Guard of Honor is a neglected masterpiece that stands comparison with the greatest novels of the Second World War--essayist Noel Perrin deemed it "probably the best war novel of the twentieth century." James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida. The reader is acutely aware of the war raging abroad and the effect it has had, or will have, on the multitude of servicemen who populate Cozzens's immense canvas. As Noel Perrin commented in The Washington Post Book World: "There is material for two or three hundred movies in Guard of Honor." "No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it," said Orville Prescott in The New York Times. As Brendan Gill observed in The New Yorker "Every page of Guard of Honor gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork."
Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget. Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold in the Elburz Mountains Stark was the first to document for the Royal Geographical Society. Her account is at once a highly readable travel narrative and a richly drawn, sympathetic portrait of a people told from their own compelling point of view. This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.
