Download or read book The Railway Man written by Eric Lomax and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells of a British soldier's ordeal as a prisoner of war and how he was able fifty years later to meet his torturer and offer forgiveness.
Download or read book Railway Man A POW s Searing Account of War Brutality and Forgiveness written by Eric Lomax and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-06-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a remarkable true story of forgiveness--a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. A classic war autobiography, The Railway Man is a powerful tale of survival and of the human capacity to understand even those who have done us unthinkable harm. From The Railway Man: The passion for trains and railroads is, I have been told, incurable. I have also learned that there is no cure for torture. These two afflictions have been intimately linked in the course of my life, and yet through some chance combination of luck and grace I have survived them both. I was born in Edinburgh, in the lowlands of Scotland, in 1919. My father was an official in the General Post Office there, a career which he had started as a boy of 16 and which he intended me to imitate to the letter. He was fascinated by telephony and telegraphy, and I grew up in a world in which tinkering and inventing and making were honoured past-times. I vividly remember the first time that my father placed a giant set of headphones around my ears and I heard, through the hiss and buzz of far-off-energies, a disembodied human voice. In the worst times, much later, when I thought I was about to die in pain and shock at the hands of men who could not imagine anything of my life, who had no respect for who I was or my history, I might have wished that my father had had a different passion. But in the 1920s, technology was still powerful and beautiful without being menacing. Who would have thought that a radio, for example, could cause terrible harm? It seemed to be a wonderful instrument by which people could speak to each other; and yet I heard Hitler ranting over airwaves, and saw two men beaten to death for their part in making such an instrument, and suffered for my own part in it for a half a century.
Download or read book The Railway Man A POW s Searing Account of War Brutality and Forgiveness Movie Tie in Editions written by Eric Lomax and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize The Railway Man is a remarkable memoir of forgiveness—a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. Eric Lomax, sent to Malaya in World War II, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and put to punishing work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. After the radio he illicitly helped to build in order to follow war news was discovered, he was subjected to two years of starvation and torture. He would never forget the interpreter at these brutal sessions. Fifty years after returning home from the war, marrying, and gaining the strength from his wife Patti to fight his demons, he learned the interpreter was alive. Through letters and meeting with his former torturer, Lomax bravely moved beyond bitterness drawing on an extraordinary will to extend forgiveness. Now a major motion picture starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman.
Download or read book The Railway Man written by Eric Lomax and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of innocence betrayed, of passion and curiosity about the world of machines turned nightmarish and punished by the cruelty of which only humans are capable. It is also a story of survival and courage. Eric Lomax was tortured by the Japanese on the Burma-Siam Railway. Fifty years later he met one of his tormentors.
Download or read book The Railway Man A POW s Searing Account of War Brutality and Forgiveness Movie Tie in Editions written by Eric Lomax and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize The Railway Man is a remarkable memoir of forgiveness—a tremendous testament to the courage that propels one toward remembrance, and finally, peace with the past. Eric Lomax, sent to Malaya in World War II, was taken prisoner by the Japanese and put to punishing work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. After the radio he illicitly helped to build in order to follow war news was discovered, he was subjected to two years of starvation and torture. He would never forget the interpreter at these brutal sessions. Fifty years after returning home from the war, marrying, and gaining the strength from his wife Patti to fight his demons, he learned the interpreter was alive. Through letters and meeting with his former torturer, Lomax bravely moved beyond bitterness drawing on an extraordinary will to extend forgiveness. Now a major motion picture starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman.
Download or read book Unbroken written by Laura Hillenbrand and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. Appearing in paperback for the first time—with twenty arresting new photos and an extensive Q&A with the author—Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award “Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] one-in-a-billion story . . . designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.”—New York “Staggering . . . mesmerizing . . . Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page.”—People “A meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.”—The Washington Post “Ambitious and powerful . . . a startling narrative and an inspirational book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . incredible . . . [Hillenbrand] has crafted another masterful blend of sports, history and overcoming terrific odds; this is biography taken to the nth degree, a chronicle of a remarkable life lived through extraordinary times.”—The Dallas Morning News “An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tale of triumph and redemption . . . astonishingly detailed.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[A] masterfully told true story . . . nothing less than a marvel.”—Washingtonian “[Hillenbrand tells this] story with cool elegance but at a thrilling sprinter’s pace.”—Time “Hillenbrand [is] one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Download or read book Voices of World War II written by Priscilla Roberts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together a wide variety of primary source documents from across the United States, Europe, and Asia, this book illuminates the events and experiences of World War II—the most devastating war in human history. World War II was the most destructive and disruptive war ever, a global conflict that in one way or another affected the lives of people across the planet. Voices of World War II: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life coalesces a wide variety of primary source documents drawn from across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Supplemented by interpretive material that enables readers to analyze them, assess their impact and significance, and place them in context to comparable situations today, the documents provide rare insights into World War II. Expert commentaries and additional information on these texts enable a greater understanding of the background to these documents, providing valuable training in learning to interpret, assess, and evaluate historical sources. Intended primarily for upper-level high school and undergraduate-level history students, general readers will also appreciate the variegated array of primary material from World War II, which depicts numerous aspects of the conflict, often in extremely personal terms.
Download or read book Chasing the Wind written by Neil H. Williams and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chasing the Wind covers a variety of ideas from Christianity, science, philosophy, ethics, and psychology. It starts with Socrates's statement, "an unexamined life is not worth living" and asks how we might go about discovering what is a worthwhile life and what might motivate us to live such a life. It is a vast topic that is narrowed down to two principal areas: (1) a focus on relationships, which are central to providing fulfillment, worth, and purpose to our lives; and (2) an interaction with Christianity, which claims to have answers as to what is a worthwhile life. In summary, this book is a dialog between these two questions: What is a good life, and how does Christianity help or hinder such a life?
Download or read book Prisoners of War written by Arnold Krammer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's current War on Terror is causing a readjustment of centuries of POW policies. Prisoners of war are once again in the news as America and Western Europe grapple with a new, faceless enemy and the rules of war and the torture of POWs are open to reconsideration. Until very recently, there has been astonishingly little written on the subject of prisoners of war. Yet, to understand the present, it is critical to look back over history. To that end, Arnold Krammer examines the fate of war prisoners from Biblical and Medieval times through the halting evolution of international law to the current reshuffling of the rules. The issue of prisoners of war is of more immediate concern now than ever before and an examination of the history of their treatment and current status may well influence foreign policy. The fate of war prisoners through history has been cruel and haphazard. The lives of captives hung by a thread. Execution, enslavement, torture, or being held for ransom were equally likely. International agreements developed haltingly through the 19th and 20th centuries to culminate in the Geneva Accords of 1929. America's current War on Terror is causing a readjustment of centuries of POW policies. Prisoners of war are once again in the news as America and Western Europe grapple with a new, faceless enemy and the rules of war and the torture of POWs are open to reconsideration. Until very recently, there has been astonishingly little written on the subject of prisoners of war. Yet, to understand the present, it is critical to look back over history. To that end, Arnold Krammer examines the fate of war prisoners from Biblical and Medieval times through the halting evolution of international law to the current reshuffling of the rules. Since biblical times, war captives have been considered property and counted as booty to be enslaved or killed. Americans were interested in generals and weapons and battles, but not the fate of prisoners of war. The Second World War, when 90,000 Americans fell into enemy hands, began to change that. Concern for our POWs in Germany and Japan, and close contact with enemy camps in America began to change our attitudes. However, it was the Vietnam War, media-driven and polarizing, that caused the American public to truly reevaluate the plight of its sons and brothers, heroic and clearly loyal, as they fell into the hands of an inscrutable and apparently unyielding distant enemy. More recently, during the first Gulf War of 1991 and the current War on Terrorism, the issue of prisoners of war has moved to center stage, involving the clash of ideologies, politics, and expediency. Since 9/11, the rights and safety of prisoners of war caught up in the War on Terror have been debated in Congress and adjudicated on by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales whose conclusions were protested by numerous organizations. The issue of prisoners of war is of more immediate concern now than ever before, and an examination of the history of their treatment and current status may well influence foreign policy.
Download or read book Mercy written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-12 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. It is an arena where individuality is subsumed in collective violence and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy pitted against its reflection in an elemental struggle for survival. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this gripping, poignant, and powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus. Yet somehow the trigger is not always pulled. A different choice is made. Restraint triumphs. Humanity is rediscovered and honored in a flash of recognition. This book gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance--across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary men and women who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Mercy is an exceptional book about exceptions, challenging myths and heroic fabrications, refuting claims to exclusive moral virtue. It reminds us that decency in warfare is also universal, offering a haunting and compellingly humane counternarrative to war's usual inhumane logic.
Download or read book Mass Atrocity Collective Memory and the Law written by Michael Curtis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trials of those responsible for large-scale state brutality have captured public imagination in several countries. Prosecutors and judges in such cases, says Osiel, rightly aim to shape collective memory. They can do so hi ways successful as public spectacle and consistent with liberal legality. In defending this interpretation, he examines the Nuremburg and Tokyo trials, the Eicnmann prosecution, and more recent trials in Argentina and France. Such trials can never summon up a "collective conscience" of moral principles shared by all, he argues. But they can nonetheless contribute to a little-noticed kind of social solidarity. To this end, writes Osiel, we should pay closer attention to the way an experience of administrative massacre is framed within the conventions of competing theatrical genres. Defense counsel will tell the story as a tragedy, while prosecutors will present it as a morality play. The judicial task at such moments is to employ the law to recast the courtroom drama in terms of a "theater of ideas," which engages large questions of collective memory and even national identity. Osiel asserts that principles of liberal morality can be most effectively inculcated in a society traumatized by fratricide when proceedings are conducted in this fashion. The approach Osiel advocates requires courts to confront questions of historical interpretation and moral pedagogy generally regarded as beyond their professional competence. It also raises objections that defendants' rights will be sacrificed, historical understanding distorted, and that the law cannot willfully influence collective memory, at least not when lawyers acknowledge this aim. Osiel responds to all these objections, and others. Lawyers, judges, sociologists, historians, and political theorists will find this a compelling contribution to debates on the meaning and consequences of genocide.
Download or read book World War II on Film written by David Luhrssen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II on Film examines the war through the lens of 12 films. The movies selected include productions made during World War II and in each succeeding decade, providing a sense of how different generations perceive the war. World War II on Film provides a succinct yet well-grounded appraisal of that war as seen through 12 representative films. The book separates fact from fiction, showing where the movies were accurate and where they departed from reality, and places them in the larger context of historical and social events. Each movie chosen represents a particular aspect of the conflict, including the air war over Europe, the condition of prisoners of war, Nazi atrocities, and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. Unlike most histories of Hollywood during World War II or the genre of war movies, World War II on Film examines in depth the relation between the depictions of events, beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life as seen on film with reality as documented by historians or recorded by journalists or eye-witnesses to the war. The volume will appeal to high school and college readers, as well as general interest readers and film buffs.
Download or read book The Railway Man written by Eric LOMAX and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Soldier Stories written by Joe L. Wheeler and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2006-12-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True stories of people who endured the shock and trauma of war—and whose spirits triumphed. A priest in the infamous Bataan Death March who kept others alive with his faithful recitation of the Lord’s Prayer The journey to faith by a skeptical B-17 copilot lost at sea A young American widow caught in the “Dresden Inferno” who survived the firestorm with her three children The lesson of post-war forgiveness learned by a British soldier tortured by the Japanese A rowdy Arizona cowboy who achieved World War I flying ace status in a matter of weeks and many more Soldier Stories’ true, soul-stirring accounts of those who have risen to the challenge of unimaginable circumstances will inspire you—no matter what obstacles you may face.
Download or read book Just and Unjust Peace written by Daniel Philpott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-03 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott offers an innovative and hopeful response to these questions. He challenges the approach to peace-building that dominates the United Nations, western governments, and the human rights community. While he shares their commitments to human rights and democracy, Philpott argues that these values alone cannot redress the wounds caused by war, genocide, and dictatorship. Both justice and the effective restoration of political order call for a more holistic, restorative approach. Philpott answers that call by proposing a form of political reconciliation that is deeply rooted in three religious traditions--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism--as well as the restorative justice movement. These traditions offer the fullest expressions of the core concepts of justice, mercy, and peace. By adapting these ancient concepts to modern constitutional democracy and international norms, Philpott crafts an ethic that has widespread appeal and offers real hope for the restoration of justice in fractured communities. From the roots of these traditions, Philpott develops six practices--building just institutions and relations between states, acknowledgment, reparations, restorative punishment, apology and, most important, forgiveness--which he then applies to real cases, identifying how each practice redresses a unique set of wounds.
Download or read book Japan in the World the World in Japan written by Center for Japanese Studies and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In fall 1997 the Center for Japanese Studies at The University of Michigan celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The November symposium featured more than fifty speakers, moderators, and musicians who celebrated the occasion and offered reminiscences on the Center's multifaceted scholarly and professional missions, discussions of the accomplishments of its al-umni/ae, and perspectives on wartime and postwar Japan-U.S. relations. As the first American interdisciplinary institute devoted to education and research on Japan, The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies has a path-making legacy. This volume, which includes the public presentations from the November 1997 symposium, reflects that legacy and the university's long and continuing involvement in Asia, which dates back to the 1870s.
Download or read book Developing Leaders for Positive Organizing written by Bernd Vogel and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-19 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leadership is not about individuals; it is a complex, relational, socially co-constructed and emergent process. This book brings together the latest thinking from business and positive psychology research to provide new insights into leadership, organizational development and change.
