The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners.The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades.In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serveas the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
Oxford University Press; 1st edition
|
9780197550779
|
1st Edition
The Strangers We Became
By Shamash, Cynthia Kaplan
This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia's father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family.
Brandeis University Press
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9781611688054
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eBook
The Art of Resistance
By Rosenberg, Justus
An unforgettable World War II memoir set in Nazi-occupied France and filled with romance and adventure: a former Eastern European Jew remembers his flight from the Holocaust and his extraordinary four years in the French underground. Justus Rosenberg, now 98, has taught literature at Bard College for the past fifty years.In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless, and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille helping thousands of men and women, including many artists and intellectuals - among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst - escape the Nazis.
William Morrow
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9780062742193
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Hardcover
Wilmington's Lie
By Zucchino, David
By 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, was a shining example of a mixed-race community -- a bustling port city with a thriving African American middle class and a government made up of Republicans and Populists, including black aldermen, police officers, and magistrates. But across the state -- and the South -- white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in the November 8th elections and then use a controversial editorial published by black newspaper editor Alexander Manly to trigger a rebellion or "race riot" to overthrow the elected government in Wilmington. With a coordinated campaign of intimidation and violence, the Democrats sharply curtailed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes to steal the 1898 mid-term election. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed white nightriders known as Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, terrorizing women and children and shooting at least 60 black men dead in the streets. The rebels forced city officials and leading black citizens to flee at gun point while hundreds of local African Americans took refuge in nearby swamps and forests. This brutal insurrection is the only violent overthrow of an elected government in American history. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another 70 years. It was not a "race riot" as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially-motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists. In Wilmington's Lie, David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper reports, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate, fear, and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.
Publisher: n/a
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9780802128386
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Hardcover
The Deserters
By Glass, Charles
Powerful and often startlingThe Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts --The Boston GlobeA groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War Charles Glassrenowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris Life and Death Under Nazi Occupationdelves deep into army archives personal diaries court-martial records and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by historySurveying the American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater The Deserters A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France Italy and Africa Their deeds form the backbone of Glasss arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiersWith the grace and pace of a novel The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandyyet became a gangster in liberated Paris robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain who deserted three times but never fled from combatand who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his fathera disillusioned First World War veteranto sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest as an infantryman with the th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commandersFar from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reportedto the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.
Penguin Press HC, The; First Edition / First Printing edition
|
9781594204289
|
Hardcover
Surviving Hiroshima
By Drago, Anthony
On August 6, 1945, 22-year-old Kaleria Palchikoff was doing pre-breakfast chores when a blinding flash lit the sky over Hiroshima, Japan. A moment later, everything went black as the house collapsed on her and her family. Their world, and everyone else's, changed as the first atomic bomb was detonated over a city. From Russian nobility, the Palchikoff's barely escaped death at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries until her father, a White Russian officer, hijacked a ship to take them to safety in Hiroshima. Safety was short lived. Her father, a talented musician, established a new life for the family, but the outbreak of World War II created a cloud of suspicion that led to his imprisonment and years of deprivation for his family. After the bombing, trapped in the center of previously unimagined devastation, Kaleria summoned her strength to come to the aid of bomb victims, treating the never-before seen effects of radiation.
Boutique of Quality Books
|
9781608082360
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Paperback
Gangbuster
By Prendergast, Alan
A gripping and exhaustively researched, first-time account of a feared gangbuster's groundbreaking battles with organized crime, the KKK, and corruption at the highest levels of government sure to resonate with readers affected by the politics of contemporary society.. At the height of the roaring 1920s, the ex-frontier town of Denver, Colorado, emerged from the postwar boom as the future of the American city. But the slick façade of progress and opportunity masked a murky stew of organized crime, elaborate swindles, and widespread government corruption. One man risked everything to alter the course of history. Rookie district attorney Phillip Van Cise was already making national headlines for a new brand of law enforcement. Employing military intelligence tools he'd developed during the Great War - wiretapping, undercover operatives, communication intercepts - Van Cise crippled the criminal empire of Lou Blonger, an ex-lawman who had risen from petty scam artist to master of the Big Con.
Citadel Press
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9780806542126
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Hardcover
The Words That Made Us
By Amar, Akhil Reed
Publisher: n/a
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9780465096350
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Hardcover
The Library
By Kells, Stuart
"If you think you know what a library is, this marvellously idiosyncratic book will make you think again. After visiting hundreds of libraries around the world and in the realm of the imagination, bibliophile and rare-book collector Stuart Kells has compiled an enchanting compendium of well-told tales and musings both on the physical and metaphysical dimensions of these multistoried places." -- The Sydney Morning Herald Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern-day "Library Tourists." Kells discovered that all the world's libraries are connected in beautiful and complex ways, that in the history of libraries, fascinating patterns are created and repeated over centuries. More important, he learned that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama. The Library is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It's a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.
