The thrilling inside story of the secret "special operations" mission that paved the way for D- Day—and changed the way America waged war On D-Day, three hundred young American and Allied soldiers were dropped behind enemy lines to launch a secret sabotage mission code-named Jedburgh. Working with the French Resistance, the "Jeds" launched a stunningly effective guerrilla campaign against the German war machine. In this compelling narrative, Colin Beavan, whose grandfather Gerry Miller helped direct the operation for the OSS, tells the incredible story of the rowdy daredevils who carried out America’s first special-forces mission. Drawing on scores of interviews with Jeds, Beavan’s history reads like a spy thriller. Dodging Gestapo spies, the Jeds armed and trained fighters who liberated Paris, snarled German transport throughout France, and provided essential cover to the invading Allied forces. Beavan focuses on key figures like William Colby, Stewart Alsop, and John Singlaub—all of whom went on to high-profile postwar careers—and shows how Jedburgh pioneered the specialforces procedures still used in Iraq and Afghanistan today. This gripping history of the original special ops mission makes a major contribution to the literature of American warfare.
‘I was there, kneeling, unable to breathe, before a television screen, watching Armstrong step off Eagle onto the regolith. I read [Rocket Men] in the same mood of boyhood wonder. So should you’
(Sunday Times )
In this interlocking prose web of first-person testimony, novelist, poet, and playwright Ariel Dorfman relates the struggles of fifty hard-core human rights activists hailing from more than forty countries. Manifesto for Another World features the words and struggles of internationally celebrated activists including Vaclav Havel, Baltasar Garzon, Helen Prejean, and Marian Wright Edelman; and Nobel Prize Laureates the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Oscar Arias Sanchez, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Jose Ramos-Horta, and Bobby Muller. Equally moving are the stories of more than thirty others, unknown and (as yet) unsung beyond their national boundaries. From their diverse voices Dorfman culls the message: freedom from persecution, and freedom of opportunity, for all.
Ariel Dorfman has been hailed by The Washington Post as a "world novelist of the first order."
(3)'A stirring intellectual adventure, and a clear, fast-paced and indispensable history of events on which our future depends' Carl Sagan
'The best, the richest, and the deepest description of the development of physics in the first half of this century that I have yet read, and certainly the most enjoyable' Isaac Asimov
'The comprehensive history of the bomb-and also a work of literature' Tracy Kidder
'A monumental and enthralling history...alive and vibrant in the book are all the scientists...and each human being stands vividly revealed as a man of science, of conscience, of doubts or of hubris' San Francisco Chronicle
