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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900
'An intimate, insightful portrait of an extraordinarily private leader' WALTER ISAACSON From the bestselling author of Enemies of the People An intimate and deeply researched account of the extraordinary rise and political brilliance of the most powerful - and elusive - woman in the world. Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor's daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her twenties working as a research chemist, only entering politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within fifteen years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West. Acclaimed author Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of this unlikely ascent. With unparalleled access to the chancellor's inner circle and a trove of records only recently come to light, she teases out the unique political genius that is the secret to Merkel's success. No other modern leader has so ably confronted authoritarian aggression, enacted daring social policies and calmly unified an entire continent in an era when countries are becoming only more divided. Again and again, she's cleverly outmanoeuvred strongmen like Putin and Trump, and weathered surprisingly complicated relationships with allies like Obama and Macron. Famously private, the woman who emerges from these pages is a role model for anyone interested in gaining and keeping power while staying true to one's moral convictions. At once a riveting political biography, an intimate human portrait and a revelatory look at successful leadership in action, The Chancellor brings forth from the shadows one of the most extraordinary women of our time.
John Grigg's four volume life of Lloyd George is one of the great political biographies. This, the final volume, opens with Lloyd George's succession to the Premiership in December 1916, when Britain faced starvation and defeat through the German U-boat campaign, its allies France, Russia and Italy were tottering, the Liberal Party was bitterly divided and unrest in Ireland was growing. Worst of all, military chiefs regarded themselves as at least the equals of the government. To resolve these crises required ruthlessness, political genius and leadership of the highest order. In this thrilling book we see one of Britain's most resourceful Prime Ministers in brilliant action, steering his country to victory. It is a tragedy John Grigg didn't live to complete his magnum opus but what exists is a masterpiece. Faber Finds is reissuing the four volumes: The Young Lloyd George, Lloyd George: The People's Champion 1902-1911, Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912-1916, Lloyd George: War Leader 1916-1918. 'With the volume, Grigg crowns the edifice of one of the great biographies of our time.' Anthony Howard - Sunday Times 'A fitting climax to a path-breaking study.' John Campbell, Independent, Books of the Year 'Superb... the fullest account we shall ever have of Lloyd George's career as a wartime Prime Minister. It is a fascinating story and is told with panache, vigour, clarity and impartiality by a great biographer... brings out as never before the brilliance of Lloyd George's finest hour.' Robert Blake, Evening Standard 'A major publishing event... Grigg mingles factual precision, high-interest value and judgements which are mostly as wise as they are forthright.' Roy Jenkins, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year 'Gripping... essential... This wonderful biography, clear and authoritative, every page a lesson in how to write narrative history, well up to its preceding volumes, recreates both a time of acute national danger and an extraordinary man.' Max Egremont, Financial Times
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as "domestic enemy aliens" during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with workplaces, social groups, and political alliances-in short, networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki's Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections between people are the foundation of human societies. Exploring the creation of networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from the camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated community, specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and resistance. Kekki constructs a dynamic network model of all of Heart Mountain's residents and their interconnections-family, political, employment, social, and geospatial networks-using historical "big data" drawn from the War Relocation Authority and narrative sources, including the camp newspaper Heart Mountain Sentinel. For all the inmates, life inevitably went on: people married, had children, worked, and engaged in politics. Because of the duration of the incarceration, many became institutionalized and unwilling to leave the camps when the time came. Yet most individuals, Kekki finds, took charge of their own destinies despite the injustice and looked forward to the day when Heart Mountain was behind them. Especially timely in its implications for debates over immigration and assimilation, Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain presents a remarkable opportunity to reconstruct a community created under duress within the larger American society, and to gain new insight into an American experience largely lost to official history.
