by Thomas Daly

In many ways, it could be any residentialurban area in America—if you patched up the bullet-riddled concrete walls and replaced the towering minarets with church steeples. For the Marines of Rage Company on their first patrol as part of Operation Squeeze Play, every step down the quiet, narrow streets of Ramadi brings them one step closer to apotential death trap.

As the first scene in Rage Company explodes into frantic and harrowing action, it is clear that Captain Thomas Daly's memoir of the first six months of the Surge in Iraq is a taut, crisply written chronicle of bitter and ferociousmilitary action, yet it is also much more than that. In their effort to help clear al Qaeda from Anbar Province, Daly and his fellow Marines would learn that counterinsurgency required them to stretch beyond their training as efficient and deadly warriors. They would have to become diplomats, goodwill ambassadors, toughnegotiators, and shrewd judges of character. All this while remaining constantly vigilant and ready to spring into action on a moment's notice. These skills were in great demand at the outset of what became known as the Sunni Awakening, the uprising of local citizens against al Qaeda. Daly describes the tensemoment when, leading a small convoy to make contact with unarmed former Iraqi soldiers, he discovers that the group iswell armed, primed for a fight, and led by a general who expects to be treated with full military courtesy.

by Rita Cosby

When a father reveals his haunting past, a daughter takes an incredible journey of self-discovery . . .

Emmy award–winning journalist, TV host, and New York Times bestselling author Rita Cosby has always asked the tough questions in her interviews with the world’s top newsmakers. Now, in a compelling and powerful memoir, she reveals how she uncovered an amazing personal story of heroism and courage, the untold secrets of a man she has known all her life: her father.

Years after her mother’s tragic death, Rita finally nerved herself to sort through her mother’s stored belongings, never dreaming what a dramatic story was waiting for her. Opening a battered tan suitcase, she discovered it belonged to her father—the enigmatic man who had divorced her mother and left when Rita was still a teenager.

Rita knew little of her father’s past: just that he had left Poland after World War II, and that his many scars, visible and not, bore mute witness to some past tragedy. He had always refused to answer questions. Now, however, she held in her hand stark mementos from the youth of the man she knew only as Richard Cosby, proud American: a worn Polish Resistance armband; rusted tags bearing a prisoner number and the words Stalag IVB; and an identity card for an ex-POW bearing the name Ryszard Kossobudzki.

by Stieg Larsson

This novel not only puts the cap on the most eagerly read trilogy in years; the sequel to The Girl Who Played With Fire marks the completion of its Swedish author's career: Stieg Larsson died at the age of fifty in 2004. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is, however, too exciting and too adept to be read simply as a major author's memorial. From its onset, with "avenging angel" protagonist Lisbeth Salander lying in intensive care, this fiction pulses forward. One British critic called it "intricately plotted, lavishly detailed but written with a breakneck pace and verve...a tantalizing double finale—first idyllic, then frenetic."

by Nathaniel Philbrick

"More than anything else, he wanted to be remembered." That's how Nathaniel Mayflower) Philbrick sizes up George Armstrong Custer toward the end of The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and The Battle of The Little Bighorn, and no one will dispute that America's ultimate glory hound got his wish. Too bad the victorious Lakota and Cheyenne weren't feeling respectful after wiping out his command in what's now Montana on June 25, 1876. They not only punctured the dead Custer's eardrums because he "wouldn't listen," but -- in a detail long suppressed by decorum -- jammed an arrow up the corpse's penis.

Only his own folly was to blame. But to quote an American poet (well, he was) named Ronald Reagan, who in 1941 played the young Custer opposite Errol Flynn's J.E.B. Stuart in the wildly implausible Santa Fe Trail, facts are stupid things. Idealized in the Budweiser promotional lithograph that once decorated the nation's saloons, restaged to gallant or belittling effect in too many movies to count, the prairie Götterdämmerung we know as "Custer's Last Stand" has endured, above all, as an iconic American image. It's the perfect middle panel in an imaginary triptych whose bookends are Washington crossing the Delaware and the flag-raising on Iwo Jima.

by Sean Hannity

“Barack Obama is endangering our nation’s future. The time to stop him is now.” -Sean Hannity

Barack Obama and his radical team of self-professed socialists, fringe activists, and others are trying to remake the American way of life. They have used their new Democratic majority to launch an alarming assault on our capitalist system-while abandoning the war on terror, undermining our national security, and weakening our position in the eyes of our enemies. The “candidate of change” is threatening to change our country irreparably, and for the worse-if we don’t act to stop him now. Sean Hannity has been sounding the alarms about Obama and his agenda from the start. Now-in his first new book in six years-he issues a stirring call to action. Hannity surveys all the major Obama players-from the president’s affiliation with radical theology to his advisers’ history of Marxist activism, repression of the media, support for leftist dictators, and worse. He exposes their resulting campaign to dismantle the American free-market system and forfeit our national sovereignty. But he draws on the examples of Ronald Reagan and the GOP’s Contract with America to show how conservatives can unite behind this country’s most cherished principles and act now to get America back on the right track-while we still can.