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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
'A sprawling tale of love, family, duty, war, and displacement'
Khaled Hosseini Correspondents by Tim Murphy is a powerful story
about the legacy of immigration, the present-day world of
refugeehood, the violence that America causes both abroad and at
home, and the power of the individual and the family to bring good
into a world that is often brutal. Spanning the breadth of the
twentieth century and into the post-9/11 wars and their legacy,
Correspondents is a powerful novel that centres on Rita Khoury, an
Irish-Lebanese woman whose life and family history mirrors the
story of modern America. Both sides of Rita's family came to the
United States in the golden years of immigration, and in her home
north of Boston Rita grows into a stubborn, perfectionist, and
relentlessly bright young woman. She studies Arabic at university
and moves to cosmopolitan Beirut to work as a journalist, and is
then posted to Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. In
Baghdad, Rita finds for the first time in her life that her safety
depends on someone else, her talented interpreter Nabil al-Jumaili,
an equally driven young man from a middle-class Baghdad family who
is hiding a secret about his sexuality. As Nabil's identity
threatens to put him in jeopardy and Rita's position becomes more
precarious as the war intensifies, their worlds start to unravel,
forcing them out of the country and into an uncertain future.
Britain’s best-selling historian writes the first definitive account of
the famous televised SAS storming of the Iranian embassy in London in
1980
On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian
embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they
took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British
citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around
screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British
television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists
sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an
organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue
mission: Operation Nimrod.
Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the
SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators,
intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling
historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the
years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute
account of the siege and rescue.
Recreating the dramatic conversations between negotiators and hostages,
the cutting-edge intelligence work happening behind-the-scenes, and the
media frenzy around this moment of international significance, The
Siege is the remarkable story of what really happened on those fateful
six days, and the first full account of a moment that forever changed
the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.
Inspired by the discovery of her father's long-forgotten photos,
diaries and letters from home, the author set about creating this
book as a tribute to the bravery and sacrifices made by the armed
forces in the often over-looked Indian sub-continent area of
conflict, 5,000 miles away from home. Now, after six years of work
and research, this book has culminated in a tremendous insight into
the appalling hardships and working conditions as well as the
ingenuity of the often forgotten RAF ground crew who kept the
warbirds in the air. Deprived by the RAF of his Pilot's Licence due
to colour blindness, Peter was based firstly in central India,
maintaining old planes that were already obsolete, and then in
Burma where the ground crew were also flying as cargo handlers and
stretcher bearers, having to land and take off in the most
hazardous of conditions on short bush strips hacked out of the
Japanese-infested jungles.
"Vengeance" is a true story that reads like a novel. It is the
account of five ordinary Israelis, selected to vanish into "the
cold" of espionage secrecy -- their mission to hunt down and kill
the PLO terrorists responsible for the massacre of eleven Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
This is the account of that secret mission, as related by the
leader of the group -- the first Mossad agent to come out of "deep
cover" and tell the story of a heroic endeavor that was shrouded in
silence and speculation for years. He reveals the long and
dangerous operation whose success was bought at a terrible cost to
the idealistic volunteer agents themselves.
"Avner" was the leader of that team, handpicked by Golda Meir to
avenge the monstrous crime of Munich. He and his young companions,
cut off from any direct contact with Israel, set out systematically
to find and kill the central figures of the PLO's Munich operation,
tracking them down wherever they lived.
The mechanics, the horror, the day-by-day suspense of what they
did surpass by far anything John le Carre or Robert Ludlum could
imagine, as they themselves were tracked in turn (and some killed)
by PLO assassins, changing identities constantly, moving from
country to country, devoting their young lives to the brutal task
of vengeance.
"Vengeance" is a profoundly human document, a real-life
espionage classic that plunges the reader into the shadow world of
terrorism and political murder. But it goes far beyond that, to
explore firsthand the feelings of disgust and doubt that gradually
came to torment each member of the Israeli team, and that in the
end inexorably changed their view of the mission -- and
themselves.
"Vengeance" opens a window onto a secret world, a book that at
the same time inspires and horrifies. For its subject is an act of
revenge that goes to the very heart of the ancient biblical
questions of good and evil.
The end of the Second World War led to the United States' emergence
as a global superpower. For war-ravaged Western Europe it marked
the beginning of decades of unprecedented cooperation and
prosperity that one historian has labeled "the long peace". Yet
half a world away, in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea and
Malaya-the fighting never really stopped, as these regions sought
to completely sever the yoke of imperialism and colonialism with
all-too-violent consequences. East and Southeast Asia quickly
became the most turbulent regions of the globe. Within weeks of the
famous surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri, civil war,
communal clashes and insurgency engulfed the continent, from
Southeast Asia to the Soviet border. By early 1947, full-scale wars
were raging in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, with growing guerrilla
conflicts in Korea and Malaya. Within a decade after the Japanese
surrender, almost all of the countries of South, East and Southeast
Asia that had formerly been conquests of the Japanese or colonies
of the European powers experienced wars and upheavals that resulted
in the deaths of at least 2.5 million combatants and millions of
civilians. With A Continent Erupts, acclaimed military historian
Ronald H. Spector draws on letters, diaries and international
archives to provide, for the first time, a comprehensive military
history and analysis of these little-known but decisive events. Far
from being simply offshoots of the Cold War, as they have often
been portrayed, these shockingly violent conflicts forever changed
the shape of Asia, and the world as we know it today.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
Grounds of Judgment reopens the question of consular jurisdiction
and extraterritoriality in China and Japan. The book combines
recent findings in Qing history on the nature of ethnicity and law
with the history of the treaty ports in both China and Japan,
especially Shanghai, Yokohama and Nagasaki. Extraterritoriality was
not implanted into East Asia as a ready-made product, but developed
in a dialogue with local precedents, local understandings of power,
and local institutions, which are best understood within the
complex triangular relationship between China, Japan and the West.
A close reading of treaty texts and other relevant documents
suggests that a Qing institution for the adjudication for
Manchu-Chinese disputes served as the model for both the
International Mixed Court in Shanghai and the extraterritorial
arrangements in Sino-Japanese Treaty of Tianjin in 1871. The
adaptability of Qing legal procedure provided for a relatively
seamless transition into the treaty port era, which would have
momentous consequences for China's national sovereignty in the
twentieth century. There was no parallel to this development in the
Japanese case. Instead, Japanese authorities chose not to integrate
consular courts and mixed courts into the indigenous legal order,
and as a consequence, consular jurisdiction remained an alien body
in the Japanese state, and Japanese policymakers were determined to
keep it that way.
Qiu Guangming, the author of this book, has been a researcher on
the measuring and weighing systems in China for more thirty years.
He has been collecting historical data and examining actual
objects, which has resulted in numerous research papers and books.
This book examines the systems she has researched.
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