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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorSkunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed
Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos · 385 pages
From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations
The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of Darpa, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
Annie Jacobsen · 568 pages
Since its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has grown to become the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science research and development agency. Created by President Eisenhower to prevent another Sputnik, and to focus primarily on defensive programs against nuclear weapons, the agency--and its imagination and sc
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Erik Larson · 464 pages
It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President
The Gun
C.J. Chivers · 481 pages
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
P.W. Singer · 516 pages
A military expert reveals how science fiction is fast becoming reality on the battlefield, changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itselfP. W. Singer's previous two books foretold the rise of private military contractors and the advent of child soldiers— predictions that proved all too accurate. Now, he explores the greatest revol
American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms
Chris Kyle, William Doyle · 302 pages
In this book, the author, deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the ten most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a Navy SEAL. He uses these guns as a window on United States history, making the sweeping argument that the American story has been tied to and shaped by the gun. He revisits turning points in
The Philadelphia Experiment
Charles Frambach Berlitz, William L. Moore · 288 pages
Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship
Tom Clancy, John D. Gresham
Only the author of *The Hunt for Red October* could capture the reality of life aboard a nuclear submarine. Only a writer of Mr. Clancy's magnitude could obtain security clearance for information, diagrams, and photographs never before available to the public. Now, every civilian can enter this top secret world...the weapons, the procedures, the people themselves...the startling facts behind the f
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy
David E. Hoffman · 577 pages
This riveting narrative history of the end of the arms race sheds new light on the frightening last chapters of the Cold War and the legacy of the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that remain a threat today. During the Cold War, world superpowers amassed nuclear arsenals containing the explosive power of one million Hiroshimas. The Soviet Union secretly plotted to create the "Dead Hand,"
Yeager: An Autobiography
Chuck Yeager, Leo Janos · 388 pages
Offers a personal glimpse of air pilot General Chuck Yeager. Yeager talks about his life and achievements, expressed in his own words.
Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing
Tom Clancy · 331 pages
Engineers of Victory: The Making of the War Machine That Defeated the Nazis
Paul Kennedy · 450 pages
An account of how the tide was turned against the Nazis by the Allies in the Second World War. It focuses on the problem-solvers - Major-General Perry Hobart, who invented the 'funny tanks' which flattened the curve on the D-Day beaches; Flight Lieutenant Ronnie Harker 'the man who put the Merlin in the Mustang.
The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden
Mark Bowden · 296 pages
This work is a dramatic account of the hunt for and defeat of Osama bin Laden draws on unprecedented access to primary sources to trace how key decisions were made, revealing events from the perspectives of an adept President Obama and an increasingly despondent bin Laden. After masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden managed to vanish. Over the next ten years, as the auth
The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran
David Crist · 638 pages
Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team
Michael Smith · 352 pages
"Sunday Times journalist Michael Smith reveals the 25-year history of a top-secret US Army special operations unit. 'The Activity', as it became known to insiders, has hidden behind a myriad of rapidly changing code names like Centra Spike and Grey Fox, and been publicly 'disbanded' and then secretly resurrected so often that it has achieved near mythical status, even among the world's special ope
The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth
Mark Mazzetti · 400 pages
An account of the transformation of the CIA and America's special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world's dark spaces: the new American way of war.
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Simon Singh · 402 pages
In his first book since the bestselling *Fermat's Enigma*, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisit
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor
Gordon W. Prange · 912 pages
"Fifty years after the attack that plunged America into World War II, 'At Dawn We Slept' remains the greatest account of Pearl Harbor ever written. This gripping study scrupulously reconstructs the Japanese attack, from its conception (less than a year before the actual raid) to its lightning execution; and it reveals the true reason for the American debacle: the insurmountable disbelief in the Ja
Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
Nathaniel Popper · 416 pages
"A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age. Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement. The notion o
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Jon Ronson · 272 pages
"In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were th
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Yuval Noah Harari · 544 pages
From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing head
Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to al-Qaeda
Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger · 480 pages
From two men who know how espionage really works, an unprecedented history--heavily illustrated with never-before-seen images--of the CIA's most secretive operations and the gadgets that made them possible. What is an invisible photo used for? What does it take to build a quiet helicopter? How does one embed a listening device in a cat? These may sound like challenges for James Bond's fictional ga
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
Steven Levy · 424 pages
Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers. Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indi
The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
Carlotta Gall · 368 pages