Download or read book Six Months in 1945 written by Michael Dobbs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler’s armies were on the run, and victory was imminent. The Big Three wanted to draft a blueprint for a lasting peace—but instead they set the stage for a forty-four year division of Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. After fighting side by side for nearly four years, their political alliance was beginning to fracture. Although the most dramatic Cold War confrontations such as the Berlin airlift were still to come, a new struggle for global hegemony had got underway by August 1945 when Truman used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Six Months in 1945 brilliantly captures this momentous historical turning point while illuminating the aims and personalities of larger-than-life political giants.
Download or read book From World War to Cold War written by David Reynolds and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-02-23 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1940s was probably the most dramatic and decisive decade of the 20th century. This volume explores the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War from the vantage point of two of the great powers of that era, Britain and the USA, and of their wartime leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt. It also looks at their chequered relations with Stalin and at how the Grand Alliance crumbled into an undesired Cold War. But this is not simply a story of top-level diplomacy. David Reynolds explores the social and cultural implications of the wartime Anglo-American alliance, particularly the impact of nearly three million GIs on British life, and reflects more generally on the importance of cultural issues in the study of international history. This book persistently challenges popular stereotypes - for instance on Churchill in 1940 or his Iron Curtain speech. It probes cliches such as 'the special relationship' and even 'the Second World War'. And it offers new views of the familiar, such as the Fall of France in 1940 or Franklin Roosevelt as 'the wheelchair president'. Incisive and readable, written by a leading international historian, these essays encourage us to rethink our understanding of this momentous period in world history.
Download or read book Down with Big Brother written by Michael Dobbs and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this volume was present during the final decade of the Soviet empire, first for Reuters, then for the "Washington Post". While Dobbs watched, playwrights and elctricians were transformed into presidents, while Communist Party leaders became jailbirds or newly-minted tycoons. He identifies the seeds of destruction, and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular, was the unwitting inspiration for the upheaval of the empire, while he thought he could save the Communist Party by reforming it.;Dobbs' conclusion is that though Big Brother may be dead, his dark legacy is still alive in the turbulence in Russia, Romania, Bosnia and other countries that once made up the most brutal empire of the 20th century.
Download or read book Year Zero written by Ian Buruma and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.
Download or read book Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln written by Francis Bicknell Carpenter and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Racing the Enemy written by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-30 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With startling revelations, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa rewrites the standard history of the end of World War II in the Pacific. By fully integrating the three key actors in the story—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan—Hasegawa for the first time puts the last months of the war into international perspective. From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan’s surrender; as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific; as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense; and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific. Authoritative and engrossing, Racing the Enemy puts the final days of World War II into a whole new light.
Download or read book Six Months in 1945 written by Michael Dobbs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler’s armies were on the run, and victory was imminent. The Big Three wanted to draft a blueprint for a lasting peace—but instead they set the stage for a forty-four year division of Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. After fighting side by side for nearly four years, their political alliance was beginning to fracture. Although the most dramatic Cold War confrontations such as the Berlin airlift were still to come, a new struggle for global hegemony had got underway by August 1945 when Truman used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Six Months in 1945 brilliantly captures this momentous historical turning point while illuminating the aims and personalities of larger-than-life political giants.
Download or read book Hiroshima written by John Hersey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.
Download or read book Countdown 1945 written by Chris Wallace and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "behind-the-scenes account of the 116 days leading up to the Americans attack on Hiroshima"--Dust jacket flap.
Download or read book Six Months in Sudan written by Dr. James Maskalyk and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring story of one doctor’s struggle in a war-torn village in the heart of Sudan In 2007, James Maskalyk, newly recruited by Doctors Without Borders, set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan. An emergency physician drawn to the ravaged parts of the world, Maskalyk spent six months treating malnourished children, coping with a measles epidemic, watching for war, and struggling to meet overwhelming needs with few resources. Six Months in Sudan began as a blog that Maskalyk wrote from his hut in Sudan in an attempt to bring his family and friends closer to his experiences on the medical front line of one of the poorest and most fragile places on earth. It is the story of the doctors, nurses, and countless volunteers who leave their homes behind to ease the suffering of others, and it is the story of the people of Abyei, who endure its hardship because it is the only home they have. A memoir of volunteerism that recalls Three Cups of Tea, Six Months in Sudan is written with humanity, conviction, great hope, and piercing insight. It introduces us to a world beyond our own imagining and demonstrates how we all can make a difference.
