The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

** June 5, 1967. **The nineteen-year-old state of Israel is surrounded by enemies who want nothing less than her utter extinction. The Soviet-equipped Egyptian Army has amassed a thousand tanks on the nation’s southern border. Syrian heavy guns are shelling her from the north. To the east, Jordan and Iraq are moving mechanized brigades and fighter squadrons into position to attack. Egypt’s President Nasser has declared that the Arab force’s objective is the destruction of Israel.” The rest of the world turns a blind eye to the new nation’s desperate peril. June 10, 1967. The Arab armies have been routed, ground divisions wiped out, air forces totally destroyed. Israel’s citizen-soldiers have seized the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The land under Israeli control has tripled. Her charismatic defense minister, Moshe Dayan, has entered the Lion’s Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem to stand with the paratroopers who have liberated Judaism’s holiest site—the Western Wall, part of the ruins of Solomon’s temple, which has not been in Jewish hands for nineteen hundred years. It is one of the most unlikely and astonishing military victories in history. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with veterans of the war—fighter and helicopter pilots, tank commanders and Recon soldiers, paratroopers, as well as women soldiers, wives, and others—bestselling author Steven Pressfield tells the story of the Six Day War as you’ve never experienced it before: in the voices of the young men and women who battled not only for their lives but for the survival of a Jewish state, and for the dreams of their ancestors. By turns inspiring, thrilling, and heartbreaking, The Lion’s Gate is both a true tale of military courage under fire and a journey into the heart of what it means to fight for one’s people.
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The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life

The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

In the Depression year of 1931, on the golf links at Krewe Island off Savannah's windswept shore, two legends of the game - Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen - meet for a mesmerizing thirty-six hole showdown. They are joined by another player, a troubled war hero called Rannulph Junah. But the key to the outcome lies not with these golfing titans but with Junah's caddie and mentor, the mysterious, sage and charismatic Bagger Vance - for he is the custodian of the secret of the Authentic Swing... Written in the spirit of Bernard Malamud's The Natural and sharing the magic of the celebrated Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, Steven Pressfield's first novel - never before published in the UK - reveals the true nature of the game. Page-turning, spellbinding and affecting, it is a novel for golfers and non-golfers alike - a story in which the search for the Authentic Swing becomes a metaphor for the search for the Authentic Self. 'A marvellous, life-affirming book' Mark McCormack 'Golf and mysticism...a dazzler and a thought-provoker' Los Angeles Times 'Good stuff...a philosophical fantasy imagined on a golf course, heavy with fog, storm, fireworks and the howling winds of supernatural forces' New York Times Book Review 'Memorable...a page-turner...golf played a foot or so from Alice's looking glass, with mystical realms poised to engulf the reader at every turn' Sports Illustrated
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Tides of War

Tides of War

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield's The Profession. Brilliant at war, a master of politics, and a charismatic lover, Alcibiades was Athens’ favorite son and the city’s greatest general. A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory. But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies. For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither. Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation.
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36 Righteous Men

36 Righteous Men

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

New York homicide detectives pursue a serial killer in this apocalyptic thriller.When detectives James Manning and Covina "Dewey" Duwai are called in to investigate a series of bizarre murders, they make a shocking discovery: the legend of the hidden righteous ones, the 36 who preserve the world from destruction, is no legend at all. They are real, and they are being murdered.As the bodies pile up and the world tilts into chaos, Manning and Dewey must protect the righteous ones from a ruthless killer able to beguile his victims and command them against their will. The detectives find their traditional arsenal of bullets and blades of little use against a foe who seems to anticipate their every move.Joining forces with a disgraced but brilliant rabbinical scholar and a renowned anthropologist—who's also the last of the righteous ones—Manning and Dewey set off on a perilous quest from New York to Gehenna to defeat a murderer...
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The Virtues of War

The Virtues of War

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield's The Profession. I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. So begins Alexander’s extraordinary confession on the eve of his greatest crisis of leadership. By turns heroic and calculating, compassionate and utterly merciless, Alexander recounts with a warrior’s unflinching eye for detail the blood, the terror, and the tactics of his greatest battlefield victories. Whether surviving his father’s brutal assassination, presiding over a massacre, or weeping at the death of a beloved comrade-in-arms, Alexander never denies the hard realities of the code by which he lives: the virtues of war. But as much as he was feared by his enemies, he was loved and revered by his friends, his generals, and the men who followed him into battle. Often outnumbered, never outfought, Alexander conquered every enemy the world stood against him–but the one he never saw coming. . . .
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The Afghan Campaign

