Best Selling Books by Michael Lee

The Only Worlds We Know is a nuanced and tactile look at both addiction, and what comes after. Patient meditations on loss and the land where the people we love live and are also buried. Includes poems such as "Waking Up Naked", "The Addict, a Magician", "The Pill", and "Just Yesterday" that have been watched by millions online.

A single day in the heat of armed conflict can shape the future of the world. Throughout history, individual battles have inspired the birth of nations, the devastation of cultures and the triumph of revolutions. Yet while some battles rise up as the cornerstones of history, others fade in our cultural memory, forgotten as minor skirmishes. Why is this so? What makes a battle "important"? Celebrated veteran and military expert Michael Lee Lanning offers a provocative response with The Battle 100: The Stories Behind History''s Most Influential Battles. Lanning ranks history''s 100 greatest battles according to their influence, both immediate and long-term. Thought-provoking and controversial, Lanning''s rankings take us to the heart of the battles and reveal their true greatness.

TIME TO CRIME is the author Michael Lees 1st book. It is an account of his time spent inside his citys county jail.While there he would listen to stories of how various inmates became incarcerated. In telling his story, he also tells of the injustice some suffer,some who are innocent,like himself, but are being held as guilty before their trails.This is part one, look for the sequel soon.

THEY WERE CONQUERERS. LIBERATORS. HEROES. MADMEN.ALL CHANGED THE WORLD FOREVER ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE This compelling study by Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning (U.S. Army, Ret.) lists the hundred most influential military leaders not by their victories, their combat prowess, or even their legacies, but by the lasting impact that their lives had upon the world, the lives they affected, and the historical significance of their actions in war. Warriors from every corner of the globe and every era are profiled, both glorious and notorious, modern and ancient, good and evil, including: George Washington Attila the Hun Adolf Hitler Napoleon Hannibal Alexander the Great H. Norman Schwarzkopf Ghengis Khan George S. Patton Sun Tzu Oliver CromwellILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOS AND PORTRAITS Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning (U.S. Army, Ret.) served as public affairs officer for General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. He has spent more than twenty years on active duty in the U.S. Army. He is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, in which he served as an infantry platoon leader and a company commander. The author of twelve books, Lanning lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

“A thorough, long-overdue study of Black Americans’ contributions during the War of Independence. . . . An important piece of American and African American history.” —Kirkus Reviews In this enlightening and informative work, military historian Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning (ret.) reveals the little-known, critical, and heroic role African Americans played in the American Revolution, serving in integrated units—a situation that would not exist again until the Korean War—more than 150 years later . . . At first, neither George Washington nor the Continental Congress approved of enlisting African Americans in the new army. Nevertheless, Black men—both slave and free—filled the ranks and served in all of the early battles. Black sailors also saw action in every major naval battle of the Revolution, including members of John Paul Jones’s crew aboard the Bonhomme Richard. At least thirteen Black Americans served in the newly formed U.S. Marine Corps during the war. Bravery among African Americans was commonplace, as recognized by their commanders and state governments, and their bravery is recorded here in the stories of citizen Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre; militiaman Price Esterbrook at Lexington Green; soldier Salem Poor at Bunker Hill; and marine John Martin aboard the brig Reprisal. As interest in colonial history enjoys renewed popularity due to works like Hamilton, and the issues of prejudice and discrimination remain at the forefront of our times, African Americans in the Revolutionary War offers an invaluable perspective on a crucial topic that touches the lives of Americans of every color and background.

I was blessed in my life to see a lot as well as learn a lot at the end I learned not to take advantage of people just because you can. I believe that the truth I told in this book can last forever and have the ability to change lives. Thank you for reading and allowing me to be truthful.

Vietnam was a different kind of war, calling for a different kind of soldier. The LRRPs--Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols--were that new breed of fighting man. They operated in six-man teams deep within enemy territory, and were the eyes and ears of the units they served. This is their story--of perseverence under extreme hardship and uncommon bravery--and how they carried out the war''s most hazardous missions.