Download or read book China 1945 written by Richard Bernstein and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of 1945, relations between America and the Chinese Communists couldn’t have been closer. Chinese leaders talked of America helping to lift China out of poverty; Mao Zedong himself held friendly meetings with U.S. emissaries. By year’s end, Chinese Communist soldiers were setting ambushes for American marines; official cordiality had been replaced by chilly hostility and distrust, a pattern which would continue for a quarter century, with the devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam among the consequences. In China 1945, Richard Bernstein tells the incredible story of the sea change that took place during that year—brilliantly analyzing its far-reaching components and colorful characters, from diplomats John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service to Time journalist, Henry Luce; in addition to Mao and his intractable counterpart, Chiang Kai-shek, and the indispensable Zhou Enlai. A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines American power coming face-to-face with a formidable Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations.
Download or read book King Richard written by Michael Dobbs and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF USA TODAY'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A riveting account of the crucial days, hours, and moments when the Watergate conspiracy consumed, and ultimately toppled, a president—from the best-selling author of One Minute to Midnight. In January 1973, Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated after winning re-election in a historic landslide. He enjoyed an almost 70 percent approval rating. But by April 1973, his presidency had fallen apart as the Watergate scandal metastasized into what White House counsel John Dean called “a full-blown cancer.” King Richard is the intimate, utterly absorbing narrative of the tension-packed hundred days when the Watergate conspiracy unraveled as the burglars and their handlers turned on one another, exposing the crimes of a vengeful president. Drawing on thousands of hours of newly-released taped recordings, Michael Dobbs takes us into the heart of the conspiracy, recreating these traumatic events in cinematic detail. He captures the growing paranoia of the principal players and their desperate attempts to deflect blame as the noose tightens around them. We eavesdrop on Nixon plotting with his aides, raging at his enemies, while also finding time for affectionate moments with his family. The result is an unprecedentedly vivid, close-up portrait of a president facing his greatest crisis. Central to the spellbinding drama is the tortured personality of Nixon himself, a man whose strengths, particularly his determination to win at all costs, become his fatal flaws. Rising from poverty to become the most powerful man in the world, he commits terrible errors of judgment that lead to his public disgrace. He makes himself—and then destroys himself. Structured like a classical tragedy with a uniquely American twist, King Richard is an epic, deeply human story of ambition, power, and betrayal.
Download or read book Eisenhower and the Cold War written by Robert A. Divine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1981 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Eisenhower was a stronger president than previously believed and was responsible for many important accomplishments in the area of foreign policy and the quest for peace.
Download or read book The Unwanted written by Michael Dobbs and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The powerfully told story of a group of German Jews desperately seeking American visas to escape the Nazis, and an illuminating account of America's struggle with the refugee crisis caused by the rise of Hitler. Official tie-in to the U.S. Holocaust Museum multi-year exhibit"--
Download or read book The Secret War written by Max Hastings and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Monumental." --New York Times Book Review NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From one of the foremost historians of the period and the acclaimed author of Inferno and Catastrophe: 1914, The Secret War is a sweeping examination of one of the most important yet underexplored aspects of World War II—intelligence—showing how espionage successes and failures by the United States, Britain, Russia, Germany, and Japan influenced the course of the war and its final outcome. Spies, codes, and guerrillas played unprecedentedly critical roles in the Second World War, exploited by every nation in the struggle to gain secret knowledge of its foes, and to sow havoc behind the fronts. In The Secret War, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance, to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history.
Download or read book One Minute to Midnight written by Michael Dobbs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-06-03 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In this hour-by-hour chronicle of those tense days, veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs reveals just how close we came to Armageddon. Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo; the handling of Soviet nuclear warheads on Cuba; and the extraordinary story of a U-2 spy plane that got lost over Russia at the peak of the crisis. Written like a thriller, One Minute to Midnight is an exhaustively researched account of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called “the most dangerous moment in human history,” and the definitive book on the Cuban missile crisis.
Download or read book The Kamikaze Hunters written by Will Iredale and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1945, with victory in Europe established, the war was all but over. But on the other side of the world, the Allies were still engaged in a bitter struggle to control the Pacific. And it was then that the Japanese unleashed a terrible new form of warfare: the suicide pilots, or Kamikaze.Drawing on meticulous research and unique personal access to the remaining survivors, Will Iredale follows a group of young men from the moment they signed up through their initial training to the terrifying reality of fighting against pilots who, in the cruel last summer of the war, chose death rather than risk their country's dishonorable defeat—and deliberately flew their planes into Allied aircraft carriers.
