Download or read book The Berlin Baghdad Express written by Sean McMeekin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends. The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I—Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as never before. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.

Download or read book Baghdad Express written by Joel Turnipseed and published by Minnesota Historical Society Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early summer of 1990, Joel Turnipseed was homeless--kicked out of his college's philosophy program, dumped by his girlfriend. He had been AWOL from his Marine Corps Reserve unit for more than three months, spending his days hanging out in coffee shops reading Plato and Thoreau. Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Turnipseed's unit was activated for service in Operation Desert Shield. By January of '91, he was in Saudi Arabia driving tractor-trailers for the Sixth Motor Transport Battalion--the legendary "Baghdad Express." The greatest logistical operation in Marine Corps history, the Baghdad Express hauled truckloads of explosives and ammunition across hundreds of miles of desert. But on the brink of war, Turnipseed's greatest struggles are still within. Armed with an M-16 and a seabag full of philosophy books, he is a wise-ass misfit, an ironic observer with a keen eye for vivid detail, a rebellious Marine alive to the moral ambiguity of his life and his situation. Developed from Turnipseed's 1997 feature article for GQ Magazine, this innovative memoir--simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, equal parts Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye--explores both the absurdities of war and the necessity of accepting our flawed world of shadows. With expansive humanity and profane grace, Turnipseed finds the real-world answers to his philosophical questions and reaches the hardest peace for any young man to achieve--with himself.

Download or read book The 8 55 to Baghdad written by Andrew Eames and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A winning blend of travelogue and literary biography” by a British journalist who travels the journey Agatha Christie once did from London to Iraq. (Entertainment Weekly) With her marriage to her first husband over, Agatha Christie decided to take a much needed holiday; the Caribbean had been her intended destination, but a conversation at a dinner party with a couple who had just returned from Iraq changed her mind. Five days later she was off on a completely different trajectory. Merging literary biography with travel adventure, and ancient history with contemporary world events, Andrew Eames tells a riveting tale and reveals fascinating and little-known details of this exotic chapter in the life of Agatha Christie. His own trip from London to Baghdad--a journey much more difficult to make in 2002 with the political unrest in the Middle East and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1928--becomes intertwined with Agatha's, and the people he meets could have stepped out of a mystery novel. Fans of Agatha Christie will delight in Eames' description of the places and events that appeared in and influenced her fiction--and armchair travelers will thrill in the exotica of the journey itself. “Agatha Christie fans, as well as connoisseurs of fine travel writing, will relish British journalist Eames's gripping, humorous and eye-opening account of his train and bus trip across Europe and the Middle East on the eve of the second Gulf War.” Publisher’s Weekly Second;Iraq;Gulf;war;Kurds;Armenians;Palestinians;English;travel;writer;writing;1928;bestselling;mystery;author;English;crime;writer;Europe;passenger;train;memoir;literary;biography;adventure;travel;history;autobiography;holiday;Middle;East;Damascus;Ur;Syria;archaeology TRV026090 TRAVEL / Special Interest / Literary BIO007000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures BIO026000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs TRV015000 TRAVEL / Middle East / General 9781468306415 Candlemoth Ellory, R.J.

Download or read book The Baghdad Express written by R. W. Greenacre and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 2003 and two private security companies, Redline in the UK and Eagle in the US are preparing to go to Iraq. Redline’s leader Westerby is dreaming of a world where the sun never sets on the Empire and has bought himself a pith helmet and a monocle. Eagle’s boss, Flint, wants to make up for not going to Vietnam, while his second in command TJ is dreaming of a new boat. Westerby’s reluctant recruit, Carlingford, wants to escape his dead end job and sense of failure and find some meaning in his life.Once in Iraq our characters meet in a compound in a Baghdad suburb to build a theme park. Carlingford finds love amongst the dust and the madness but his loyalties are divided when Larry McKinley, the bombastic, six shooter toting U.S television reporter he is protecting is kidnapped. McKinley came to straighten out the ‘liberal media’s lies’ about Iraq but instead finds himself chained up in the cellar of librarian-turned-unlikely-insurgent Samir.As Iraq descends into chaos, an unsafe second-hand roller coaster, to be renamed the Baghdad Express, is rising from the ashes, but not everyone is fooled by this low culture masquerading as freedom and progress. When Carlingford finally rides the Baghdad Express he can see from its summit the truth about the war; the violence, incompetence, greed and deceit. The only thing keeping him in Iraq now is his love for CPA spin doctor Suria, but even his love is dying before the truth of what they have done to a country.The Baghdad Express is in turns bawdy, satirical, farcical and downright funny but ultimately, like the war itself, a story of tragedy and waste. Come ride The Baghdad Express – what will you see?