Environment, population, interactions, communities, ecosystem.

If the costs of the Vietnam War were great to Americans and staggering to the South Vietnamese, they were even worse for the North. And those costs were borne largely by the individual soldiers—the soldiers who won the war. Based on interviews, soldiers’ diaries, letters, and government documents, this book, first published in 1992, gives a classic, soldier’s-eye account of the war our opponents fought and the men who fought it.

An action-packed overview of America''s elite military forces offers a close-up look at the training and operations of the Navy SEALs, Marine Corps'' Force Reconnaissance, and the U.S. Army''s Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces. Original.

"The American sniper could be regarded as the greatest all-around rifleman the world has ever known. . . ." At the start of the war in Vietnam, the United States had no snipers; by the end of the war, Marine and army precision marksmen had killed more than 10,000 NVA and VC soldiers--the equivalent of an entire division--at the cost of under 20,000 bullets, proving that long-range shooters still had a place in the battlefield. Now noted military historian Michael Lee Lanning shows how U.S. snipers in Vietnam--combining modern technology in weapons, ammunition, and telescopes--used the experience and traditions of centuries of expert shooters to perfect their craft. To provide insight into the use of American snipers in Vietnam, Lanning interviewed men with combat trigger time, as well as their instructors, the founders of the Marine and U.S. Army sniper programs, and the generals to whom they reported. Backed by hard information and firsthand accounts, the author demonstrates how the skills these one-shot killers honed in the jungles of Vietnam provided an indelible legacy that helped save American lives in Grenada, the Gulf War, and Somalia and continues to this day with American troops in Bosnia.

From the War for Independence to the War on Terror, American military intelligence has often failed, costing needless casualties and squandering money and materiel as well as prestige – and all too often it has failed to learn from its mistakes. Senseless Secrets covers more than 200 years of intelligence breakdowns in every American war, including not only how intelligence has been wrong, but also how good intel has failed to make it to battlefield commanders, how spies and traitors have infiltrated the military intelligence community, and more. Here are stories of Benedict Arnold’s turn in the Revolution, George McClellan’s reliance on the Pinkertons’ inflated estimates of enemy strengths in the Civil War, Custer’s flawed intelligence prior to the Little Bighorn, the controversy over Pearl Harbor, the surprise German attack that started the Battle of the Bulge, the failure to convey useful intelligence to small-unit commanders in Vietnam, overestimates of Iraqi strength during Operation Desert Storm, the bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear arsenal in 2002-03, and the chaos surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Senseless Secrets is a military history of the United States through its intelligence operations. It should be required reading inside the U.S. military and beyond.

Reeling from the loss of her mother, plagued with a bad case of writer''s block (and don''t even talk about those extra twenty pounds), Renata DeChavannes feels as though everything is just plain wrong. And that was before the tabloids caught her sweetheart, filmmaker Ferg Lauderdale, sharing an intimate squeeze with Hollywood''s hottest young tamale. But the granddaughter of the formidable Honora DeChavannes possesses more hell than belle in her backbone—and she''s about to reclaim it. Heading south to Honora''s home on the Gulf Coast, Renata is determined to stop feeling like a wilted gardenia and emerge as the unstoppable kudzu her beloved grandmother proudly proclaimed she would be. But for that to happen Renata''s got to face some not-so-genteel ghosts from her past, discover the truth about the mother she desperately misses, and make peace with the first man who abandoned her and broke her heart: her handsome and distant father.

