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Icebound (Paperback)
Andrea Pitzer
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R491
R209
Discovery Miles 2 090
Save R282 (57%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'An epic tale of exploration, daring and tragedy told by a fine
historian - and a wonderful writer' Peter Frankopan, author of the
bestselling The Silk Roads. 'The name of William Barents isn't that
familiar to us these days...but this enthralling, elemental and
literally spine-chilling epic of courage and endurance should
change all that' Roger Alton, Daily Mail A dramatic and compelling
account of survival against the odds from the golden Age of
Exploration. The human story has always been one of perseverance -
often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale
of all might be that of sixteenth-century Dutch explorer William
Barents and his crew, who ventured further North than any Europeans
before and, on their third polar expedition, lost their ship off
the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would
spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing
hunger and endless winter. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer masterfully
combines a gripping tale of survival with a sweeping history of the
great age of Exploration - a time of hope, adventure and seemingly
unlimited geographic frontiers.
For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed
somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have
evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and
the savage practicality with which governments have employed them.
Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the
magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have
broken our own solemn promise of "never again." In this harrowing
work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four
continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the
chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps.
Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around
the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern
Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and
detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp
systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and
political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a
nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead
served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives
of millions. Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical
scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the
roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the
staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the
extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that
have also been part of camp life during the past century.
'An epic tale of exploration, daring and tragedy told by a fine
historian - and a wonderful writer' Peter Frankopan, author of the
bestselling The Silk Roads. 'The name of William Barents isn't that
familiar to us these days...but this enthralling, elemental and
literally spine-chilling epic of courage and endurance should
change all that' Roger Alton, Daily Mail A dramatic and compelling
account of survival against the odds from the golden Age of
Exploration. Since its beginning, the human story has been one of
exploration and survival - often against long odds. The longest
odds of all might have been faced by Dutch explorer William Barents
and his crew of fifteen, who on Barents' third journey into the Far
Arctic in the year 1597 lost their ship to a crush of icebergs and,
with few weapons and dwindling supplies, spent nine months fighting
off ravenous polar bears, gnawing cold and seemingly endless
winter. This is their story. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer combines a
movie-worthy tale of survival with a sweeping history of the period
- a time of hope, adventure and seemingly unlimited scientific and
geographic frontiers. At the story's centre is William Barents, one
of the sixteenth century's greatest navigators, whose
larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to find a path
through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in
both catastrophe and glory - glory because the desperation that his
men endured had an epic quality that would echo through the
centuries as both warning and spur to polar explorers. In a
narrative that is filled with fascinating tutorials - on such
topics as survival at twenty degrees below, the degeneration of the
human body when it lacks Vitamin C, the history of mutiny, the
practice of keel hauling, the art of celestial navigation and the
intricacies of repairing masts and building shelters - the lesson
that stands above all others is the feats humans are capable of
when asked to double then triple then quadruple their physical
capacities.
Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century,
escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and
fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris
fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a
blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity.
But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really
deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many
critics?
Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and
recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that
far from being a proponent of art for art s sake, Vladimir Nabokov
managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction history that has
gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of
documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his
career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and
searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust.
Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert s secret identity, and reveals a
Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of
Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world.
From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations
to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov s family is the story
of his century and both are woven inextricably into his
fiction."
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