Download or read book The Berlin Baghdad Express written by Sean McMeekin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-07 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends. The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I—Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as never before. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.

Download or read book Baghdad Diaries written by Nuha al-Radi and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-05-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this often moving, sometimes wry account of life in Baghdad during the first war on Iraq and in exile in the years following, Iraqi-born, British-educated artist Nuha al-Radi shows us the effects of war on ordinary people. She recounts the day-to-day realities of living in a city under siege, where food has to be consumed or thrown out because there is no way to preserve it, where eventually people cannot sleep until the nightly bombing commences, where packs of stray dogs roam the streets (and provide her own dog Salvi with a harem) and rats invade homes. Through it all, al-Radi works at her art and gathers with neighbors and family for meals and other occasions, happy and sad. In the wake of the war, al-Radi lives in semi-exile, shuttling between Beirut and Amman, travelling to New York, London, Mexico and Yemen. As she suffers the indignities of being an Iraqi in exile, al-Radi immerses us in a way of life constricted by the stress and effects of war and embargoes, giving texture to a reality we have only been able to imagine before now. But what emanates most vibrantly from these diaries is the spirit of endurance and the celebration of the smallest of life’s joys.

Download or read book Orient Express written by John Dos Passos and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The journal of the author on a trip through Russia and the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean, including Syria and Lebanon), published in 1927.

Download or read book China s Great Train written by Abrahm Lustgarten and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid account of China's unstoppable quest to build a railway into Tibet, and its obsession to transform its land and its people In the summer of 2006, the Chinese government fulfilled a fifty-year plan to build a railway into Tibet. Since Mao Zedong first envisioned it, the line had grown into an imperative, a critical component of China's breakneck expansion and the final maneuver in strengthening China's grip over this remote and often mystical frontier, which promised rich resources and geographic supremacy over South Asia. Through the lives of the Chinese and Tibetans swept up in the project, Fortune magazine writer Abrahm Lustgarten explores the "Wild West" atmosphere of the Chinese economy today. He follows innovative Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin as he makes the train's route over the treacherous mountains and permafrost possible (for now), and the tenacious Tibetan shopkeeper Rinzen, who struggles to hold on to his business in a boomtown that increasingly favors the Han Chinese. As the railway—the highest and steepest in the world—extends to Lhasa, and China's "Go West" campaign delivers waves of rural poor eager to make their fortunes, their lives and communities fundamentally change, sometimes for good, sometimes not. Lustgarten's book is a timely, provocative, and absorbing first-hand account of the Chinese boom and the promise and costs of rapid development on the country's people.

Download or read book The Russian Origins of the First World War written by Sean McMeekin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Banking on Baghdad written by Edwin Black and published by Dialog Press. This book was released on 2021-04-10 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Banking on Baghdad, New York Times and international bestselling author Edwin Black chronicles the dramatic and tragic history of a land long the center of world commerce and conflict. Tracing the involvement of Western governments and militaries, as well as oil, banking, and other corporate interests, Black pinpoints why today, just as throughout modern history, the world needs Iraq's resources and remains determined to acquire and protect them. Banking on Baghdad almost painfully documents the many ways Iraq's recent history mirrors its tumultuous past.

Download or read book The Baghdad Clock written by Shahad Al Rawi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A HEART-RENDING TALE OF TWO GIRLS GROWING UP IN WAR-TORN BAGHDAD Baghdad, 1991. The Gulf War is raging. Two girls, hiding in an air raid shelter, tell stories to keep the fear and the darkness at bay, and a deep friendship is born. But as the bombs continue to fall and friends begin to flee the country, the girls must face the fact that their lives will never be the same again. This poignant debut novel reveals just what it's like to grow up in a city that is slowly disappearing in front of your eyes, and how in the toughest times, children can build up the greatest resilience.

Download or read book The Great Railway Bazaar written by Paul Theroux and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author recounts his epic journey across Europe and Asia in this international bestselling classic of travel literature: “Compulsive reading” (Graham Greene). In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on a four-month journey by train from the United Kingdom through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In The Great Railway Bazaar, he records in vivid detail and penetrating insight the many fascinating incidents, adventures, and encounters of his grand, intercontinental tour. Asia's fabled trains—the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express—are the stars of a journey that takes Theroux on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.

