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Downpour -- Bi-Monthly Offers -- exp 12 Sep @ 11:59 pm PT

$4.99 -- A Higher Call -- Adam Makos, et al/ Robertson Dean -- 13.4 hrs -- NF history

Editor's Pick

An Incredible True Story of Combat & Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II

Four days before Christmas in 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over wartime Germany. At its controls was a twenty-one-year-old pilot. Half his crew lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly a sleek, dark shape pulled up on the bomber's tail—a German Messerschmitt fighter. Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American bomber with the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy imagination and later be called the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.

This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day—the American—Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17—and the German—Second Lieutenant Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War II.

A Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz's harrowing missions. Charlie would face takeoffs in English fog over the flaming wreckage of his buddies' planes, flak bursts so close they would light his cockpit, and packs of enemy fighters that would circle his plane like sharks. Franz would face sandstorms in the desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of one thousand bombers, each with eleven guns, waiting for his attack.

Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at one another. What happened between them, the American Eighth Air Force would later classify as top secret. It was an act that Franz could never mention without facing a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search for one another, a last mission that could change their lives forever.

$4.99 -- Life & Times of Wm Shakespeare -- P Levi/ W McCaddon -- 18.2 hrs -- biography

Staff Pick

This authoritative and extremely readable biography is the first since the Victorian Age to pay full attention to Shakespeare’s life and times and their numerous subtle connections to his works. Peter Levi emphasizes the background of Shakespeare’s life: the local and national events that shaped his experiences, his family and friends, and the Elizabethan people with whom he shared his life and populated his plays. Bringing together new research and new discoveries and reexamining the famous legends about Shakespeare, Levi uses the writings of modern historians to shed light on the poet’s life. This valuable work will be the definitive life of Shakespeare for many years to come.