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Books > History > World history > From 1900
Based on 70 hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the extermination camps), this book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final soulution.
Marthie Voigt (nooi Prinsloo) is in 1931 in Suidwes-Afrika gebore;
die vierde van ses kinders. Wat volg is ’n groot avontuur. Marthie
word groot in die wye en ongetemde vlaktes van Angola. Die
Prinsloo-gesin trek baie rond agter goeie weiding en gesonder
toestande aan. Die lewe in ongerepte Angola het ook sy gevare en
Marthie beleef groot hartseer toe haar sussie op 19 sterf aan
malaria. Nadat Marthie trou met Carl-Wilhelm Voigt en hulle hul
gevestig het op haar skoonouers se koffieplaas, begin die onheil in
Angola roer. Ongelukkig breek daar oorlog uit en die Voigts moet
hulle plaas net so los. Hulle speel ’n groot rol daarin om
vlugtelinge uit Angola te versorg. Marthie Voigt het haar
ongelooflike herinneringe aan hierdie historiese en persoonlike
gebeurtenisse neergeskryf sodat wanneer ’n mens dit lees, dit
glashelder voor jou geestesoog afspeel. ’n Wonderlike lewensverhaal
uit die pen van ’n sterk, intelligente vrou.
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of
World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three
minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in
Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years
later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of
home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community,
an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three
Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey
to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His
search takes him across the United States to Canada, England,
Poland, and Israel. To archives, film preservation laboratories,
and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates
seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty six
year old man who appears in the film as a thirteen year old boy.
Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents,
and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny,
harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven
survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir,
David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a
vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film,
Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and
improbable survival, a monument to a lost world.
The Great and Holy War offers the first look at how religion
created and prolonged the First World War. At the one-hundredth
anniversary of the outbreak of the war, historian Philip Jenkins
reveals the powerful religious dimensions of this modern-day
crusade, a period that marked a traumatic crisis for Western
civilization, with effects that echoed throughout the rest of the
twentieth century.
The war was fought by the world's leading Christian nations, who
presented the conflict as a holy war. Thanks to the emergence of
modern media, a steady stream of patriotic and militaristic
rhetoric was given to an unprecedented audience, using language
that spoke of holy war and crusade, of apocalypse and Armageddon.
But this rhetoric was not mere state propaganda. Jenkins reveals
how the widespread belief in angels and apparitions, visions and
the supernatural was a driving force throughout the war and shaped
all three of the major religions--Christianity, Judaism and
Islam--paving the way for modern views of religion and violence.
The disappointed hopes and moral compromises that followed the war
also shaped the political climate of the rest of the century,
giving rise to such phenomena as Nazism, totalitarianism, and
communism.
Connecting numerous remarkable incidents and characters--from
Karl Barth to Carl Jung, the Christmas Truce to the Armenian
Genocide--Jenkins creates a powerful and persuasive narrative that
brings together global politics, history, and spiritual crisis as
never before and shows how religion informed and motivated
circumstances on all sides of the war.
Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France
by Nicholas Shakespeare is a transcendent work of narrative
nonfiction in the vein of The Hare with Amber Eyes.
When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a trunk full of his
late aunt's personal belongings, he was unaware of where this
discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden
past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his
childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman
who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals and
photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious
existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy
during World War II.
As a young boy, Shakespeare had always believed that his aunt
was a member of the Resistance and had been tortured by the
Germans. The truth turned out to be far more complicated.
Piecing together fragments of his aunt's remarkable and tragic
story, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving
portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and
a spellbinding slice of history.
Recent years have seen a disturbing advance in populist and
authoritarian styles of rule and, in response, a rise in popular
activism. Strongmen, especially since the advent of fascism, have
formed their base of power in popular acclaim. But what power do
the people have in checking the rise of tyranny? In this book an
international team of experts representing several academic
disciplines examines the power relationship between peoples and
their rulers. It is among the first to study this globally as a
problem of nation states. From populism in 19th-century Latin
America to eastern Europe since the collapse of communism, to the
Arab Spring and contemporary Russia and China, the cases in this
book span five continents and twelve nations. Taken together, they
reveal how different forms of popular opposition have succeeded or
failed in unseating authoritarian regimes and expose the tactics
and strategies used by regimes to repress people power and create
an image of popular support. Analysing the causes and consequence
of the global advance of authoritarianism, The Power of Populism
and the People offers a historical comparison of popular protest,
opposition and crises over the last century to the recent rise of
populist leaders.
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