Books like The Crowded Hour by Clay Risen

A collection of linked short stories that follows a platoon of American soldiers and their experiences, thoughts, and burdens during the Vietnam War.

A frontline chronicle of the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, told through the eyes of New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins.

A detailed account of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann’s service in the Vietnam War, tracing his rise from infantry officer to outspoken military analyst.

Two months after the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in February 1898, Congress authorized President McKinley to recruit a volunteer army to drive the Spaniards from Cuba. From this army emerged the legendary "Rough Riders," a mounted regiment drawn from America's western territories and led by the indomitable Theodore Roosevelt. Its ranks included not only cowboys and other westerners, but several Ivy Leaguers and clubmen, many of them friends of "TR." Roosevelt and his men quickly came to symbolize American ruggedness, daring, and individualism. He led them to victory in the famed Battle at San Juan Hill, which made TR a national hero and cemented the Rough Riders' place in history. Now, Mark Lee Gardner synthesizes previously unknown primary accounts as well as period newspaper articles, letters, and diaries from public and private archives in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Boston, and Washington, DC, to produce this authoritative chronicle. He breathes fresh life into the Rough Riders and pays tribute to their daring feats and indomitable leader. Gardner also explores lesser-known aspects of the story, including their relationship with the African-American "Buffalo Soldiers," with whom they fought side by side at San Juan Hill.

Lawrence Freedman’s Kennedy’s Wars examines President John F. Kennedy’s foreign‑policy leadership during the Cold War, detailing his responses to Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, and how his cabinet’s evolving liberalism shaped U.S. military and diplomatic decisions.

Napoleon's campaigns within Europe have been exhaustively covered, but in this pioneering and highly original survey, Paul Fregosi focuses on Napoleon's forays outside Continental Europe. Reminding us that Napoleon wanted to be "not just the Emperor of France and the conqueror of Europe, but Emperor of the Orient and the Conqueror of India," Fregosi explores Napoleon's global ambition -- an ambition so vast that hardly a corner of the world remained untouched. In this engrossing work, Fregosi examines Napoleon's overall methods and aims, and also recounts Napoleon's campaigns in America (Louisiana), the West Indies, the Middle East, Africa, Ireland, Asia and South America. Few people realize that Napoleon conquered the islands of Haiti, Guadalupe, St. Kitt's and Martinique in the Caribbean and Guyana in South America. In Africa, he captured Capetown and occupied Senegal. Napoleon's ships took Mauritius and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, and in the Southwest Pacific, the tricolor flag of France flew over Java. And in the Mediterranean, Napoleon occupied Malta, Corfu and Cypress. Fregosi fills his pages with fascinating detail, vivid character sketches and exciting battle scenes. Dreams of Empire fills in the gaps left in the more conventional history of Napoleon's wars and provides a fresh and highly readable interpretation of his actions and their consequences. - Jacket flap.

"The Rough Riders (1899) is the story of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the regiment Roosevelt led to enduring fame in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt recounts how the regiment was raised from an unusual mixture of hardened southwestern frontiersmen and privileged northeastern college graduates, and how it trained in Texas and then sailed "southward through the topic seas toward the unknown." Writing at a time when war could still be seen as a romantic adventure, Roosevelt describes the confusion of fighting in the jungle; the heat, hunger, rain, mud, and malaria that tested his men; and his "crowded hour" of triumph on the San Juan Heights." "In An Autobiography (1913), Roosevelt recalls his lifelong fascination with natural history, his love of hunting and the outdoors, and his adventures as a cattleman in the Dakota Badlands, as well as his career in politics as a state legislator, civil service reformer, New York City police commissioner, assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York, and president. Roosevelt writes of his battles against corruption and machine rule, efforts to establish America as a world power, historic achievements in conservation, and his growing conviction that only a strong national government and an energetic presidency could protect the public against the rapacious greed of modern corporations."--BOOK JACKET.

Born in the wake of World War II, RAND quickly became the creator of America’s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy. A magnet for the best and the brightest, its ranks included Cold War luminaries such as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation and unquestionably created Eisenhower’s "military-industrial complex." In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied -- religion, patriotism, tribalism. With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella has rewritten the history of America’s last half century and cast a new light on our problematic present.