Download or read book Bridge Over the River Kwai written by Pierre Boulle and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2018-08-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnificent story of Colonel Nicholson, who built the perfect bridge - for the enemy. On its publication in France, this brilliant novel was awarded the Prix Ste. Beuve. Since its appearance in the USA and its presentation as a film, this compelling story has been awarded a succession of prizes in both the fields of entertainment and literature. This is a historical novel. It is based in part on factual events. It was made into the greatest movie ever made. Although hard to believe, the book is based on actual real historical events, except that vastly more people died building the real bridge and the railroad to the bridge than are shown in the movie. The book and movie have slightly different names. The book is "The Bridge Over the River Kwai." The movie is "The Bridge On the River Kwai." In Thailand, they call it the River Kwae.
Download or read book The Bridge Over the River Kwai written by Pierre Boulle and published by Presidio Press. This book was released on 2007-08-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1942: Boldly advancing through Asia, the Japanese need a train route from Burma going north. In a prison camp, British POWs are forced into labor. The bridge they build will become a symbol of service and survival to one prisoner, Colonel Nicholson, a proud perfectionist. Pitted against the warden, Colonel Saito, Nicholson will nevertheless, out of a distorted sense of duty, aid his enemy. While on the outside, as the Allies race to destroy the bridge, Nicholson must decide which will be the first casualty: his patriotism or his pride.
Download or read book THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI written by PIERRE BOULLE and published by . This book was released on with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Man Behind the Bridge written by Peter Davies and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey was the senior British officer concerned with the building of the notorious "Bridge over the River Kwai". Toosey understood from the very beginning that the only real issue was how to ensure that as many of his men as possible should survive their captivity. Many thousands who knew how Toosey stood up to their oppressors at great personal risk were incensed by Alec Guinness's brilliant portrayal of 'Colonel Nicholson' in the film version of Boulle's book. This book provides an accurate historical account of the terrible events during which more than 16,000 PoWs died while building the Thai-Burma railway, of which "the bridge" formed an essential part. A memorial to Toosey, this book is also a definitive history of the building of the railway in the context of the Far Eastern theatre of World War II. First published in 1991, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.
Download or read book Survivor on the River Kwai written by Reg Twigg and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Survivor on the River Kwai is the heartbreaking story of Reg Twigg, one of the last men standing from a forgotten war. Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be fighting Germans. Instead, he found himself caught up in the worst military defeat in modern British history - the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. What followed were three years of hell, moving from one camp to another along the Kwai river, building the infamous Burma railway for the all-conquering Japanese Imperial Army. Some prisoners coped with the endless brutality of the code of Bushido by turning to God; others clung to whatever was left of the regimental structure. Reg made the deadly jungle, with its malaria, cholera, swollen rivers, lethal snakes and exhausting heat, work for him. With an ingenuity that is astonishing, he trapped and ate lizards, harvested pumpkins from the canteen rubbish heap and with his homemade razor became camp barber. That Reg survived is testimony to his own courage and determination, his will to beat the alien brutality of camp guards who had nothing but contempt for him and his fellow POWs. He was a risk taker whose survival strategies sometimes bordered on genius. Reg's story is unique. Reg Twigg was born at Wigston (Leicester) barracks on 16 December 1913. He was called up to the Leicestershire Regiment in 1940 but instead of fighting Hitler he was sent to the Far East, stationed at Singapore. When captured by the Japanese, he decided he would do everything to survive. After his repatriation from the Far East, Reg returned to Leicester. With his family he returned to Thailand in 2006, and revisited the sites of the POW camps. Reg died in 2013, at the age of ninety-nine, two weeks before the publication of this book.
Download or read book The Bridge On The River Kwai written by Pierre Boulle and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bridge on the River Kwai tells the story of three POWs who endure the hell of the Japanese camps on the Burma-Siam railway - Colonel Nicholson, a man prepared to sacrifice his life but not his dignity; Major Warden, a modest hero, saboteur and deadly killer; Commander Shears, who escaped from hell but was sent back. Ordered by the Japanese to build a bridge, the Colonel refuses, as it is against regulations for officers to work with other ranks. The Japanese give way but, to prove a point of British superiority, construction of the bridge goes ahead - at great cost to the men under Nicholson's command.
Download or read book Long Way Back to the River Kwai written by Loet Velmans and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2011-09 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The astounding memoir of a World War II veteran who spent three and a half years in the slave labor camps made famous by The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Download or read book My Own River Kwai written by Pierre Boulle and published by New York : Vanguard Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author's true adventures during World War II, which inspired his novel "The bridge over the River Kwai."
Download or read book The Forgotten Highlander written by Alistair Urquhart and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alistair Urquhart was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders, captured by the Japanese in Singapore. Forced into manual labor as a POW, he survived 750 days in the jungle working as a slave on the notorious “Death Railway” and building the Bridge on the River Kwai. Subsequently, he moved to work on a Japanese “hellship,” his ship was torpedoed, and nearly everyone on board the ship died. Not Urquhart. After five days adrift on a raft in the South China Sea, he was rescued by a Japanese whaling ship. His luck would only get worse as he was taken to Japan and forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki. Two months later, he was just ten miles from ground zero when an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In late August 1945, he was freed by the American Navy—a living skeleton—and had his first wash in three and a half years. This is the extraordinary story of a young man, conscripted at nineteen, who survived not just one, but three encounters with death, any of which should have probably killed him. Silent for over fifty years, this is Urquhart’s inspirational tale in his own words. It is as moving as any memoir and as exciting as any great war movie.
