Mike Tougias

The Finest Hours is the gripping, true story of the valiant attempt to rescue the souls huddling inside two oil tankers (the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer) that split in half during the brutal nor'easter that wreaked havoc on New England in the winter of 1952.

In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor'easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril. In the early hours of Monday, February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, found themselves in the same horrifying predicament. Built with "dirty steel," and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split...

On May 19, 1942, a U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico stalked its prey fifty miles from New Orleans. Captained by twenty nine-year-old Iron Cross and King's Cross recipient Erich Wurdemann, the submarine set its sights on the freighter Heredia with sixty-two souls on board. Most aboard were merchant seamen, but there were also a handful of civilians, including the Downs family: Ray and Ina, and their two children, eight-year-old Sonny and eleven-year-old...

The harrowing story of one of America's first and costliest wars-featuring a new foreword by bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick At once an in-depth history of this pivotal war and a guide to the historical sites where the ambushes, raids, and battles took place, King Philip's War expands our understanding of American history and provides insight into the nature of colonial and ethnic wars in general. Through a careful reconstruction of events,...

Chronicles the worst disaster in U.S. naval history, describing heroism in the face of persistant shark attacks and hypothermia after the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in the South Pacific in the final days of World War II.