Author: Tony Geraghty Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 446
Book Description
Offers a history of mercenaries, exploring ways in which soldiers for hire have been an essential component of modern and privatized warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Author: Richard Harding Davis Publisher: Copp, Clark ; New York : Scribner's Sons ISBN: Category : American fiction Languages : en Pages : 386
Book Description
A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economy. A huge best-seller, the novel did its part to push the nation into war against Spain, and stands as one of the most important texts in the literature of American imperialism. The appendices, which bring together primary materials by writers and politicians such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jose Martí, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and others, address such issues as social Darwinism, masculinity, and ideas of Anglo-American superiority.
Author: Richard Harding Davis Publisher: The Floating Press ISBN: 1776535731 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 139
Book Description
Richard Harding Davis' career began in journalism, where he made his name as a daring front-line correspondent in several wars and conflicts. Later, he would translate his battlefield experience into a number of fiction and nonfiction books. Real Soldiers of Fortune presents brief biographies detailing the lives and martial triumphs of luminaries such as Captain Philo McGiffen and the young Winston Churchill.
Author: Jay Mallin Publisher: Casemate Publishers ISBN: 1612005926 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
The “fast-paced, fascinating, often shocking” account of hired guns and their heroic adventures in hotspots around the world—includes photos (Milwaukee Journal). Merc is a classic; first published in 1979, its characters and stories are as vivid and worthy of retelling today. American soldiers of fortune have seen action on nearly every battlefield in history—from the Revolutionary War to modern times, men like John Early, a member of the famed Selous Scouts who hunted terrorists in Rhodesia. They fight because they enjoy combat, for causes in which they passionately believe, for money, or simply for adventure. The mercs profiled in this book range from West Point graduates and Harvard poets to former CIA agents and ex-cons. They are men like William Morgan, a guerrilla leader in the Cuban uprising against Fulgencio Batista, later imprisoned and executed by Fidel Castro; David Marcus, raised in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, who went on to a brilliant career in law and reform politics and died in 1947 fighting for the survival of a tiny new nation called Israel; William Brooks, Vietnam Special Forces veteran who, down and out in a cheap Paris hotel, joined the French Foreign Legion and ended up in a remote African outpost where he lived on Coke, salt tablets, and paregoric while fighting Somali insurgents; and George Bacon, an ex-CIA operative in Laos with mysterious connections, who died fighting Cubans in Angola. Because their private histories parallel the larger history of unconventional warfare and political upheaval, Merc provides insight into global conflicts—but most of all it is a fast-paced, eye-opening account of a little-known but fascinating way of life.
Author: Tony Geraghty
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Author: Jay Mallin
Author: Harding Richard Davis
Author: Ernest K. Gann
Author: Geoffrey Trease