Atlantic Fever - Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic

It's salty, smoky, and sweet. It's experiencing a culinary renaissance. It can make almost any dish better. It's bacon, and it's the best meat ever. And now, here's the book that celebrates that deliciously sinful strip of cured pork belly.

In Bacon: A Love Story, popular bacon blogger Heather Lauer serves up a piping hot dish of fun and facts with this definitive love letter to what she calls meat candy. Heather explores the ins and outs of how bacon finds its way to your skillet and what to do with it when it gets there.

Bacon: A Love Story features:

• Makin' Bacon: a tour of country-style bacon outfits and their time-honored methods and traditions. Hankering for some pepper, cinnamon, honey, jalapeño, or vanilla bourbon-flavored bacon? They've got it! There are also tips for making your own signature cure.
• "Bacon Nation": profiles of bacon-loving chefs across the country who incorporate the meat into their menus in increasingly innovative ways.
• There's Bacon in This?: Heather dishes out more than twenty delicious recipes for tons of bacon goodies like Bacon-Wrapped Tator Tots, BLT with caramelized bacon, Jalapeño-Bacon Pizza, and a few surprises like Bacon Bloody Marys and Bacon Brownies.
• Bacon 411: an extensive resource section on all things bacon.

Written in a witty, engaging style and brimming with Lauer's infectious passion for the Best Meat Ever, Bacon: A Love Story is a must-read for anyone who loves bacon or is passionate about food.

In 1940, as Hitler plotted to conquer Europe, only one nation posed a serious threat to the Third Reich's domination: France. The German command was wary of taking on the most powerful armed force on the continent. But three low-ranking generals-Eric von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel-were about to change the face of modern warfare.

By grouping tanks into juggernauts to slam through enemy lines, the blitzkrieg was born. With this aggressive, single-minded plan, the Nazis bypassed the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line, charged into the heart of France, and alerted the world that the deadly might of Germany could no longer be ignored.

“Both a serious work of history . . . and a marvelously readable dramatic narrative.”—San Francisco Chronicle

On the first Sunday in December 1941, an armada of Japanese warplanes appeared suddenly over Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Six months later, in a sea fight north of the tiny atoll of Midway, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent into the abyss, a blow that destroyed the offensive power of their fleet. Pacific Crucible tells the epic tale of these first searing months of the Pacific war, when the U.S. Navy shook off the worst defeat in American military history and seized the strategic initiative.

This dramatic narrative, relying predominantly on eyewitness accounts and primary sources, is laced with riveting details of heroism and sacrifice on the stricken ships and planes of both navies. At the war’s outset, Japan’s pilots and planes enjoyed a clear-cut superiority to their American counterparts, but there was a price to be paid. Japanese pilots endured a lengthy and grueling training in which they were disciplined with baseball bats, often suffering broken bones; and the production line of the Zero— Japan’s superbly maneuverable fighter plane—ended not at a highway or railhead but at a rice paddy, through which the planes were then hauled on ox carts. Combat losses, of either pilots or planes, could not be replaced in time to match the fully mobilized American war machine.

Pacific Crucible also spotlights recent scholarship that revises our understanding of the conflict, including the Japanese decision to provoke a war that few in their highest circles thought they could win. Those doubters included the flamboyantly brilliant Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto, architect of the raid on Pearl and the Midway offensive.

Once again, Ian W. Toll proves himself to be a simply magnificent writer. The result here is a page-turning history that does justice to the breadth and depth of a tremendous subject.