Daniel Ford

Fish, Chips & Football perfectly captures the joy of non-league football - discovering new towns and villages, chatting to new friends, pubs, pints, burgers, banter, delayed trains, lots of laughs - and groundhopping. The author watched 103 games from his base in Eastbourne and along the coast from Dover to Havant - from the shiny professionals in their stadiums to those who play on muddy, forgotten fields. This is a story of how football used to be.

"A richly colorful novel"--New York TimesIn the words of the New Hampshire statute, "now comes Theodora" to file for divorce from Colin, who'd rather march for world peace than stay home with his pregnant wife. She and the baby take refuge with Boris, photographer of nudes, who in all innocence finds himself in love for the first time in his life. Daniel Ford's debut novel is a fascinating cameo of university life in the 1960s--before Woodstock, before Vietnam, but not before student rebels. "It is impossible not to keep on watching them, simply because they are so human and so young and selfish and opinionated and anxious ... The clear-sighted, unangry Mr. Ford will undoubtedly write another novel, which means we all have something to look forward to."--The New Yorker

Cowboy was handsome, flamboyant, courageous, clever, and cruel. He got his nickname from the Green Berets who worked with him in the Highlands of South Vietnam in the 1960s. "You've got to take the bad with the good," one Special Forces captain explained. "And Cowboy is a good interpreter." But he soon fired the interpreter because prisoners did not fare well when Cowboy was around. And in the end, Cowboy was murdered by his own side, the Montagnard rebels who hated the generals in Saigon as much as the Communists in Hanoi. The compelling story of a country and a people caught up in a Cold War they couldn't understand, and which in the end would destroy them.

'To read the book is to get a new appreciation of the greatness of America, the greatness of her present and the possibilities of her future.' That was the reaction in 1907 when Ralph Paine published his dispatches from a 15,000-mile circuit around and through a West that was fast losing its wildness. He talked to homesteaders in sod huts, to the people building towns and laying railroads across the empty prairie, to "cow punchers" making a last roundup on the once-open range, to lumberjacks who scorned any tree less than six feet through, to prospectors and sailors and confidence tricksters. He rode trains and horses, a pilot schooner, a stage coach, and a desert jalopy, taking copious notes wherever he found himself. The result, in the words of another admirer, was 'A book to make a man hold his head high, to step high, to throw out his chest.' That was important in 1907, when the United States was suffering growing pains, with a president who believed in American greatness while the "muck rakers" ranted about the evils of capitalism as seen from New York and Washington. All this will seem very familiar to Americans in 2017. Paine's classic has now been edited and brought up to date by Daniel Ford, a prize-winning historian and author.

During World War II, in the skies over Rangoon, Burma, a handful of American pilots met and bloodied the "Imperial Wild Eagles" of Japan and in turn won immortality as the Flying Tigers. One of America's most famous combat forces, the Tigers were recruited to defend beleaguered China for $600 a month and a bounty of $500 for each Japanese plane they shot down-fantastic money in an era when a Manhattan hotel room cost three dollars a night. To bring his prize-winning history of the American Volunteer Group up to date, Daniel Ford has twice rewritten his original text, drawing on the most recent U. S., British, and Japanese scholarship, along with new information about AVG pilots and crewmen, their Royal Air Force colleagues, and their Japanese opponents. "Admirable," wrote Chennault biographer Martha Byrd of Ford's original text. "A readable book based on sound sources. Expect some surprises." Flying Tigers won the Aviation/Space Writers Association Award of Excellence in the year of its first publication.

"What God abandoned, these defended / And saved the sum of things for pay" In the bleak winter of 1941-1942, no American or British force could stem the tide in Southeast Asia, as the Philippines, Thailand, Malaya, and Singapore fell to the victorious Japanese. Only in Burma was there a ray of hope. There, over beleaguered Rangoon, a few dozen Americans clawed Japanese warplanes from the sky for a cash bounty from the Chinese government. Wearing mismatched uniforms, with Chinese insignia, and flying cast-off fighter planes, they did what no other air force seemed able to do, and won immortality as the Flying Tigers. Daniel Ford wrote the definitive history of the American Volunteer Group, as it was formally known. Here, he has collected five e-books about the Flying Tigers into an omnibus that details the AVG's planes, pilots, and history as remembered in the United States and in Japan. An essential collection for every admirer of the Flying Tigers. Revised and updated 2020.

From Simon & Schuster, The Button is Daniel Ford's novel about the Pentagon's command and control system...and whether it works. Author of The Cult of the Atom, Daniel Ford's latest work, The Button, is a thrilling and chilling novel about the Pentagon's command and control system, and whether those systems in place actually work as they were originally designed.

The Second World War -- the worst thing that ever happened. It began in September 1939, with Hitler's Wehrmacht invading Poland from the west, while Stalin's Red Army stormed in from the east. Among their victims was a five-year-old named Basia Deszberg. The Russians shot her father and brother in the Katyn Forest, then loaded Basia, her sister, and her mother into a cattle car for a horrific three-week journey to the steppes of Kazakhstan, there to survive as best they could. Over the next eight years, they would escape through Persia, Lebanon, and Egypt to find safe haven in England. By contrast, Daniel Ford grew up in a United States mired by the Great Depression. Europe's agony was America's windfall Dan went from hardscrabble poverty to a college degree and a fellowship that took him to the English university where Basia too was a student. This is the story of their meeting, their travels, and their parting. It is, promises the author, both a love story and a history lesson, and one you will never forget. "An extraordinary book," wrote Cosmopolitan Review, "highly original, gripping, at once full of joy and of sorrow."

