If Not Now, When?: Duty and Sacrifice in America's Time of Need
Author: Colonel Jack Jacobs retired
A Medal of Honor recipient looks back at his own service-and ahead to America's future.
Jack Jacobs was acting as an advisor to the South Vietnamese when he and his men came under devastating attack. Severely wounded, 1st Lt. Jacobs took command and withdrew the unit, returning again and again to the site of the attack to rescue more men, saving the lives of a U.S. advisor and thirteen Allied soldiers. Col. Jacobs received the nation's highest military award, the Medal of Honor.
Here, with candor, humor, and quiet modesty, Col. Jack Jacobs tells his stirring story of heroism, honor, and the personal code by which he has lived his life, and expounds with blunt honesty and insight his views on our contemporary world, and the nature and necessity of sacrifice.
If Not Now, When? is a compelling account of a unique life at both war and peace, and the all-too-often unexamined role of the citizenry in the service and defense of the Republic.
What People Are Saying
Nelson DeMille
"As good a Vietnam War memoir as I've ever read. And if that's not good enough, Jack Jacobs makes some very brutal, honest, and disturbing observations about America then and America now, and most importantly, about where we are headed. Jack Jacobs won/earned the Congressional Medal of Honor forty years ago, and he's earned it every day since."--(Nelson DeMille, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Wild Fire and Night Fall)
Tom Brokaw
"It's a privilege to call him friend and an honor to recommend this remarkable life story."
Bob Kerrey
"Jack Jacobs was probably the shortest officer in the U.S. Army. He was certainly among the bravest. It is about time he wrote this memoir, and it's about time you read it."--(Bob Kerrey, President of The New School University, Former U.S. Senator)
Barry M. McCaffrey
"This book is a classic. Jack Jacobs is the bravest-and funniest-soldier I met in thirty-two years of military service. He is also an intellectual with a writer's gift of description. Jack tells a life story of military service with a sense of humor that makes palatable the brutality of intense combat."--(General Barry M. McCaffrey, U.S. Army (Retired))
Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
Author: Piers Brendon
A comprehensive, scholarly and fascinating study of the end of the British Empire.
No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves, and a quarter of the earth’s surface was coloured red on the map. Where Britain’s writ did not run directly, its influence, sustained by matchless industrial and commercial sinews, was often paramount.
Yet no empire (except for the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation, this mighty structure sank almost without trace leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of empire — the Commonwealth. Equally, it can be claimed that Britain bequeathed its former colonies economic foundations, a cultural legacy, a sporting spirit, a legal code and a language more ubiquitous than Latin ever was.
Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire evokes remote places as well as distant times.
The Washington Post - Karl E. Meyer
[Brendon's] book is in no sense an apologia; it is history with the nasty bits left in. Not one massacre, civil war, famine, racist outrage, covert trick or egregious human-rights abuse is passed over. His chronicle thus serves as a useful counterpoint to the generally upbeat accounts of Britain's imperial era, notably Harvard professor Niall Ferguson's well-written yet almost nostalgic encomiums. Brendon supplements but does not supplant Jan Morris's irresistibly readable Pax Britannica trilogy, published in the 1970s, the critical yet fair-minded standard by which new entries should be judged. This Decline and Fall is strongest in its details; the author seemingly has scoured every available memoir for devastating quips, nicknames, anecdotes, rumors and shrewd assessments.
Kathleen McCallister - Library Journal
At its height, the British Empire covered nearly a quarter of the world's land and ruled over 400 million people. Yet as illustrated in this well-researched book by Brendon (Fellow of Churchill Coll., Cambridge; The Dark Valley), throughout much of its existence this powerful entity was suffering a slow process of decay. Tracing the history of the empire from its loss of the American Colonies to the handover of Hong Kong, he examines the contradictory nature of its principles and actions. Founded on the ideas of caretaking and eventual liberty for those colonized, the empire was all too willing to expand beyond its means and stifle attempts at independence in order to retain its own global superiority-a process that only hastened its inevitable downfall. While the scope of the subject is vast, Brendon handles the material with skill and provides a sharp and grim contrast to more positive studies of the topic. The narrative is enhanced by the inclusion of fascinating anecdotes-sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling-about the worlds of the colonies and the lives of those who ruled them. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. (Illustrations not seen.) [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/08.]
Kirkus Reviews
A richly detailed, lucid account of how the British Empire grew and grew-and then, not quite inexorably, fell apart. Historian Brendon (Eminent Edwardians: Four Figures who Defined their Age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell, 2003, etc.) opens on October 17, 1781, when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington's troops at Yorktown. That date, by Brendon's account, is the beginning of the end of the empire, "an unbeaten revolt of children against parental authority" and the first such rebellion in modern history, though not the last. Brendon adds that it was merely the first growth of what he calls the "libertarian commitment to trusteeship," the British administration's preference for some form of local autonomy that nearly always resulted in the demand for independence. Brendon leisurely tours one imperial outpost after another over the course of two centuries, ending with the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese rule by way of stops at New Zealand (which, he writes, once contemplated petitioning the United States for admission as a state), Canada, the Transvaal, Palestine and elsewhere across the globe. The imperial impulse, the author observes, was not all bad; one fine moment came when Britain exercised its considerable power to demand that the Greek government compensate a Jewish man born in Gibraltar for damage done to his property during an anti-Semitic riot in Athens. Perhaps thanks to such nobler impulses, many nations seemed glad to join the empire, which, in the first part of Victoria's rule, "grew on average by 100,000 square miles a year." Yet many others were eager to shed that rule, especially toward the end, when Britain behaved poorly in places such asSouth Africa, India and particularly Kenya, and when outposts such as Cyprus became milieus of what Brendon, quoting Lawrence Durrell, describes as " 'blameless monotony' conducted in an atmosphere of 'suffocating inertia.' "A comprehensive rejoinder to the work of Niall Ferguson and other modern students of British imperial history.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The World Turned Upside Down
The American Revolution and the Slave Trade
2 An English Barrack in the Oriental Seas
Britannia’s Indian Empire
3 Exempt from the Disaster of Caste
Australia, Canada and New Zealand
4 To Stop is Dangerous, to Recede, Ruin
The Far East and Afghanistan
5 Sacred Wrath
Irish Famine and Indian Mutiny
6 Spread the Peaceful Gospel — with the Maxim Gun
Towards Conquest in Africa
7 A Magnificent Empire under the British Flag
Cape to Cairo
8 Barbarians Thundering at the Frontiers
The Boer War and the Indian Raj
9 The Empire, Right or Wrong
Flanders, Iraq, Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge
10 Aflame with the Hope of Liberation
Ireland and the Middle East
11 Englishmen Like Posing as Gods
West and East
12 White Mates Black in a Very Few Moves
Kenya and the Sudan
13 Spinning the Destiny of India
The Route to Independence
14 That Is the End of the British Empire
Singapore and Burma
15 The Aim of Labour is to Save the Empire
Ceylon and Malaya
16 A Golden Bowl Full of Scorpions
The Holy Land
17 The Destruction of National Will
Suez Invasion and Aden Evacuation
18 Renascent Africa
The Gold Coast and Nigeria
19 Uhuru — Freedom
Kenya and the Mau Mau
20 Kith and Kin
Rhodesia and the Central African Federation
21 Rocks and Islands
The WestIndies and Cyprus
22 All Our Pomp of Yesterday
The Falklands and Hong Kong
Abbreviations
Notes
Sources
Index
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