Download or read book July 1914 written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict -- much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events. As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand's murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war's outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved -- from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré- sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe's countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain's final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month -- and a handful of men -- changed the course of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Yet There Isn t a Train I Wouldn t Take written by William D. Middleton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yet there isn't a train goes by all day But I hear its whistle shrieking.... Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, No matter where it's going. —Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Travel" "Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take" is a collection of stories about favorite train journeys by an inveterate railway enthusiast and train traveler. A half century career as an engineer, Naval officer, and university administrator took Bill Middleton to almost every part of the globe, and everywhere he took with him an abiding interest in railways, and a notebook and camera to record his experiences. His North American journeys have included experiences as diverse as the long journey north through Manitoba to polar bear country on Hudson Bay, a trip to Minnesota's Mesabi Range to haul a boatload of iron ore to Lake Superior behind a giant Yellowstone articulated steam locomotive, and the trip between Costa Rica's Atlantic and Pacific coasts by narrow gauge railway. His European travels have ranged from a Pullman seat on the crack London-Paris Golden Arrow to the slow trip across Thrace on one of the last runs of the celebrated Simplon-Orient Express. In Asia he traveled through the Toros Mountains of Turkey on the famous Istanbul-Baghdad Toros Express, experienced modern high-speed railroading in the cab of Japan's Bullet Train, and rode to Asia's highest mountain east of the Himalayas on the little trains of Taiwan's Ali Shan Forestry Railway.

Download or read book Afghanistan Rising written by Faiz Ahmed and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debunking conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone and the rule of law as a secular-liberal monopoly, Faiz Ahmed presents a vibrant account of the first Muslim-majority country to gain independence, codify its own laws, and ratify a constitution after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Afghanistan Rising illustrates how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Kabul--far from being a landlocked wilderness or remote frontier--became a magnet for itinerant scholars and statesmen shuttling between Ottoman and British imperial domains. Tracing the country's longstanding but often ignored scholarly and educational ties to Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul as well as greater Delhi and Lahore, Ahmed explains how the court of Kabul attracted thinkers eager to craft a modern state within the interpretive traditions of Islamic law and ethics, or shariʿa, and international norms of legality. From Turkish lawyers and Arab officers to Pashtun clerics and Indian bureaucrats, this rich narrative focuses on encounters between divergent streams of modern Muslim thought and politics, beginning with the Sublime Porte's first mission to Afghanistan in 1877 and concluding with the collapse of Ottoman rule after World War I. By unearthing a lost history behind Afghanistan's founding national charter, Ahmed shows how debates today on Islam, governance, and the rule of law have deep roots in a beleaguered land. Based on archival research in six countries and as many languages, Afghanistan Rising rediscovers a time when Kabul stood proudly as a center of constitutional politics, Muslim cosmopolitanism, and contested visions of reform in the greater Islamicate world.

Download or read book Baghdad Underground Railroad written by Steve Miska and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the war's worst fighting in 2006 and 2007, a handful of Iraqi interpreters put their lives on the line to help American troops. Families threatened, a bounty on their heads, ignored by the powers that be, they faced execution as collaborators with the enemy if they remained in their homeland. A Task Force Commander decides a promise made should be a promise kept. After the murders of several Iraqi allies, Lt. Col Steve Miska decides to slice through the bureaucratic red tape to get interpreters to safety. His team creates the Baghdad Underground Railroad to get the "terps" and other allies out of the country to Jordan for their Embassy interviews. Soldiers also tap their own families in the United States to serve as sponsors to house and assist the new immigrants. For the Iraqis, they face the struggle of adapting to a culture vastly different from their own. One of them even joins the U.S. Army and returns to Iraq as an American soldier. In this compelling memoir that illustrates humanity and compassion in the midst of war, Steve Miska highlights the plight of local allies, who are essential to the American cause in foreign wars but are often left behind. He also offers an insider's look at the complex and frustrating political reality of Iraq facing U.S. commanders and policymakers following the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

Download or read book Marrakech Express written by Peter Millar and published by Arcadia Books. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Back in 1969 when Morocco's ancient capital was a hashish clouded happy mecca, Crosby, Stills and Nash recorded their cheesy (and hopelessly inaccurate) foot-tapping anthem 'Marrakech Express'. A generation on, award-winning journalist, author, and one-time glamrock fan Peter Millar uses what is now the country's best visited tourist destination as the embarkation point for a literally reverse-engineered train journey through this still exotic, diverse and challenging North African country, struggling to maintain its unique blend of tradition and tolerance in the turbulent winds of the Arab Spring.