The Civil War was the defining event in American history. The Civil War 100 uses a truly novel approach to analyze the respective importance of the events, leaders and battles of America''s most important war. "Across this easily accessible reference, readers meet not only such icons as Lincoln and Lee, but also chronic fumblers whose tarnished reputations have most often sunk beneath the notice of the endless waves of Civil War histories...A recommended reference for the aficionado and the uninitiated alike. Those well-versed in Civil War lore will enjoy the intellectual challenge of supporting or debunking Lanning''s rankings, while the merely curious will be exposed to an insightful world of detail that they may have otherwise missed." --ForeWord Magazine

As soldiers who have just returned from war, we fight a separate war daily in an attempt to leave the war behind. Many soldiers, just like myself, come home from war only to fight a separate internal battle, with debilitating illnesses such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. It was important for me to share my story not only for myself but for those who have fought, for those who have fallen, and for those who continue to wage war in order for the United States of America to continue to remain free. The price of freedom is not free. War is chaos, and many soldiers bear the scars from it for the rest of our lives.

SOLDIERS OF $$ Privateers, contract killers, corporate warriors. Contract soldiers go by many names, but they all have one thing in common: They fight for money and plunder rather than liberty, God, or country. Now acclaimed author and war vet Michael Lee Lanning traces the compelling history of these fighting machines–from the “Sea Peoples” who fought for the pharaohs’ greater glory to today’s soldiers for hire from private military companies (PMCs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges is a fascinating account of the men who fight other people’s wars–the Greeks who built an empire for Alexander the Great, the Nubians who accompanied Hannibal across the Alps, the Irish who became the first to go global in their search for work. Soldiers of fortune have always had the power to change the course of war, and Lanning examines their pivotal roles in individual battles and in the rise and fall of empires. As the employment of contract soldiers spreads in Iraq and America’s War on Terrorism–the U.S. paid $30 billion to PMCs in 2003 alone–Mercenaries offers a valuable inside look at a system that appears embedded in our nation’s future. Includes eight pages of photographs

"For more than two hundred years African Americans have fought for their own personal freedom as well as that of their fellow Americans. Blacks contributed to the success of the revolution that gained the country, but not its slaves, their independence. Blacks played a significant role in preserving the union in the Civil War and securing their own freedom. From the expanse of the American West to the heights of San Juan Hill, from the trenches of France to the heartlands of Germany and Japan, from the icy mountain ridges of Korea to the thick jungles of Vietnam and the sands of the Persian Gulf, African Americans have performed loyally and bravely." —From The African-American Soldier In this moving and revealing account, Michael Lee Lanning brings to life the battles in which African Americans fought so courageously to become full citizens by risking their lives for their country. This updated edition includes analyses of African-American soldiers'' involvement in recent U.S. conflicts, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Michael Lee Lanning serves as public affairs officer for General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. He has spent more than twenty years on active duty in the United States Army. He has written nine books of military history, including The Military 100 and Senseless Secrets. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

The award-winning journalist and author of Hidden History of Alexandria, D.C. combs through the haunted past of this Virginia colonial town. The ghost of a Revolutionary War spy that fosters a centuries-old grudge against the British, two young lovers parted by fire but reunited in death and Union and Confederate soldiers who still battle at the Hotel Monaco are among the haunts of Alexandria, Virginia. Beside the Potomac and the twice-blooming wisteria, local author Michael Lee Pope takes readers on a thrilling journey with his collection of historic ghost lore. Join him as he searches for the identity of the Female Stranger of Gadsby’s Tavern and wanders the lonely halls of Woodlawn Plantation to encounter Alexandria’s restless souls. Includes photos! “A thrilling journey . . . [A] Halloween crowd-pleaser.” —Local Kicks

Originally published: [New York]: Ballantine Books, 1987.

Discover the untold stories that precede "The Lucy Walker Chronicles Series." Explore the intertwined lives of two families and the secrets behind Lee''s family''s mysterious flight into hiding, followed by Lucy and her brother''s desperate search for help.

Behind-enemy-lines stories of elite Marines in Vietnam Force Recon companies were the eyes and ears of the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Classified as special operations capable, Force Recon Marines ventured into the enemy’s backyard to conduct reconnaissance and launched deliberate strikes against the enemy. Lanning and Stubbe blend analysis and you-are-there stories of Force Recon in action to create the definitive account of Recon Marines.