New Releases by Donald L. Miller

Em Mestres do ar, Donald L. Miller conta a instigante saga da Oitava Frota Aérea do Exército americano na Segunda Guerra Mundial e dos jovens que voaram nos bombardeiros que ajudaram a levar a Alemanha nazista à derrota. A Segunda Guerra Mundial não poderia ter sido vencida sem os bombardeiros da Oitava Frota Aérea do Exército dos Estados Unidos da América. Em Mestres do ar, o premiado historiador Donald Miller conta a dramática história dos bombardeiros (Clark Gable e Jimmy Stewart entre eles) que levaram a guerra ao território de Hitler antes que os soldados Aliados pisassem em solo alemão. A Oitava Frota Aérea começou uma campanha limitada de bombardeios em meados de 1942. As perdas foram terríveis e a situação piorou ainda mais até que um novo tipo de avião de combate chegou para escoltar os bombardeiros em suas missões. Por fim, o bombardeamento teve êxito, destruindo entroncamentos ferroviários e refinarias de petróleo, e paralisando o esforço de guerra alemão, enquanto as escoltas de caças dizimavam a Luftwaffe. Mas o preço do sucesso foi alto: a Oitava perdeu mais homens na guerra do que o Corpo de Fuzileiros Navais dos EUA. Mesmo os sobreviventes sofriam terrivelmente com as condições de congelamento a bordo dos bombardeiros e com a tremenda tensão mental de voar em missões quase suicidas. Baseando-se em pesquisas massivas de arquivos nos Estados Unidos e na Europa, bem como em histórias contadas por centenas dos aviadores, Donald Miller escreveu um relato profundamente pessoal da primeira e única guerra de bombardeiros, descrevendo o sofrimento não apenas das tripulações como também do povo alemão sob as bombas. "Uma história minuciosa e envolvente sobre a guerra aérea norte-americana contra a Alemanha nazista. Recria de modo vívido a rotina dos bombardeadores." — William Grimes, The New York Times " Mestres do ar, de Donald L. Miller, é um feito impressionante. O efeito composto pela vitalidade da narrativa do livro e pela atenção aos detalhes humanos é fantástico em todos os sentidos — aterrorizante, extraordinário, extremamente admirável. Que história!" — David McCullough, autor de 1776: História dos homens que lutaram na guerra pela independência dos Estados Unidos "É impossível não ser envolvido pela paixão de Miller por seu objeto de estudo e pelo grande êxito de suas conquistas." — Keith Lowe, The Daily Telegraph

Tras Hermanos de sangre y The Pacific, Los amos del aire es el libro que ha inspirado la nueva serie de Steven Spielberg y Tom Hanks para Apple TV. Los amos del aire es la historia personal de los bombarderos aliados que en la Segunda Guerra Mundial golpearon con su carga letal el mismísimo corazón del Tercer Reich. Combinando el poder del rigor histórico con la fuerza narrativa propia de la mejor ficción, su aclamado autor, Donald L. Miller, transporta al lector en un viaje trepidante a través de los cielos teñidos de fuego sobre Berlín, Hannover y Dresde, una guerra sin cuartel con devastadoras consecuencias tanto para la maquinaria de guerra nazi como para el pueblo alemán librada a más de 7000 metros de altitud, unas cotas a las que jamás se había combatido anteriormente y que llevaron a extremos inconcebibles la resistencia física y psicológica de las tripulaciones aliadas. El combate aéreo era mortal pero intermitente: periodos de inactividad y ansiedad eran seguidos por breves descargas de fuego y terror. La campaña de bombardeos angloamericana contra la Alemania nazi fue la operación militar más larga de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, una guerra dentro de otra guerra. Hasta que los soldados aliados entraron en Alemania en los últimos meses de la guerra, fue la única batalla librada dentro de territorio germano. Pero más allá de los aspectos militares, Los amos del aire es un relato tremendamente humano, de la vida en la Inglaterra del momento y en los campos de prisioneros alemanes, donde decenas de miles de aviadores pasaron parte de la guerra, y de las espeluznantes marchas del hambre que los aviadores capturados se vieron obligados a realizar a través del país que sus bombas destruyeron. Elaborado a partir de entrevistas recientes, historias orales y archivos estadounidenses, británicos, alemanes y de otros países, Los amos del aire es un relato autorizado y profundamente conmovedor de la primera y única guerra de bombarderos de la historia.

