Stories of heroism, exploration, and sacrifice — including Apollo XIII and Scott of the Antarctic — that inspire boys to be courageous, selfless, and open to adventure

Tales of brave and selfless deeds used to be part of every boy’s education. We grew up sharing stories with our fathers, uncles, and grandfathers of how other men had lived their lives, met their challenges, reached their goals, and faced their deaths. Becoming a man was about comradeship and standing by your friends whatever the circumstances. And it meant that sometimes it was more important to die a hero than live a coward’s life. Through Neil Oliver’s vivid, stirring accounts we can rediscover the stories that inspire men to perform acts greater than themselves. These are the epics that we should all know by heart; the tales of courage, endurance, and sacrifice that made men out of boys.

Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys is packed with classic stories of courage and heroism from around the world and includes four stories especially for the American edition: Omaha Beach, June 6th 1944; The Alamo; The Civil War Battle of Shilo; and The Revolutionary War Sea Battle of John Paul Jones and the Bon Homme Richard.

The Vikings famously took no prisoners, relished cruel retribution, and prided themselves on their bloodthirsty skills as warriors. But their prowess in battle is only a small part of their story, which stretches from their Scandinavian origins to America in the West and as far as Baghdad in the East. As the Vikings did not write their own history, we have to discover it for ourselves; and that discovery, as Neil Oliver reveals, tells an extraordinary story of a people who, from the brink of destruction, reached a quarter of the way around the globe and built an empire that lasted nearly two hundred years.
Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world’s great empires of conquest.