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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900
Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was one of the most inspiring leaders
of the twentieth century, and one of its greatest wits. War
reporter, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime Minister, Nobel
Laureate, wordplay enthusiast, he was a powerful man of many words.
Throughout his life, he moved, entertained, and sometimes enraged
people with his notorious wit and razor-sharp tongue. Consequently,
he is one of the most oft-quoted and misquoted leaders in recent
history. Now in paperback, "Churchill by Himself" is the first
fully annotated and attributed collection of Churchill
sayings--edited by longtime Churchill scholar Richard M. Langworth
and authorized by the Churchill estate--that captures Churchill's
wit in its entirety.
This is the third and final 'stand-alone' account of C Squadron
SAS's thrilling operations against the relentless spread of
communist backed terrorism in East Africa. Drawing on first-hand
experiences the author describes operations against
communist-backed terrorists in Angola and Mozambique, aiding the
Portuguese and Renamo against the MPLA and Frelimo respectively.
Back in Southern Rhodesia SAS General Peter Walls, realising the
danger that Mugabe and ZANU represented, appealed directly to
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This correspondence,
published here for the first time, changed nothing and years of
corruption and genocide followed. Although C Squadron was disbanded
in 1980 many members joined the South African special forces.
Operations undertaken included unsuccessful and costly
destabilisation attempts against Mugabe and missions into
Mozambique including the assassination of Samora Machel. By 1986
deteriorating relationships with the South African authorities
resulted in the break-up of the SAS teams who dispersed worldwide.
Had Mike Graham not written his three action-packed books, C
Squadron SAS's superb fighting record might never have been
revealed. For those who are fascinated by special forces soldiering
his accounts are 'must reads'.
In this bold reevaluation of a decisive moment in American history,
Michael Hiltzik dispels decades of accumulated myths and
misconceptions about the New Deal to capture with clarity and
immediacy its origins, its legacy, and its genius.
In this book the territory of Pechenga, located well above the
Arctic circle between Russia, Finland and Norway, holds the key to
understanding the geopolitical situation of the Arctic today. With
specific focus on the local nickel industry of the region, Lars
Rowe explores the interaction between commercial and state security
concerns in the Soviet Union. Through the lens of this local
industry a larger historical context is unravelled - the nature of
Soviet-Finnish relations after the Russian Revolution, Soviet
international relations strategies during the Second World War and
the nature of the Stalinist economy in the early post-war years. By
presenting this environmentally focused history of a small corner
of the Arctic, Rowe offers the historical context needed to
understand the current geopolitical climate of the Polar North.
Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed "Yellow Dirt," "will
break your heart. An enormous achievement--literally, a piece of
groundbreaking investigative journalism--illustrates exactly what
reporting should do: Show us what we've become as a people, and
sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become" ( "The
Christian Science Monitor" ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and
discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked,
unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project
and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in
all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New
Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush
flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground.
They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled
radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining
companies had left behind, and their children played in the
unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the
cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be
born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they
grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation
with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to
clean up.
Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning "Los Angeles
Times" series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous
prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe.
"Yellow Dirt" is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of
neglect and the Navajos' fight for justice.
'The Book Collectors of Daraya celebrates the political and
therapeutic power of the written word . . . defiant and cautiously
optimistic' Financial Times '[An] incredible chronicle . . . The
book tells the kind of story that often gets buried beneath images
of violence' LitHub In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus
was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of
suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical
gas attacks. People's homes were destroyed and their food supplies
cut off; disease was rife. Yet in this man-made hell, forty young
Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project,
rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of
their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a
safe place, deep underground. It became their school, their
university, their refuge. It was a place to learn, to exchange
ideas, to dream and to hope. Based on lengthy interviews with these
young men, conducted over Skype by the award-winning French
journalist Delphine Minoui, The Book Collectors of Daraya is a
powerful testament to freedom, tolerance and the power of
literature. Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud.
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