In 1956, at age 14, Don ran away from home with his younger brother after a one-way argument with his father. “I don’t give a damn if you want to finish watching your program!” Bring the boats in now!” After years of abuse, neglect and a family with no love, this incident broke the camel’s back. The next day, Don stole $35 from his father’s drawer before telling his mom of his runaway plans. “Oh, yeah?” she replied in her usual lackadaisical way, and then continued on with her sewing. The plan was to ride their bikes from Illinois to Florida, unbeknownst to them, a pedophile killer lurked the streets of Chicago. At 18, Don found an escape – he dropped out of school to join the Navy, where he met many other challenges. He was first stationed in Hawaii, right after it had become a state, and was attacked by a huge, crazed Samoan man, who may not have been fond about the US military being in his homeland! Several years later he got into a major argument with his wife and took off with the family car. He was going to Hollywood, California to find his sister, even though he didn’t know her last name, or where she lived. A miracle occurred when he got there. Now at age eighty, the author is going through his toughest challenge: caring for his wife of sixty-one years, who is struggling with the last stages of dementia and under hospice care. Join the author as he looks back at the obstacles he’s overcome and the lessons he’s learned along the way in Oh No! Not Another Brat!

Winner of the Civil War Round Table of New York’s Fletcher Pratt Literary Award Winner of the Austin Civil War Round Table’s Daniel M. & Marilyn W. Laney Book Prize Winner of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award “A superb account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the longest and most decisive military campaign of the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, which opened the Mississippi River, split the Confederacy, freed tens of thousands of slaves, and made Ulysses S. Grant the most important general of the war. Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River. It prevented the Union from using the river for shipping between the Union-controlled Midwest and New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The Union navy tried to take Vicksburg, which sat on a high bluff overlooking the river, but couldn’t do it. It took Grant’s army and Admiral David Porter’s navy to successfully invade Mississippi and lay siege to Vicksburg, forcing the city to surrender. In this “elegant…enlightening…well-researched and well-told” (Publishers Weekly) work, Donald L. Miller tells the full story of this year-long campaign to win the city “with probing intelligence and irresistible passion” (Booklist). He brings to life all the drama, characters, and significance of Vicksburg, a historic moment that rivals any war story in history. In the course of the campaign, tens of thousands of slaves fled to the Union lines, where more than twenty thousand became soldiers, while others seized the plantations they had been forced to work on, destroying the economy of a large part of Mississippi and creating a social revolution. With Vicksburg “Miller has produced a model work that ties together military and social history” (Civil War Times). Vicksburg solidified Grant’s reputation as the Union’s most capable general. Today no general would ever be permitted to fail as often as Grant did, but ultimately he succeeded in what he himself called the most important battle of the war—the one that all but sealed the fate of the Confederacy.

An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment --

Le livre qui a inspiré la série événement de Steven Spielberg et Tom Hanks 1942. L''Angleterre est seule contre l''Allemagne nazie. De jeunes Américains de tous milieux et de toutes origines, noirs ou blancs (étudiants de Harvard, paysans ou futures personnalités telles que Jimmy Stewart et Clark Gable), vont prêter main-forte aux Alliés pour vivre la grande aventure et traverser l''Atlantique à bord de leur avion. Souvent au péril de leur vie. La Seconde Guerre mondiale aurait-elle pu être gagnée sans l''aide de cette 8e Air Force ? Pas sûr. Car ces aviateurs qui sont arrivés aux portes de l''Allemagne nazie avant même les forces alliées ont usé de stratégies et de méthodes innovantes grâce auxquelles l''ennemi a pu être déstabilisé puis paralysé... Quand les Britanniques attaquaient la nuit, eux bombardaient en plein jour, détruisant au passage chemins de fer, raffineries de pétrole, gares de triage, usines... Mais la victoire a un prix, et cette unité a payé très cher sa contribution à la campagne alliée : 26 000 tués – plus que dans la marine américaine –, 10 561 avions perdus, 14 000 blessés et 33 000 prisonniers de guerre. S''appuyant à la fois sur des témoignages, des journaux intimes et des documents officiels, Miller retrace l''épopée de cette unité aérienne et nous plonge dans l''intimité de ses jeunes aviateurs, mettant l''accent sur leur courage face au danger et à la peur. Dans ce livre qui se lit comme un roman, l''auteur dresse un portrait touchant de ces héros de guerre, qui fut la plus meurtrière du XXe siècle. LE PLUS GRAND COMBAT AERIEN DE LA SECONDE GUERRE MONDIALE

