In the spring of 1701 a lord drew his sword inside the shogun’s own castle and was ordered to die by sundown. His samurai became masterless men overnight. For nearly two years they scattered, shamed and watched, and seemed to forget him. Then, on a snowy winter night, forty-seven of them came for the man who had ruined their master. This is the true story behind Japan’s most enduring tale of loyalty.
He was a stubby-tailed stray of no particular breed, wandering a college football field in 1917 when a young soldier gave him a scrap of food. Eighteen months later that same dog had survived seventeen battles on the Western Front, warned his regiment of gas attacks, single-handedly captured a German soldier, and come home the most decorated war dog in American history. This is the story of Sergeant Stubby.
On a hot afternoon in 2003, a pizza deliveryman walked into a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a bomb locked around his neck and a note demanding $250,000. What followed was one of the strangest, most disturbing crimes in American history — a lethal scavenger hunt, a frozen body, and a question that still has no clean answer: was Brian Wells a victim, or part of the plot that killed him?
She was a history student from Kyiv who had never meant to be a soldier. By the age of twenty-five she had killed 309 enemy soldiers with a rifle, survived the two worst sieges on the Eastern Front, and stood before a room of American reporters to ask them, coldly, how long they intended to hide behind her back. This is the story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadliest woman ever to carry a gun to war.
In 1910 a band of friends painted their faces, pinned on false beards, and talked their way aboard the most powerful warship in the world by pretending to be visiting African royalty. One of them was a young writer named Virginia Stephen, not yet Virginia Woolf. The Royal Navy gave them an honour guard, a red carpet, and a full tour of HMS Dreadnought before anyone realised the princes of Abyssinia were a joke.
Seven centuries ago, a great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan vowed she would marry only the man who could beat her in wrestling. Suitor after suitor stepped onto the grass and was thrown into the dust. By the end she is said to have owned ten thousand horses and no husband at all — and the empire never knew what to do with a woman it could not defeat.
In 1948, the Soviet Union sealed off West Berlin and waited for two million people to starve. One American pilot, moved by a handful of children who refused to beg, began dropping chocolate from his plane on tiny handkerchief parachutes — and turned a hungry, broken city into friends.
In 1820, a sperm whale the size of the ship itself turned and rammed the Nantucket whaleship Essex until it sank, stranding twenty men thousands of miles from land. What they did to stay alive gave Herman Melville the ending he could never bring himself to write.
On a bright June morning in 1904, more than thirteen hundred people boarded a steamboat for a church picnic and never came home. The General Slocum burned on the East River with rotten life jackets and locked lifeboats — and took an entire New York neighborhood down with it.
It was a sphere of plutonium the size of a grapefruit, built to end a war that ended first. Twice, a careless half-second brought it to the edge of a chain reaction — and twice, the man standing over it paid with his life. This is the story of the Demon Core.