"At the end of the Trail of Tears there was a promise," U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the decision issued on July 9, 2020, in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma. And that promise, made in treaties between the United States and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation more than 150 years earlier, would finally be kept. With the Court's ruling, the full extent of the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation was reaffirmed-meaning that 3.25 million acres of land in Oklahoma, including part of the city of Tulsa, were recognized once again as "Indian Country" as defined by federal law. A Promise Kept explores the circumstances and implications of McGirt v. Oklahoma, likely the most significant Indian law case in well over 100 years. Combining legal analysis and historical context, this book gives an in-depth, accessible account of how the case unfolded and what it might mean for Oklahomans, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and other tribes throughout the United States. For context, Robbie Ethridge traces the long history of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from its inception in present-day Georgia and Alabama in the seventeenth century; through the tribe's rise to regional prominence in the colonial era, the tumultuous years of Indian Removal, and the Civil War and allotment; and into its resurgence in Oklahoma in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Against this historical background, Robert J. Miller considers McGirt v. Oklahoma, examining important related cases, precedents that informed the Court's decision, and future ramifications-legal, civil, regulatory, and practical-for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, federal Indian law, the United States, the state of Oklahoma, and Indian nations in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Their work clarifies the stakes of a decision that, while long overdue, raises numerous complex issues profoundly affecting federal, state, and tribal relations and law-and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Von Moltke and 'quick victory': Jellicoe and the Battle of Jutland: Petain and the wave of mutinies: Ludendorff and the 1918 offensives. Four key men, four key moments in the Great War. Corelli Barnett, in his famous study, writes with brilliant insight about these flawed men grappling with events that were outside their comprehension. In his preface he writes thus: 'The Theme of this book is the decisive effect of individual human character on history. The background, in sharpest contrast, is a sudden and violent transition to mass collectivised life - to twentieth century industrial civilization. The principal actors are four national commanders-in-chief: two German, one Frenchman, one Englishman. Theirs was the novel task of directing these new and terrifying forces of mass powering battle. Each had been born and bred in the last century; each belonged to a highly conservative profession. Their abilities and defects reflected and illustrated those of their countries. For the historian, with the priceless gift of hindsight, it is moving and fascinating, therefore, to study these men locked in struggle with events greater than themselves; to see their moments of clarity and prophesy, of optimistic self-delusion, of uncertainty, of despair. Each in turn, as commander-in-chief, bore his nation's sword at a period when the course of the war pivoted on his judgement and will: four actors in a continental tragedy of death and re-birth.'
In Harold Nicolson's own words 'This study of Lord Curzon represents the third volume of a trilogy on British diplomacy covering the years from 1870 to 1924. The first volume of that trilogy was a biography entitled Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy. The second volume was a critical survey of the Paris conference called Peacemaking, 1919.' All three volumes are reissued in Faber Finds. Curzon himself, not a modest man it must be admitted, rated highly the work of his final years. In his 'Literary Testament' dictated only a few hours before his death he said, 'As to my work as Foreign Secretary from 1918 to 1924 - a period of unparalleled difficulty in international affairs and of great personal worry and sometimes tribulation . . . - I court the fullest publicity as to my conduct in those anxious years and can imagine no better justification than the publication of any or all the telegrams, despatches, minutes and records of interviews for which I was responsible.' Some of the chapter headings alone remind us of what an eventful period it was: Armistice, The Eastern Question, Smyrna, Persia, Egypt, Reparation, Chanak and Lausanne. It is perhaps a pity that Harold Nicolson didn't write the official biography of Lord Curzon (he was a candidate) but what we have here is a work that is, in the words of David Gilmour, another biographer of Curzon, 'acute, jaunty, readable and sympathetic.'
'Of all branches of human endeavour, diplomacy is the most protean.' That is how Harold Nicolson begins this book. It is an apt opening. The Paris Conference of 1919, attended by thirty-two nations, had the supremely challenging task of attempting to bring about a lasting peace after the global catastrophe of the Great War. Harold Nicolson was a member of the British delegation. His book is in two parts. In the first he provides an account of the conference, in the second his diary covering his six month stint. There is a piquant counterpoise between the two. Of his diary he writes, 'I should wish it to be read as people read the reminiscences of a subaltern in the trenches. There is the same distrust of headquarters; the same irritation against the staff-officer who interrupts; the same belief that one's own sector is the centre of the battle-front; the same conviction that one is, with great nobility of soul, winning the war quite single-handed.' The diary ends with prophetic disillusionment, 'To bed, sick of life.' As a first-hand account of one of the most important events shaping the modern world this book remains a classic.
The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War was published in 1938. It is G. L. Steer's masterpiece. Martha Gellhorn famously wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt: "" ""'You must read a book by a man names Steer: it is called The Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques - he's the London Times man - and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I have tried to say to you the times I saw you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still deal with war. Pleas get it.' "" ""As Paul Preston says in his "We Saw Spain Die," 'Martha Gellhorn's judgement has more than stood the test of time.' "" ""In his introduction, Nick Rankin writes.' "The Tree of Gernika" tells how Euzkadi, the democratic republic that the Basques created in their green homeland by the Bay of Biscay, fought for freedom and decency in an atrocious civil war. After a year of struggle, blockaded by sea, bombed from the air, fighting against overwhelming odds in their own hill, the Basques in the end lost to Franco's forces - but they lost honourably, without resorting to murder, torture and treachery.' "" ""It was Steer who alerted the world to the destruction of Gernika (Basque spelling), Guernica (Spanish spelling). It was the most important dispatch of his life, run by both "The Times "and "The New York Times." Nick Rankin rightly describes "The Tree of Gernika" as 'a masterpiece of narrative history and eyewitness reporting by someone close to the key events . . .'
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