Adult

Pedro Martinez entered the big leagues a scrawny power pitcher with a lightning arm who they said wasn’t “durable” enough, who they said was a punk. Yet Martinez willed himself to become one of the most intimidating pitchers to have ever played the game, an eight-time All-Star, three-time Cy Young Award winner, World Series champion and Hall of Famer. In PEDRO, the always colorful pitcher opens up to tell his remarkable story.

C-SPAN’s yearlong history series, "First Ladies: Influence and Image," featured interviews with more than 50 preeminent historians and biographers. In this informative book, these experts paint intimate portraits of all 45 first ladies --- their lives, ambitions, and unique partnerships with their presidential spouses. It provides an up-close historical look at these fascinating women who survived the scrutiny of the White House, sometimes at great personal cost, while supporting their families and famous husbands --- and sometimes changing history.

As prize-winning historian Jonathan Schneer reveals in MINISTERS AT WAR, Winston Churchill depended on a team of powerful ministers to manage the war effort as he rallied a beleaguered nation. Selecting men from across the political spectrum --- from fellow Conservative Anthony Eden to leader of the opposing socialist Labor Party Clement Attlee --- Churchill assembled a War Cabinet that balanced competing interests and bolstered support for his national coalition government. The group possessed a potent blend of talent, ambition and egotism.

Midnight, Sunday, June 18, 1815. Britain holds its breath. Since Napoleon’s escape from Elba in February, Europe has been jolted from 11 months of peace back into the frenzied panic of a war it believed had ended. The nation is awash in reports and rumors. The Battle of Waterloo is close at hand. WENT THE DAY WELL? is an astonishing hour-by-hour chronicle that starts the day before the battle that reset the course of world history and continues to its aftermath.

The turning point of World War II came at Stalingrad. Hitler’s soldiers stormed the city in September 1942 in a bid to complete the conquest of Europe. Yet Stalingrad never fell. After months of bitter fighting, 100,000 surviving Germans surrendered to Soviet troops. During the battle and shortly after its conclusion, scores of Red Army commanders and soldiers, party officials and workers spoke with a team of historians who visited from Moscow to record their conversations. The tapestry of their voices provides groundbreaking insights into the thoughts and feelings of Soviet citizens during wartime.

General Douglas MacArthur matched an undeniable military genius with a massive ego and a rebellious streak that often seemed to destine him for the dustbin of history. Yet, despite his flaws, MacArthur is remembered as a brilliant commander whose combined-arms operation in the Pacific secured America’s triumph in World War II and changed the course of history. In THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA, celebrated historian Mark Perry examines how this paradox of a man overcame personal and professional challenges to lead his countrymen in their darkest hour.

While Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days may be the most celebrated period of his presidency, the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor proved the most critical. Beginning as early as 1939 when Germany first attacked Poland, Roosevelt skillfully navigated a host of challenges to prepare the country for its inevitable confrontation with the Axis. In NO END SAVE VICTORY, esteemed historian David Kaiser draws on extensive archival research to reveal the careful preparations that enabled the United States to win World War II.

Edmund Burke is both the greatest and the most underrated political thinker of the past 300 years. A brilliant 18th-century Irish philosopher and statesman, Burke was a fierce champion of human rights and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, and a lifelong campaigner against arbitrary power. Revered by great Americans, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Burke has been almost forgotten in recent years. But as politician and political philosopher Jesse Norman argues in this penetrating biography, we cannot understand modern politics without him.

On April 16, 1945, the crewmen of the USS Laffey were battle hardened and prepared. But nothing could have prepared the crew for this moment --- an 80-minute ordeal in which the single small ship was targeted by no fewer than 22 Japanese suicide aircraft. Using scores of personal interviews with survivors, the memoirs of crew members, and the sailors' wartime correspondence, historian and author John Wukovits breathes life into the story of this nearly forgotten historic event.

In her riveting account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the Lusitania is a window on the maritime world of the early 20th century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage --- a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival.