Download or read book Game On The Nicaraguan War Chronicles Book 1 written by Peter Duysings and published by Peter Duysings Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rob van Duis served two consecutive tours in Vietnam, on grueling and dangerous LRRPs - Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols. The ‘shadow warriors’ deadly warfare games of silent covert scouting operations against the enemy deep in the bush could last a few weeks at a time. Although their task was to locate, spying out enemy positions and call in strikes, they invariably took part in ambushes and small scale raids. With numerous firefight missions under his belt, van Duis had become a skilled combat field operator. Once back stateside, he continued to hone his warfare field craft under the training of a highly-decorated former Army Green Beret officer, Dave Randall, who successfully served three Nam combat tours. With high-profile military connections, Randall is able to secure a government assignment to fight Communist Sandinista insurgents in Nicaragua along with other teams. It was into this hot cauldron of socio-political chaos, in late 1977 that recruited experienced fighting soldiers began to be inserted within Nicaraguan borders clandestinely to fight the Sandinista rebels to avert a communist takeover so close to the U.S. border. Having recruited and trained a team of twelve experienced combat operators, van Duis being one of them, they are off once again taking the field as in Vietnam years in rough and unforgiving terrain striking fear and death to armed rebels with a vengeance. The story begins with Bravo Team’s covert arrival into Nicaragua. Van Duis and his teammates hit the ground running as they battle Sandinista rebels deep in enemy territory. His team’s first-full scale battle is to purge a peaceful countryside villa of the armed combatants that have besieged it. After a vicious door-to-door fight to clear the villa’s dwellings of rebels, it takes all the firepower available to finally defeat the horde of insurgents, who have taken innocent villagers hostage in a dense woodland area. On another mission as a solo strike team, Bravo is inserted into a rebel-infested area to neutralize a weapons supply depot, but as happenstance would have it they are faced by an enemy force triple the size they anticipated. The hazardous assignment takes yet another unforeseen turn; as van Duis and team flee to the exfiltration point, they are faced with taking an injured young peasant girl to safety with armed Sandinistas on their heels. Van Duis provides an insider’s look at the trauma of warfare’s brutality. Each mission is depicted with the intensity that only a real participant can portray. Even as a trained and experienced warrior, in the face of hideous combat he is affected by what he witnesses; the catastrophic aftermath to the civilians caught in the chaos of war. The story takes the reader deep inside the cataclysmic combat action seen through the eyes of Rob van Duis, a member Strike Team Bravo. His and the team’s direct actions are rendered in the thick of the hellacious and death-defying perilous missions. This real-life journal of agonizing anguish that takes a toll on the human body and spirit is based on actual events. Their warfare missions provide a realistic look at the traumatic bane of armed conflict and its terrorizing face and subsequent results as Bravo goes after Communist rebel camps and supply depots with one solitary mission agenda; to take down the enemy with as much deadly force required wiping them off the face of the map. Nothing short of complete sterilization of their target is acceptable. Bravo manages to overcome the odds with chilling and bristling fighting sequences that puts the reader’s mind in the very midst of terrifying clashes; close enough at times to see the whites of the enemy’s eyes before death overtakes the fallen. Nothing is as dramatic as actual in-your-face combat action up close and personal.

Download or read book Nicaragua Betrayed written by Anastasio Somoza and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells how Somoza's government in Nicaragua fell.

Download or read book Dark Alliance written by Gary Webb and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

Download or read book Voices of Play written by Amanda Minks and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While indigenous languages have become prominent in global political and educational discourses, limited attention has been given to indigenous children’s everyday communication. Voices of Play is a study of multilingual play and performance among Miskitu children growing up on Corn Island, part of a multi-ethnic autonomous region on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Corn Island is historically home to Afro-Caribbean Creole people, but increasing numbers of Miskitu people began moving there from the mainland during the Contra War, and many Spanish-speaking mestizos from western Nicaragua have also settled there. Miskitu kids on Corn Island often gain some competence speaking Miskitu, Spanish, and Kriol English. As the children of migrants and the first generation of their families to grow up with television, they develop creative forms of expression that combine languages and genres, shaping intercultural senses of belonging. Voices of Play is the first ethnography to focus on the interaction between music and language in children’s discourse. Minks skillfully weaves together Latin American, North American, and European theories of culture and communication, creating a transdisciplinary dialogue that moves across intellectual geographies. Her analysis shows how music and language involve a wide range of communicative resources that create new forms of belonging and enable dialogue across differences. Miskitu children’s voices reveal the intertwining of speech and song, the emergence of “self” and “other,” and the centrality of aesthetics to social struggle.

Download or read book Nicaragua Revolution in the Family written by Shirley Christian and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalist Christian's masterful, evenhanded account of Nicaragua's Sandinistas derives from years of interviews and on-the-scene observations. Beginning with the last days of the Somoza regime, she details the morass of political intrigue through November 1984. The problem is, she argues, that the success of ``sandinismo'' turned the people from instigators of change into objects of change, both in the eyes of the church and of the state. As the center of the struggle flew out of control onto the battlefields of Havana, Washington, Rome, and Panama, democratic principles were subordinated to other peoples' needs, a no-win situation for the peasants. To draw conclusions about Nicaragua, Christian emphasizes, is a lot more difficult than superficial U.S. policy would imply.