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published. Here are the horror and heroism of World War II in the words of the men who fought it, the journalists who covered it, and the civilians who were caught in its fury. Miller gives us an up-close, deeply personal view of a war that was more savagely fought—and whose outcome was in greater doubt—than readers might imagine. This is the war that Americans at the home front would have read about had they had access to the previously censored testimony of the soldiers on which Miller builds his gripping narrative. Miller covers the entire war—on land, at sea, and in the air—and provides new coverage of the brutal island fighting in the Pacific, the bomber war over Europe, the liberation of the death camps, and the contributions of African Americans and other minorities. He concludes with a suspenseful, never-before-told story of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, based on interviews with the men who flew the mission that ended the war.

Although most people associate the term D-Day with the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, it is military code for the beginning of any offensive operation. In the Pacific theater during World War II there were more than one hundred D-Days. The largest—and last—was the invasion of Okinawa on April 1, 1945, which brought together the biggest invasion fleet ever assembled, far larger than that engaged in the Normandy invasion. D-Days in the Pacific tells the epic story of the campaign waged by American forces to win back the Pacific islands from Japan. Based on eyewitness accounts by the combatants, it covers the entire Pacific struggle from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Pacific war was largely a seaborne offensive fought over immense distances. Many of the amphibious assaults on Japanese-held islands were among the most savagely fought battles in American history: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, New Guinea, Peleliu, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. Generously illustrated with photographs and maps, D-Days in the Pacific is the finest one-volume account of this titanic struggle.

Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler''s doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes readers on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people. Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller''s Air Force band, which toured U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America -- white America, anyway. (African-Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity.) The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the "King of Hollywood," Clark Gable. And the air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: the British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal. Masters of the Air is a story, as well, of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed. Drawn from recent interviews, oral histories, and American, British, German, and other archives, Masters of the Air is an authoritative, deeply moving account of the world''s first and only bomber war.

This volume looks at the history of the Eighth Air Force in Britain. It covers the individual destinies, the famous and notorious raids like Schweinfurt-Regensburg and Dresden, the social transformation of east Anglian villages by an influx of good-time Yanks, the POW camps, and the endless controversy about the ethics of bombing.

Malcolm Cowley called Lewis Mumford "the last of the great humanists," and indeed, in more than six decades of writing, Mumford made contributions to history, philosophy, literature, art, architectural criticism, and urban planning. The author of some thirty books, Mumford produced a body of work almost unequaled in the twentieth century for its range and richness. A New York Times Notable Book, Donald Miller''s engagingly written biography reveals Mumford''s full and fascinating life. Based on ten years of research and unprecedented access to original and private papers, Miller penetrates Mumford''s reserved public persona and takes in the complete man, his works as well as his days, as he struggles to transform the world -- and his own life -- in decades marked by unparalleled change. "Miller is an excellent critical guide to Mumford''s voluminous writing." -- The New Yorker "A gracefully written biography." -- Francesca McKeon, San Francisco Chronicle "With this large, large-spirited life of Lewis Mumford ... Miller takes his place in the first rank of contemporary American biographers." -- David McCullough

A chronicle of the coming of the Industrial Age to one American city traces the explosive entrepreneurial, technological, and artistic growth that converted Chicago from a trading post to a modern industrial metropolis by the 1890s.

Abstract: "The Resource Constrained Traveling Salesman Problem (RCTSP) is introduced and an optimal algorithm for its solution is presented. The RCTSP is shown to subsume the Prize Collecting TSP and Orienteering Problem. Computational results are presented for sequential and parallel computations for problems containing up to 200 cities. The RCTSP problem is used to optimally schedule a processing facility involving sequence dependent transition costs and an aggregate due date on all job completion times. A penalty is incurred for each job not completed by the aggregate due date."

This is the first comprehensive history of the anthracite industry and the unique regional culture that grew up with it. It is the story of one of America''s first great industries and of the people who made it great--from the miserably paid immigrant mine workers to the powerful coal barons.

An in vitro system for studying the ionophore properties of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor from the electric organs of Torpedo californica was developed. Efflux of ^(22)Na^+ from microsacs rich in AcChR was studied as a function of the addition of various agonists and antagonists to the medium. In the presence of agonists increased rates of efflux of ^(22)Na^+ occurred, and this affect was abolished in the presence of antagonists. The in vitro response to varying concentrations of carbamylcholine was determined. The desensitization phenomenon occurring in vivo was also found to occur in vitro.