The Afghan Campaign

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

BONUS: This eBook edition contains an excerpt from THE PROFESSION: A Thriller by Steven Pressfield. On sale June 2011. 2,300 years ago an unbeaten army of the West invaded the homeland of a fierce Eastern tribal foe. This is one soldier’s story . . . The bestselling novelist of ancient warfare returns with a riveting historical novel that re-creates Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Afghan kingdoms in 330 b.c. In a story that might have been ripped from today’s combat dispatches, Steven Pressfield brings to life the confrontation between an invading Western army and fierce Eastern warriors determined at all costs to defend their homeland. Narrated by an infantryman in Alexander’s army, The Afghan Campaign explores the challenges, both military and moral, that Alexander and his soldiers face as they embark on a new type of war and are forced to adapt to the methods of a ruthless foe that employs terror and insurgent tactics. An edge-of-your-seat adventure, The Afghan Campaign once again demonstrates Pressfield’s profound understanding of the hopes and desperation of men in battle and of the historical realities that continue to influence our world.
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Last of the Amazons Last of the Amazons Last of the Amazons

Last of the Amazons Last of the Amazons Last of the Amazons

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

The author of the international bestsellers "Gates of Fire" and "Tides of War" delivers his most gripping and imaginative novel of the ancient world-a stunning epic oflove and war that breathes life into the grand myth of the ferocious female warrior culture of the Amazons. Steven Pressfield has gained a passionate worldwide following for his magnificent novels ofancient Greece, "Gates of Fire" and "Tides of War." In "Last of the Amazons," Pressfield has surpassed himself, re-creating a vanished world in a brilliant novel thatwill delight his loyal readers and bring legions more to his singular and powerful restoration of the past. In the time before Homer, the legendary Theseus, King of Athens (an actual historicalfigure), set sail on a journey that brought him into the land of "tal Kyrte," the "free people," a nation of proud female warriors whom the Greeks called "Amazons."The Amazons, bound to each other as lovers as well as fighters, distrusted the Greeks, with their boastful talk of "civilization." So when the great war queen Antiope fell in love with Theseus and fledwith the Greeks, the mighty Amazon nation rose up in rage. "Last of the Amazons" is not merely a masterful tale of war and revenge. Pressfield has created a cast of extraordinarilyvivid characters, from the unforgettable Selene, whose surrender to the Greeks does nothing to tame her; to her lover, Damon, an Athenian warrior who grows to cherish the wild Amazon ways; to the narrator, Bones, a younggirl from a noble family who was nursed by Selene from birth and secretly taught the Amazon way; to the great Theseus, the tragic king; and to Antiope, the noble queen who betrayed "tal Kyrte" for the loveof Theseus. With astounding immediacy and extraordinary attention to military detail, Pressfield transports readers into the heat and terror of war. Equally impressive is his creation of the Amazonnation, its people, its rituals and myths, its greatness and savagery. "Last of the Amazons" is thrilling on every page, an epic tale of the clash between wildness and civilization, patriotism and love, man and woman. "From the Hardcover edition."
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The Profession

The Profession

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

The “master storyteller” (Publishers Weekly) and bestselling author of Gates of Fire, The Afghan Campaign, and Killing Rommel returns with a stunning, chillingly plausible near-future thriller about the rise of a privately financed and global military industrial complex. The year is 2032. The third Iran-Iraq war is over; the 11/11 dirty bomb attack on the port of Long Beach, California is receding into memory; Saudi Arabia has recently quelled a coup; Russians and Turks are clashing in the Caspian Basin; Iranian armored units, supported by the satellite and drone power of their Chinese allies, have emerged from their enclaves in Tehran and are sweeping south attempting to recapture the resource rich territory that had been stolen from them, in their view, by Lukoil, BP, and ExxonMobil and their privately-funded armies. Everywhere military force is for hire.  Oil companies, multi-national corporations and banks employ powerful, cutting-edge mercenary armies to control global chaos and protect their riches.  Even nation states enlist mercenary forces to suppress internal insurrections, hunt terrorists, and do the black bag jobs necessary to maintain the new New World Order. Force Insertion is the world's merc monopoly. Its leader is the disgraced former United States Marine General James Salter, stripped of his command by the president for nuclear saber-rattling with the Chinese and banished to the Far East.  A grandmaster military and political strategist, Salter deftly seizes huge oil and gas fields, ultimately making himself the most powerful man in the world.  Salter's endgame is to take vengeance on those responsible for his exile and then come home...as Commander in Chief. The only man who can stop him is the novel's narrator, Gilbert "Gent" Gentilhomme, Salter's most loyal foot soldier and as close to him as the son Salter lost. As this action-jammed, lightning fast, and brutally realistic novel builds to its heart-stopping climax Gent launches his personally and professionally most desperate mission: to take out his mentor and save the United States from self destruction. Infused by a staggering breadth of research in military tactics and steeped in the timeless themes of the honor and valor of men at war that distinguish all of Pressfield’s fiction, The Profession is that rare novel that informs and challenges the reader almost as much as it entertains. From the Hardcover edition.
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Killing Rommel