The American War in Afghanistan
By Malkasian, Carter
The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners.The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades.In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serveas the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
The Strangers We Became
By Shamash, Cynthia Kaplan
This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia's father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family.
The Art of Resistance
By Rosenberg, Justus
An unforgettable World War II memoir set in Nazi-occupied France and filled with romance and adventure: a former Eastern European Jew remembers his flight from the Holocaust and his extraordinary four years in the French underground. Justus Rosenberg, now 98, has taught literature at Bard College for the past fifty years.In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless, and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille helping thousands of men and women, including many artists and intellectuals - among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst - escape the Nazis.
Wilmington's Lie
By Zucchino, David
By 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, was a shining example of a mixed-race community -- a bustling port city with a thriving African American middle class and a government made up of Republicans and Populists, including black aldermen, police officers, and magistrates. But across the state -- and the South -- white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in the November 8th elections and then use a controversial editorial published by black newspaper editor Alexander Manly to trigger a rebellion or "race riot" to overthrow the elected government in Wilmington. With a coordinated campaign of intimidation and violence, the Democrats sharply curtailed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes to steal the 1898 mid-term election. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed white nightriders known as Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, terrorizing women and children and shooting at least 60 black men dead in the streets. The rebels forced city officials and leading black citizens to flee at gun point while hundreds of local African Americans took refuge in nearby swamps and forests. This brutal insurrection is the only violent overthrow of an elected government in American history. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another 70 years. It was not a "race riot" as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially-motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists. In Wilmington's Lie, David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper reports, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate, fear, and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.
The Deserters
By Glass, Charles
Powerful and often startlingThe Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts --The Boston GlobeA groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War Charles Glassrenowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris Life and Death Under Nazi Occupationdelves deep into army archives personal diaries court-martial records and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by historySurveying the American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater The Deserters A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France Italy and Africa Their deeds form the backbone of Glasss arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiersWith the grace and pace of a novel The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandyyet became a gangster in liberated Paris robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain who deserted three times but never fled from combatand who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his fathera disillusioned First World War veteranto sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest as an infantryman with the th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commandersFar from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reportedto the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.
Surviving Hiroshima
By Drago, Anthony
On August 6, 1945, 22-year-old Kaleria Palchikoff was doing pre-breakfast chores when a blinding flash lit the sky over Hiroshima, Japan. A moment later, everything went black as the house collapsed on her and her family. Their world, and everyone else's, changed as the first atomic bomb was detonated over a city. From Russian nobility, the Palchikoff's barely escaped death at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries until her father, a White Russian officer, hijacked a ship to take them to safety in Hiroshima. Safety was short lived. Her father, a talented musician, established a new life for the family, but the outbreak of World War II created a cloud of suspicion that led to his imprisonment and years of deprivation for his family. After the bombing, trapped in the center of previously unimagined devastation, Kaleria summoned her strength to come to the aid of bomb victims, treating the never-before seen effects of radiation.
Gangbuster
By Prendergast, Alan
A gripping and exhaustively researched, first-time account of a feared gangbuster's groundbreaking battles with organized crime, the KKK, and corruption at the highest levels of government sure to resonate with readers affected by the politics of contemporary society.. At the height of the roaring 1920s, the ex-frontier town of Denver, Colorado, emerged from the postwar boom as the future of the American city. But the slick façade of progress and opportunity masked a murky stew of organized crime, elaborate swindles, and widespread government corruption. One man risked everything to alter the course of history. Rookie district attorney Phillip Van Cise was already making national headlines for a new brand of law enforcement. Employing military intelligence tools he'd developed during the Great War - wiretapping, undercover operatives, communication intercepts - Van Cise crippled the criminal empire of Lou Blonger, an ex-lawman who had risen from petty scam artist to master of the Big Con.
The Words That Made Us
By Amar, Akhil Reed
The Library
By Kells, Stuart
"If you think you know what a library is, this marvellously idiosyncratic book will make you think again. After visiting hundreds of libraries around the world and in the realm of the imagination, bibliophile and rare-book collector Stuart Kells has compiled an enchanting compendium of well-told tales and musings both on the physical and metaphysical dimensions of these multistoried places." -- The Sydney Morning Herald Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. Some still exist today; some are lost, like those of Herculaneum and Alexandria; some have been sold or dispersed; and some never existed, such as those libraries imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate. To research this book, Kells traveled around the world with his young family like modern-day "Library Tourists." Kells discovered that all the world's libraries are connected in beautiful and complex ways, that in the history of libraries, fascinating patterns are created and repeated over centuries. More important, he learned that stories about libraries are stories about people, containing every possible human drama. The Library is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder. It's a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.