristallnacht in November, MacDonogh offers a gripping account of the year Adolf Hitler came into his own and set the world inexorably on track to a cataclysmic war.

Mark W. Clark was a major figure in World War II. He was prominent as one of the top American commanders. Together with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, and George S. Patton, Jr., Clark was widely regarded as being responsible for victory on the European side of the conflict. - from the introduction One of the great World War II memoirs by a legendary American general in charge of operations in North Africa and Italy. General Mark W. Clark recounts his wartime exploits and tells the story of the battles in Tunisia and Italy with verve and attention to key detail. An unparalleled account by a great military leader.

In an eye-opening book that Booklist praised as ''impressively documented, essential Civil War reading,'' historian David Williams lays bare the myth of a united confederacy, revealing that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars - an external one that we know so much about and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. Bitterly Divided skillfully shows that from the Confederacy's very beginnings white Southerners were as likely to have opposed secession as supported it, and they undermined the Confederate war effort at nearly every turn. In just one of many telling examples in this rich and surprising narrative history, Williams shows that when planters grew too much cotton and tobacco and exempted themselves from the draft, plain folk called the conflict a ''rich man's war'' and rioted. Many formed armed anti-Confederate bands. Southern blacks, in what W.E.B. DuBois called ''a general strike against the Confederacy,'' resisted in increasingly overt ways, escaped by the thousands, and forced a change in the war's direction that led to emancipation. This immensely readable and riveting new analysis takes on the Confederacy's popular image and reveals it to be, like the Confederacy itself, a fatally fractured edifice.

Whether you believe in ghosts or other aspects of the paranormal, every culture has its folklore and many, many people have had an experience they simply can't explain. John Kachuba decided to investigate for himself, so he started with his home state of Ohio. Ghosthunting Ohio, examines more than 30 of the spookiest haunts, from cemeteries to inns and taverns to libraries and cafes, all over the Buckeye State. The results might surprise even the most devout skeptics.

The Reverend's Apprentice, the third novel by David N. Odhiambo, is a powerful, tragicomic novel about power, culture, and identity politics in contemporary America, as seen through the eyes of an African student. Jonah Ayot is a graduate student from a fictional central African nation, studying in a fictional American city some time after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003; the novel mirrors Jonah's own struggle as a newcomer to American life, trying to organize his perceptions around an identity that is global rather than parochial. But those perceptions become muddied in the reality of the new war zone - on American soil, where the foreign becomes familiar, and the familiar is no longer what it used to be. Dissonant, frantic, and full of the white noise of a culture at war with itself, The Reverend's Apprentice takes the familiar story of the stranger in a strange land to new, disturbing, breathtaking new levels. The American magazine Black Issues Book Review has said: ''David Odhiambo joins a third guard of African novelists made up of peers like Uganda's Moses Isegawa and Nigeria's Chris Abani. The books of this younger generation of African writers (heirs to the continent's greats from Chinua Achebe to Mark Mathabane) shed the starched language and steep romanticism of Africa's literary tradition to expose the rawer, hipper, more vulgar aspects of life as lived by most Africans today.''