Killing Rommel

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

Steven Pressfield's quintet of acclaimed, bestselling novels of ancient warfare-- Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Last of the Amazons, The Virtues of Wa, r and The Afghan Campaign-- have earned him a reputation as a master chronicler of military history, a supremely literate and engaging storyteller, and an author with acute insight into the minds of men in battle. In Killing Rommel Pressfield extends his talents to the modern world with a WWII tale based on the real-life exploits of the Long Range Desert Group, an elite British special forces unit that took on the German Afrika Korps and its legendary commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. Autumn 1942. Hitler's legions have swept across Europe; France has fallen; Churchill and the English are isolated on their island. In North Africa, Rommel and his Panzers have routed the British Eighth Army and stand poised to overrun Egypt, Suez, and the oilfields of the Middle East. With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance, the British hatch a desperate plan--send a small, highly mobile, and heavily armed force behind German lines to strike the blow that will stop the Afrika Korps in its tracks. Narrated from the point of view of a young lieutenant, Killing Rommel brings to life the flair, agility, and daring of this extraordinary secret unit, the Long Range Desert Group. Stealthy and lethal as the scorpion that serves as their insignia, they live by their motto: Non Vi Sed Arte--Not by Strength, by Guile as they gather intelligence, set up ambushes, and execute raids. Killing Rommel chronicles the tactics, weaponry, and specialized skills needed for combat, under extreme desert conditions. And it captures the camaraderie of this band of brothers as they perform the acts of courage and cunning crucial to the Allies' victory in North Africa. As in all of his previous novels, Pressfield powerfully renders the drama and intensity of warfare, the bonds of men in close combat, and the surprising human emotions and frailties that come into play on the battlefield. A vivid and authoritative depiction of the desert war, Killing Rommel brilliantly dramatizes an aspect of World War II that hasn't been in the limelight since Patton. Combining scrupulous historical detail and accuracy with remarkable narrative momentum, this galvanizing novel heralds Pressfield's gift for bringing more recent history to life.
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Last of the Amazons

Last of the Amazons

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield's The Profession. The author of the international bestsellers Gates of Fire and Tides of War delivers his most gripping and imaginative novel of the ancient world--a stunning epic of love and war that breathes life into the grand myth of the ferocious female warrior culture of the Amazons. Steven Pressfield has gained a passionate worldwide following for his magnificent novels of ancient Greece, Gates of Fire and Tides of War. In Last of the Amazons, Pressfield has surpassed himself, re-creating a vanished world in a brilliant novel that will delight his loyal readers and bring legions more to his singular and powerful restoration of the past. In the time before Homer, the legendary Theseus, King of Athens (an actual historical figure), set sail on a journey that brought him into the land of tal Kyrte, the "free people," a...
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Virtues of War

Virtues of War

Steven Pressfield

Nonfiction / Language / Writing

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Steven Pressfield's The Profession. I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. So begins Alexander's extraordinary confession on the eve of his greatest crisis of leadership. By turns heroic and calculating, compassionate and utterly merciless, Alexander recounts with a warrior's unflinching eye for detail the blood, the terror, and the tactics of his greatest battlefield victories. Whether surviving his father's brutal assassination, presiding over a massacre, or weeping at the death of a beloved comrade-in-arms, Alexander never denies the hard realities of the code by which he lives: the virtues of war. But as much as he was feared by his enemies, he was loved and revered by his friends, his generals, and the men who followed him into battle. Often outnumbered, never outfought, Alexander conquered every enemy the world stood against him--but the one he never saw coming. . . .
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