Download or read book Blood on the Border written by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as “a force of nature on the page and off.” That force is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz’s firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua. With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City—a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay—the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra “affair” and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world—connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition. A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.

Download or read book Confronting the American Dream written by Michel Gobat and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-27 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid–nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912–33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents. Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.

Download or read book The Strategy of Conflict written by Thomas C. Schelling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the nature of international disagreements and conflict resolution in terms of game theory and non-zero-sum games.

Download or read book One Up written by Joost van Dreunen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokémon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. Yet this industry generates billions in revenue by thinking creatively about digital distribution, free-to-play content, and phenomena like e-sports and live streaming. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment? One Up offers a pioneering empirical analysis of innovation and strategy in the video game industry to explain how it has evolved from a fringe activity to become a mainstream form of entertainment. Joost van Dreunen, a widely recognized industry expert with over twenty years of experience, analyzes how game makers, publishers, and platform holders have tackled strategic challenges to make the video game industry what it is today. Using more than three decades of rigorously compiled industry data, he demonstrates that video game companies flourish when they bring the same level of creativity to business strategy that they bring to game design. Filled with case studies of companies such as Activision Blizzard, Apple, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nexon, Sony, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, and Valve, this book forces us to rethink common misconceptions around the emergence of digital and mobile gaming. One Up is required reading for investors, creatives, managers, and anyone looking to learn about the major drivers of change and growth in contemporary entertainment.

Download or read book Homicidal Ecologies written by Deborah J. Yashar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America has among the world's highest homicide rates. The author analyzes the illicit organizations, complicit and weak states, and territorial competition that generate today's violent homicidal ecologies.

Download or read book America s Digital Army written by Robertson Allen and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "America's Digital Army is an ethnographic study of the link between interactive entertainment and military power, drawing on Robertson Allen's fieldwork observing video game developers, military strategists, U.S. Army marketing agencies, and an array of defense contracting companies that worked to produce the official U.S. Army video game, America's Army. Allen uncovers the methods by which gaming technologies such as America's Army, with military funding and themes, engage in a militarization of American society that constructs everyone, even nonplayers of games, as virtual soldiers available for deployment. America's Digital Army examines the army's desire for "talented" soldiers capable of high-tech work; beliefs about America's enemies as reflected in the game's virtual combatants; tensions over best practices in military recruiting; and the sometimes overlapping cultures of gamers, game developers, and soldiers. Allen reveals how binary categorizations such as soldier versus civilian, war versus game, work versus play, and virtual versus real become blurred--if not broken down entirely--through games and interactive media that reflect the U.S. military's ludic imagination of future wars, enemies, and soldiers."--

Download or read book Sandinistas written by Robert J. Sierakowski and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert J. Sierakowski's Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country’s rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime’s complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal. Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas’ army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime’s moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski’s innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.

Download or read book Adi s Muchachos written by Sergio Ramírez and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2011-10-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider’s account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades’ increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramírez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adiós Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement’s leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adiós Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramírez’s thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.

Download or read book The Jack Emery Series Books 1 3 An action packed political conspiracy thriller series written by Steve P. Vincent and published by Steve P. Vincent. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enjoy this action packed political conspiracy thriller series by USA Today Bestselling author Steve P. Vincent… The first four thrillers in the Jack Emery series: Fireplay, The Foundation, State of Emergency and Nations Divided. Jack Emery is the best journalist on the planet, but when he uncovers a conspiracy that will rock America he’ll need all his skills to defeat it. Faced with violence and deception, Jack will do whatever it takes to beat this conspiracy. Can he save the United States and millions of lives? All thriller, no filler! If you like L.T. Ryan’s Jack Noble series, Ken Fite’s Blake Jordan series, or Steven Konkoly’s Black Flag series, you’ll love the addictive Jack Emery political conspiracy thriller series. Strap in and get ready to enjoy this explosive thriller series!

Download or read book Out of Control written by Leslie Cockburn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. This book was released on 1988 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the last two years, the author has been investigating the secret funding of the Contras by the White House. Here, she identifies the network of National Security Council staff (led by Colonel Oliver North), CIA operatives and ex-agents who set up this illegal support system, after the passage of the Boland Amendment in October 1984 made it illegal for the US government to give direct and indirect aid to the Contras.

Download or read book Playing Dystopia written by Gerald Farca and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating gameworlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events. Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish gameworlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own ›offline‹ environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments. In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games.

Download or read book How Baseball Happened written by Thomas W. Gilbert and published by Godine+ORM. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of baseball’s nineteenth-century origins: “a delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat” (Paul Dickson, The Wall Street Journal). You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. Perhaps you’ve read that baseball’s color line was first crossed by Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. Baseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. They were hundreds of uncredited, ordinary people who played without gloves, facemasks, or performance incentives. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses, and fought against the South in the Civil War. In this myth-busting history, Thomas W. Gilbert reveals the true beginnings of baseball. Through newspaper accounts, diaries, and other accounts, he explains how it evolved through the mid-nineteenth century into a modern sport of championships, media coverage, and famous stars—all before the first professional league was formed in 1871. Winner of the Casey Award: Best Baseball Book of the Year