What would the war do without me? We March at Midnight is award-winning author Ray McPadden’s chronicle of his experience as a highly decorated Ranger Officer leading some of the most dangerous missions during the height of the Iraq and Afghan wars. In 2005, Ray joined the army in search of what he calls “the moment”—a chance to prove to himself and his brothers in arms that he is a true leader. His job is to establish the first outpost in the Korengal, Afghanistan’s deadliest valley, and his decisions and mistakes will have a permanent impact on the men he commands. During the fifteen-month tour, his unit receives numerous decorations for valor while suffering nearly 50 percent casualties, ultimately accomplishing their mission in a land considered unwinnable. Prowess with a rifle platoon soon earns Ray a position in the world’s premiere raiding force, the 75th Ranger Regiment, an accomplishment earned by less than 1 percent of the officers in the US Army, and during the most combat-heavy period of the twenty-first century. Ray spearheads the first joint-strike force of Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, in a shadow war against the agents of a foreign government, where lightning raids by helicopter, armored vehicle, and foot are his nightly routine. In 2009, when Ray returns to the same corner of Afghanistan where his military career began, he suddenly finds himself tasked with leading Rangers against a target he knows all too well: the home of friends from his first tour. As he leads one last raid, Ray is at war with himself. Conquering this unexpected enemy proves the greatest challenge of all. We March at Midnight is a blood-spattered tour de force of growing up, leadership, the nature of war, and its aftermath.

Four-tour combat veteran Ray McPadden offers a vivid portrayal of American soldiers facing an unseen enemy and death in the Mountains of Afghanistan. Sergeant Nick Burch has returned to the crags of tribal Afghanistan seeking vengeance. Burch's platoon has one goal: to capture or kill an elusive insurgent, known as the Egyptian, a leader who is as much myth as he is man, highly revered and guarded by ferocious guerrillas. The soldiers of Burch's platoon look to him for leadership, but as the Egyptian slips farther out of reach, so too does Burch's battle-worn grasp on reality. Private Danny Shane, the youngest soldier in the platoon, is learning how to survive. For Shane, hunting the Egyptian is secondary. First he must adapt to the savage conditions of the battlefield: crippling heat, ravenous sand fleas, winds thick with moondust, and a vast mountain range that holds many secrets. Shane is soon chiseled by combat, shackled by loyalty, and unflinchingly marching toward a battle from which there is no return. A new enemy has emerged, one who has studied the American soldiers and adapted to their tactics. Known as Habibullah, a teenage son of the people, he stands in brazen defiance of the Ameriki who have come to destroy what his ancestors have built. The American soldiers may be tracking the Egyptian, but Habibullah is tracking them, and he knows these lands far better than they do. With guns on full-auto, Shane and Burch trek into the deepest solitudes of the Himalayas. Under soaring peaks, dark instinct is laid bare. To survive, Shane and Burch must defeat not just Habibullah's militia but the beast inside themselves. And the Whole Mountain Burned reveals, in stunning, ruthless detail, the horrors of war, the courage of soldiers, and the fact that no matter how many enemies we vanquish, there is always another just over the next ridge.

In May 1929 Maxine Campbell and her cousin William Battersea arrive at their grandfather's house in New Jersey to find that the house is empty--and soon they're caught up in the contest for an ancient Arabian relic called the Eye of Midnight, which several secret societies are willing to do anything to posses.

Open Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wilderness—Brooke Williams’s year alone with his dog ground truthing wilderness maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the wilderness almost to Utah, dying a week short. The book is also about two levels of history—personal, as represented by William Williams, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as Williams. As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes that he has few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, “If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, and that appears at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course. The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires the author to create imagined scenes in which Williams meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Brooke Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness. Brooke Williams’s inventive and vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild. The author draws on Jungian psychology to relate how our consciousness of the wild is culturally embedded in our psyche, and how a deep connection to the wild can promote emotional and psychological well-being. Williams's narrative goes beyond a call for conservation, but in the vein of writers like Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, the author argues passionately for the importance of wildness is to the human soul. Reading Williams's inspired prose provides a measure of hope for protecting the beautiful places that we all need to thrive. Open Midnight is grounded in the present by Williams’s descriptions of the Utah lands he explores. He beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime. In doing so, he conveys what Gary Snyder calls “a practice of the wild” more completely than any other work. Williams also relates an insider’s view of negotiations about wilderness protection. As an advocate working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, he represents a minority in meetings designed to open wilderness lands to roads and hunting. He portrays the mindset of the majority of Utah’s citizens, who argue passionately for their rights to use their lands however they wish. The phrase “open midnight,” as Williams sees it, evokes the time between dusk and dawn, between where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the unconscious where all possibilities are hidden.

"The end of an empire. The birth of two nations. Seventy years ago, at midnight on August 14, 1947, the Union Jack began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House, New Delhi. A fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen--but the price of freedom was high, as a nation erupted into riots and bloodshed, partition and war. Freedom at Midnight is the true story of the events surrounding Indian independence, beginning with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten of Burma as the last Viceroy of British India, and ending with the assassination and funeral of Mahatma Gandhi"--

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason "Timbuktu" Diakité's vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family's history--from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden. Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds--part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man's-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging. In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors' origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents' struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden. What unfolds in Jason's remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.

(Book). 2 Minutes to Midnight: An Iron Maiden Day-by-Day offers a fresh form of band biography, examining myriad events in Iron Maiden's history in a detailed timeline form. The book springs to life with illustrative quotations, historical notations that put the band in the wider context of the rock world, and then, as icing on the cake, an explosion of color via live photography and memorabilia shots. Great Britain's Iron Maiden has enjoyed over 40 years of multiplatinum success the world over as pretty much the biggest, most famous heavy metal band in history, save perhaps Metallica. The band continue to tour exhaustively, a happenstance that surely will help keep this book front-racked in the minds of metalheads everywhere. A book on Maiden has been the #1 request that Martin Popoff's fan base has put upon the author for the past ten years and now he's delivered.