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Based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning story, Jim Sheeler’s unprecedented look at the way our country honors its dead; Final Salute Is a stunning tribute to the brave troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the families who continue to mourn them

They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. “The curtains pull away. They come to the door. And they know. They always know,” said Major Steve Beck.

Since the start of the war in Iraq, marines like Major Beck found themselves thrown into a different kind of mission: casualty notification. It is a job Major Beck never asked for and one for which he received no training. They are given no set rules, only impersonal guidelines.

Marines are trained to kill, to break down doors, but casualty notification is a mission without weapons. For Beck, the mission meant learning each dead marine’s name and nickname, touching the toys they grew up with and reading the letters they wrote home. He held grieving mothers in long embraces, absorbing their muffled cries into the dark blue shoulder of his uniform. He stitched himself into the fabric of their lives, in the simple hope that his compassion might help alleviate at least the smallest piece of their pain. Sometimes he returned home to his own family unable to keep from crying in the dark.

In Final Salute, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jim Sheeler weaves together the stories of the fallen and of the broken homes they have left behind. It is also the story of Major Steve Beck and his unflagging efforts to help heal the wounds of those left grieving. Above all, it is a moving tribute to our troops, putting faces to the mostly anonymous names of our courageous heroes, and to the brave families who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. Final Salute is the achingly beautiful, devastatingly honest story of the true toll of war. After the knock on the door, the story has only begun..
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I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness

In this extraordinary book, the 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother, Emily, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel.

In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war; a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, of the family's move to Africa, and of the impact of her parents' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.

"Here I still am," says Doris Lessing, "trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.

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Meridy Dresden was once a free-spirited, fun-loving girl. All that changed when the boy she loved was killed in a tragic fire. Now, years later, Meridy must return to the South Carolina Low Country and summon the courage to make a decision that may destroy everything she's worked so hard to protect-including her heart..
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The Ultimate Battle is the full story of the last great clash of World War II as it has never before been told. With the same "grunt's-eye-view" narrative style that distinguished his Brotherhood of Heroes (on the Battle of Peleliu), Bill Sloan presents a gripping and uniquely personal saga of heroism and sacrifice in which at least 115,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen from both sides were killed, as were nearly 150,000 civilians caught in the crossfire or encouraged to commit suicide by Japanese troops.

It is a story set against a panorama of more than 1,500 American ships, nearly two thousand Japanese kamikazes sworn to sink those ships, and two huge armies locked in a no-quarter struggle to the death -- the 541,000 GIs and Marines of the U.S. Tenth Army, and Japan's 110,000-man 32nd Army. Woven into the broader narrative, in Band of Brothers style, are the personal stories of men who endured this epic battle and were interviewed by the author. In many cases, their experiences are told here in print for the first time.

A few days after Japanese defenders surprised American assault troops by allowing them to land virtually unopposed on April 1, 1945, scouts of the 96th Division stumbled onto the outerworks of formidable Japanese defenses near Kakazu Ridge, where fierce fighting erupted. It would continue without respite for nearly three months as American forces used every weapon and strategy at their disposal to break through three cunningly designed Japanese lines of defense, each anchored by commanding high ground, intricate underground installations, and massed artillery. When one line was about to be breached, the Japanese would slip away to the next one, forcing the Americans to repeat the same exhausting and deadly "corkscrew and blowtorch" assaults all over again.

Much of the action in The Ultimate Battle unfolds among men pinned down under relentless fire on disputed hillsides, in the ruins of shell-blasted villages, and inside stricken tanks and armored cars. Sloan also takes readers aboard flaming ships and into the cockpits of night-fighter aircraft to capture the horror and heroism of men and vessels besieged by kamikazes.

When the battle was over, most of the GIs, Marines, and sailors who survived it were too worn out to celebrate. More than 49,000 of their comrades had been killed or wounded, and they knew that the even more brutal invasion of Japan's home islands loomed just ahead. But as Sloan makes clear, the slaughter at Okinawa helped to convince President Truman to use the atomic bomb against Japanese cities in the hope of shortening the war and averting a far more horrific loss of life.

The Ultimate Battle is a searing and unforgettable recreation of the Okinawa campaign as it was experienced by men who were there. It is filled with fresh insights that only those men can provide..
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Four Fort Bragg Army wives face hardship, tragedy, betrayal, and their own demons as they try to fulfill the antiquated role the Army expects them to. This is a true story about what happened when real life collided with Army-traditions. Each woman faced a life-altering event that forced her to find an inner compass and forge her own path. Not all succeeded.Under the Sabers explores:¥ What it is like for wives behind the gates to live in a place that is in a constant state of readiness for war.¥ How life+s little tasks-rolling out of bed to walk the dog or going grocery shopping at the post commissary-can affect one+s husband+s career; appearance and performance mean everything, and perception is reality.¥ The fact that class is everything. Army pecking order extends to Army families, too. Officer and enlisted wives swim in separate pools, belong to different organizations, live in different neighborhoods, and eat at separate clubs -all by design. ¥ The common fear of all military wives, regardless of their husbands+ ranks: life as a widow. Under the Sabers takes readers into the world of a wife+s worst pain..
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Lt. Col. John Sheppard submits his resignation following a mission in which two of his team members were lost, while Elizabeth Weir negotiates with two warring tribes who have traces of the Ancient ATA gene..
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Helps parents recognize the often subtle causes of alienation and teaches them how to prevent or minimize its damaging effects..
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Written by three renowned authorities in the actuarial field, Loss Models, Third Edition upholds the reputation for excellence that has made this book required reading for the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) qualification examinations. This update serves as a complete presentation of statistical methods for measuring risk and building models to measure loss in real-world events. It provides over 400 exercises that have appeared on previous SOA and CAS examinations, as well as Intriguing examples from the fields of insurance and business.

Features of the Third Edition include: 

• Extended discussion of risk management and risk measures, including Tail-Value-at-Risk
• Maintains an approach to modeling and forecasting that utilizes tools related to risk theory, loss distributions, and survival models
• Expanded coverage of copula models and their estimation
• New sections on extreme value distributions and their estimations
• All data sets are available on the book’s FTP site

 Loss Models, Third Edition is an essential resource for students and aspiring actuaries who are preparing to take the SOA and CAS preliminary examination. It is a must-have reference for professional actuaries, graduate students in the actuarial field, and anyone who works with loss and risk models in their everyday work.

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