Download or read book To End All Wars written by Ernest Gordon and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture starring Robert Carlyle and Kiefer Sutherland "Waking from a dream, I suddenly realized where I was: in the Death House--in a prison camp by the River Kwai. I was a prisoner of war, lying among the dead, waiting for the bodies to be carried away so that I might have more room." When Ernest Gordon was twenty-four he was captured by the Japanese and forced, with other British prisoners, to build the notorious "Railroad of Death," where nearly 16,000 prisoners of war gave their life. Faced with the appalling conditions of the prisoners' camp and the brutality of the captors, he survived to become an inspiring example of the triumph of the human spirit against all odds. To End All Wars is Ernest Gordon's gripping true story behind both the Academy Award-winning film The Bridge on the River Kwai, starring Alec Guinness, and the new film To End All Wars, directed by David Cunningham.
Download or read book The Colonel of Tamarkan written by Julie Summers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alec Guinness won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the dogmatic but brittle commanding officer in David Lean's film "The Bridge on the River Kwai". While a brilliant performance, it owed more to fiction than fact, as the man who actually commanded the POWs ordered to build the infamous bridges -- there were in fact two: one wooden, one concrete -- was cut from very different cloth. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Toosey was the senior officer among the 2,000-odd Allied servicemen incarcerated in Tamarkan prison camp, and as such had to comply with the Japanese orders to help construct their Thailand-Burma railway. With malnutrition, disease and brutality their constant companions, it was a near-impossible task for soldiers who had already endured terrible privations -- and one which they knew would be in the service of their enemy. But under Toosey's careful direction, a subtle balancing act between compliance and subversion, the Allied inmates not only survived but regained some sense of self-respect. Re-creating the story of this remarkable leader with tremendous skill and narrative flair, and drawing on many original interviews with Second World War POWs from the Asian theatre, THE COLONEL OF TAMARKAN is a riveting blend of biography and history.
Download or read book River with No Bridge written by Sue Sumii and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-27 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The River With No Bridge (Hashi no nai kawa) explores with outspoken frankness a subject still taboo in Japan: the intolerance and bigotry faced daily by Japan’s largest minority group, the burakumin. Racially no different from other Japanese, over the centuries burakumin have been cruelly ostracized for their association with occupations considered defiling. Spanning the years 1908 to 1924, the original six volumes of this novel trace the developing awareness of burakumin of their rights and dignity as human beings. Volume 1, translated into English for the first time in 1990, is a story about childhood in a burakumin village. It tells of young Koji Hatana’s questioning of the rigid social order and his growing sense of injustice as he meets prejudice from other children at school and from his teachers who try to instill in him their belief that since he was born defiled he should resign himself to his fate. Told against the backdrop of Japan’s struggle to shed its feudalistic past and enter the modern age, the novel is a courageous work and a compelling read.
Download or read book The Bridge of San Luis Rey written by Thornton Wilder and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Pulitzer Prize-winning, fable-like short novel—by the author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth—has been beloved around the world for nearly a century. This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the course of the story, the five unlucky individuals—a noblewoman, a maid, an orphan, an old man, and a child—come to life for the reader in all of their glorious complexity. Their intertwined lives—snuffed out in one shattering moment—illuminate the biggest questions that we can ask ourselves about the nature of love and meaning of the human condition.
Download or read book Between the Bridge and the River written by Craig Ferguson and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bawdy, joyous, messy, hysterically funny, and guaranteed to offendregardless of religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, or professionBetween the Bridge and the River is the debut novel by Craig Ferguson, host of CBS's The Late Late Show. Two childhood friends from Scotland and two illegitimate half-brothers from the American South suffer and enjoy all manner of bizarre experiences which, as it turns out, are somehow interconnectedand, surprisingly enough, meaningful. An eclectic cast of characters includes Carl Jung, Fatty Arbuckle, Virgil, Marat, Socrates, and Tony Randall. Love, greed, hope, revenge, organized religion, and Hollywood are alternately tickled and throttled. Impossible to summarize and impossible to stop reading, this is a romantic comic odyssey that actually deliversand rewards.
Download or read book Last Man Out written by H. Robert Charles and published by Motorbooks. This book was released on 2006 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From June 1942 to October 1943, more than 100,000 Allied POWs who had been forced into slave labor by the Japanese died building the infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway, an undertaking immortalized in the film "The Bridge on the River Kwai." One of the few who survived was American Marine H. Robert Charles, who describes the ordeal in vivid and harrowing detail in Last Man Out. The story mixes the unimaginable brutality of the camps with the inspiring courage of the men, including a Dutch Colonial Army doctor whose skill and knowledge of the medicinal value of wild jungle herbs saved the lives of hundreds of his fellow POWs, including the author.
Download or read book Essays on Conrad written by Ian Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark collection of Ian Watt's essays on Joseph Conrad.
Download or read book After Atlas written by Emma Newman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed author Emma Newman returns to the captivating universe she created in Planetfall with a stunning science fiction mystery where one man's murder is much more than it seems... Gov-corp detective Carlos Moreno was only a baby when Atlas left Earth to seek truth among the stars. But in that moment, the course of Carlos's entire life changed. Atlas is what took his mother away; what made his father lose hope; what led Alejandro Casales, leader of the religious cult known as the Circle, to his door. And now, on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of Atlas's departure, it's got something to do why Casales was found dead in his hotel room-and why Carlos is the man in charge of the investigation. To figure out who killed one of the most powerful men on Earth, Carlos is supposed to put aside his personal history. But the deeper he delves into the case, the more he realizes that escaping the past is not so easy. There's more to Casales's death than meets the eye, and something much more sinister to the legacy of Atlas than anyone realizes...