In 1941, Glen Edwards learned to fly in a fabric-covered biplane. Seven years later, he died in the crash of the Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing, the Air Force's most advanced jet-propelled aircraft and forerunner of the B-2 Stealth bomber of today. As a combat pilot in North Africa and Italy during World War II, and as a test pilot during a period of astonishing innovation, Edwards was among the best of a new generation of military aviators. The isolated desert base at Muroc, California, where Edwards crashed would be named in his honor. All through his military career, Glen Edwards kept a daily record of what he did and what he thought. Military historian Daniel Ford situates that diary in the context of World War II, the development of flight testing as a science, and the birth of an independent U. S. Air Force. He shows how military pilots in the 1940s augmented their seat-of-the-pants bravado and precision flying skills with rigorous academic training. Conveying both the exhaustion of combat and the exhilaration of flying some of the world's fastest, most sophisticated planes, the book traces the tragic course of Glen Edwards's career: the near-daily bombing missions over Africa and Italy, a record-breaking cross-country flight in the XB-42 Mixmaster, and trial flights in the YB-49 Flying Wing-the first plane Edwards ever actively disliked. The innovative Northrop bomber, Daniel Ford concludes, just wasn't ready for prime time. About 70,000 words; with photographs from the Air Force and the Edwards family." A fascinating tale and a tribute to an unassuming man who simply loved to fly." -- Air&Space/Smithsonian

"12-week guide: Swimming" offers an achievable step-by-step guide to help get an unfit person to a definable goal - a 400 metre swim in 12 weeks. The book outlines how to get started, what's needed and how to make that first step. Then using the week-by-week guide the reader works towards the target goal in very gradual steps with a weekly programme plus basic tips on nutrition, motivation, stretching and so on. The emphasis is on a very gradual approach towards achieving the goal so that the reader feels comfortable and there is constant reaffirmation of achievements as he/she works through the programme. There will also be sections for the reader's own notes, which are important for that all-important feeling of success as he/she works towards the ultimate goal of looking better and feeling fitter.

Your 12-week Guide to Cycling offers an achievable step-by-step guide to help get an unfit person to a definable goal - a 25 km race in 12 weeks. The book outlines how to get started, what's needed and how to take that first step. Then using the week-by-week guide the reader works towards the target goal in very gradual steps with a weekly programme plus basic tips on nutrition, motivation, stretching and so on. There is constant reaffirmation of achievements as he/she works through the programme. There will also be sections for the reader's own notes, which are important for that all-important feeling of success as he/she works towards the ultimate goal of looking better and feeling fitter.

Your 12-week Guide to Running offers an achievable step-by-step guide to help get an unfit person to a definable goal - running a 5km race in 12 weeks. The book outlines how to get started, what's needed and how to make that first step. Then using the week-by-week guide the reader works towards the target goal in very gradual steps with a weekly programme plus basic tips on nutrition, motivation, stretching and so on. The emphasis is on a very gradual approach towards achieving the goal so that the reader feels comfortable and there is constant reaffirmation of achievements as he/she works through the programme. There will also be sections for the reader's own notes, which are important for that all-important feeling of success as he/she works towards the ultimate goal of looking better and feeling fitter.

Your 12-week Guide to the Gym offers an achievable step-by-step guide to help get an unfit person to a definable goal - a 90 minute workout in 12 weeks. The book outlines how to get started, what's needed and how to make that first step. Then using the week-by-week guide the reader works towards the target goal in very gradual steps with a weekly programme plus basic tips on nutrition, motivation, stretching and so on. The emphasis is on a very gradual approach towards achieving the goal so that the reader feels comfortable and there is constant reaffirmation of achievements as he/she works through the programme. There will also be sections for the reader's own notes, which are important for that all-important feeling of success as he/she works towards the ultimate goal of looking better and feeling fitter.

It's the summer of 1964. The bush hat, not the steel helmet, is the favored headgear of the sixteen thousand American advisors in South Vietnam. They love their work, and they're very good at it. How can they possibly fail? Covering their war are a handful of foreign reporters, including novelist Daniel Ford. Armed with a camera and a notebook, he wanders the country on foot and by military transport--helicopter, jeep, landing craft, junk, armored personnel carrier, and an Air Force flare ship--from the Mekong Delta to the Central Highlands. Once or twice a week, or whenever he is reunited with his Hermes portable, he types up an account of what he has seen and done. Here is that journal, a generation after it was written. It is a freeze-frame picture of the Vietnam War before it became a quagmire. "How good-hearted we were " Ford says of himself and the men he met in his travels. "And how badly it all turned out."

This is the story that inspired the acclaimed Burt Lancaster movie, Go Tell the Spartans. The year is 1964--early days in South Vietnam--and the U. S. Army Raiders have garrisoned a town that the French abandoned ten years before. The Viet Cong attack, and the Americans reinforce. They're not about to repeat the mistakes of the French 'Sad, bawdy, and compelling, ' wrote the Detroit Free Press. Prophetic, too, of how the larger war would end.