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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
Horace 'Jim' Greasley was twenty years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war. After seven weeks training with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicester, he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy field south of Cherbourg, in Northern France, with just thirty rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace's war didn't last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a ten week march across France and Belgium en-route to Holland.
Horace survived...barely...food was scarce; he took nourishment from dandelion leaves, small insects and occasionally a secret food package from a sympathetic villager, and drank rain water from ditches. Many of his fellow comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through sheer exhaustion and malnourishment meant a bullet through the back of the head and the corpse left to rot. After a three day train journey without food and water, Horace found himself incarcerated in a prison camp in Poland. It was there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German girl interpreting for his captors.
He experienced the sweet taste of freedom each time he escaped to see her, yet incredibly he made his way back into the camp each time, sometimes two, three times every week. Horace broke out of the camp then crept back in again under the cover of darkness after his natural urges were fulfilled. He brought food back to his fellow prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. He broke out of the camp over two hundred times and towards the end of the war even managed to bring radio parts back in. The BBC news would be delivered daily to over 3,000 prisoners. This is an incredible tale of one man's adversity and defiance of the German nation.
The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great
Famine
An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children
starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late
1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the
twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is
still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural
disaster."
As a journalist with privileged access to official and
unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing
together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation,
including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes,
Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's
totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to
value human life over ideology and self-interest.
"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism
that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed
by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed
account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone"
is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring
tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the
final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in
"The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of
"Tombstone ""groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books
to come out of China in recent years."
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