Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler is one of the most decorated Marines of all time and is a legend among the Corps. Coming from a background of privilege, Butler became a Marine to prove his worth. Through confl icts like the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Banana Wars, and the War to End All Wars, he helped defi ne what the Marine Corps is today. Smedley begins in the summer of 1932. Butler is retired from the Marines and has lost his bid to be a Pennsylvania senator. When he is invited to speak at the Bonus Army encampment in Washington D.C., he arrives early to mingle with the other veterans, who press him for stories about his legendary exploits. How did he win his Medals of Honor? What was it like in China? Smedley is a man in his element as he recalls his toughest scrapes to an eager audience of World War I veterans, who we discover have a few war stories of their own.
"Stalingrad. From August 1942 to February 1943 this model industrial city, bathed by the waters of the Volga, was home to the bloodiest battle of World War II. Stalingrad: Letters from the Volga offers a fast-paced depiction of this titanic struggle: explicit, crude, and without concessions—just as the war and the memory of all those involved demands. The battle rendered devastating results. Almost two million human beings were marked forever in its crosshairs, a frightening figure comprised of the dead, injured, sick, captured, and missing. Military and civilians alike paid with their lives for the personal fight between Stalin and Hitler, which materialized in long months of primitive conflict among the smoking ruins of Stalingrad and its surroundings. Stalingrad: Letters from the Volga presents the battle, beginning to end, through the eyes of Russian and German soldiers. Take a chronological tour of the massacre, relive the fights, and feel the drama of trying to survive in a relentless hell of ice and snow."
"Men at Sea is an opus of eight spectacularly drawn dark, poetic stories adapted by Riff Reb’s. This collection offers: “A Smile of Fortune,” from Joseph Conrad “The Sea Horses” and “The Shamraken Homeward Bound,” from William Hope Hodgson “The Galley Slaves” and “The Far South,” from Pierre Mac Orlan “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” from Edgar Allan Poe “The Three Customs Officers,” from Marcel Schwob “The Shipwreck,” from Robert Louis Stevenson These eight tales, themselves interspersed by seven double-page spreads dedicated to extracts from illustrated classics, deliver a rich, poetic, and masterfully crafted work of life and death on the sea. "
"Hailed by many as the greatest war novel of all time and publicly burned by the Nazis for being “degenerate,” Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, is an elegant statement on a generation of men destroyed by war. Caught up by a romantic sense of patriotism and encouraged to enlist by authority figures who would not risk their lives to do the same, Paul Bäumer and his classmates join the fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I. He is soon disenchanted by the constant bombardments and ruthless struggle to survive. Through years in battle, Paul and those he serves with become men defined by the violence around them, desperate to stay as decent as they can while growing more and more distant from the society for which they are fighting. This graphic novel recreates the classic story in vivid detail through meticulous research. The accurate depictions of uniforms, weapons, trenches, and death brings the horrors of the Western Front to life in a bold new way. "