Download or read book The Bridge at Andau written by James A. Michener and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most gripping. His classic nonfiction account of a doomed uprising is as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling novels. For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a different kind of future—until, at four o’clock in the morning on a Sunday in November, the citizens of Budapest awoke to the shattering sound of Russian tanks ravaging their streets. The revolution was over. But freedom beckoned in the form of a small footbridge at Andau, on the Austrian border. By an accident of history it became, for a few harrowing weeks, one of the most important crossings in the world, as the soul of a nation fled across its unsteady planks. Praise for The Bridge at Andau “Precise, vivid . . . immeasurably stirring.”—The Atlantic Monthly “Dramatic, chilling, enraging.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Superb.”—Kirkus Reviews “Highly recommended reading.”—Library Journal
Download or read book The Bridge at Andau written by James A. Michener and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1983-11-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At four o'clock in the morning on a Sunday in November 1956, the city of Budapest was awakened by the shattering sound of Russian tanks tearing the city apart. The Hungarian revolution -- five brief, glorious days of freedom that had yielded a glimpse at a different kind of future -- was over. But there was a bridge at Andau, on the Austrian border, and if a Hungarian could reach that bridge, he was nearly free. It was about the most inconsequential bridge in Europe, but by an accident of history it became, for a few flaming weeks, one of the most important bridges in the world, for across its unsteady planks fled the soul of a nation.... Here is James A. Michener at his most gripping, with a historic account of a people in desperate revolt, a true story as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling works of fiction. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Twelve Days written by Victor Sebestyen and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The defining moment of the Cold War: 'The beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.' (Richard Nixon) The Hungarian Revolution in 1956 is a story of extraordinary bravery in a fight for freedom, and of ruthless cruelty in suppressing a popular dream. A small nation, its people armed with a few rifles and petrol bombs, had the will and courage to rise up against one of the world's superpowers. The determination of the Hungarians to resist the Russians astonished the West. People of all kinds, throughout the free world, became involved in the cause. For 12 days it looked, miraculously, as though the Soviets might be humbled. Then reality hit back. The Hungarians were brutally crushed. Their capital was devastated, thousands of people were killed and their country was occupied for a further three decades. The uprising was the defining moment of the Cold War: the USSR showed that it was determined to hold on to its European empire, but it would never do so without resistance. From the Prague Spring to Lech Walesa's Solidarity and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tighter the grip of the communist bloc, the more irresistible the popular demand for freedom.
Download or read book The Bridges at Toko Ri written by James A. Michener and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one of his beloved early bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize–winning author James A. Michener crafts a tale of the American men who fought the Korean War, detailing their exploits in the air as well as their lives on the ground. Young and innocent, they arrive in a place they have barely ever heard of, on a ship massive enough to carry planes and helicopters. Trained as professionals, they prepare for the rituals of war that countless men before them have endured, and face the same fears. They are American fighter pilots. Together they face an enemy they do not understand, knowing their only hope for survival is to win. Praise for The Bridges at Toko-Ri “A vivid and moving story, as well as an exciting one . . . The humanity of the people is deeply felt.”—Chicago Tribune “The Banshees screaming over Korea, the perilous landings on an aircraft carrier deck ‘bouncing around like a derelict rowboat,’ a helicopter rescue from the freezing waters . . . all are stirringly rendered.”—The Denver Post “Michener’s best . . . a story of action, ideas, and civilization’s responsibilities.”—Saturday Review
Download or read book Kent State written by James A. Michener and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of James A. Michener's storytelling and reportorial skills are brought to the fore in this stunning and heartbreaking examination of the events that led to the 1970 shootings at Kent State, which shook the country to the roots and had a profound impact on the anti-war movement.
Download or read book Three Great Novels of World War II written by James A. Michener and published by Gramercy. This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trio of classic bestselling novels that unforgettably capture the experience of American fighting men in World War II -- and have captured the hearts and minds of generations of readers.
Download or read book The Bridge at Andau written by James A. Michener and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1981-11-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Love Action Laughter and Other Sad Tales written by Budd Schulberg and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including stories from Schulberg's early work at Dartmouth in the '30s to his more recent pieces, here is a haunting collection of short stories that largely deal with two of Schulberg's best-known themes: underdogs and Hollywood.
Download or read book Journey to a Revolution written by Michael Korda and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-09-19 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was not just an extraordinary and dramatic event—perhaps the most dramatic single event of the Cold War—but, as we can now see fifty years later, a major turning point in history. Here is an eyewitness account, in the tradition of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. The spontaneous rising of Hungarian people against the Hungarian communist party and the Soviet forces in Hungary in the wake of Stalin's death, while ending unsuccessfully, demonstrated to the world at large the failure of Communism. The Russians were obliged to use force on a vast scale against armed students, factory workers, and intellectuals in the streets of a major European capital to restore the Hungarian communist party to power. For two weeks, students, women, and teenagers fought tanks in the streets of Budapest, in full view of the Western media—and therefore the world—and for a time they actually won, deeply humiliating the men who succeeded Stalin. The Russians eventually managed to extinguish the revolution with brute force and overwhelming numbers, but never again would they attempt to use military force on a large scale to suppress dissent in their Eastern European empire. Told with brilliant detail, suspense, occasional humor, and sustained anger, Journey to a Revolution is at once history and a compelling memoir—the amazing story of four young Oxford undergraduates, including the author, who took off for Budapest in a beat-up old Volkswagen convertible in October 1956 to bring badly needed medicine to Budapest hospitals and to participate, at street level, in one of the great battles of postwar history. Michael Korda paints a vivid and richly detailed picture of the events and the people; explores such major issues as the extent to which the British and American intelligence services were involved in the uprising, making the Hungarians feel they could expect military support from the West; and describes, day by day, the course of the revolution, from its heroic beginnings to the sad martyrdom of its end. Journey to a Revolution delivers "a harrowing and horrifying tale told in spare and poignant prose—sometimes bitter, sometimes ironic, always powerful."* * Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Download or read book Texas Stories I Like to Tell My Friends written by T. Lindsey Baker and published by ACU Press. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining collection of colorful stories from Texas history that give readers plenty of reason to laugh, cry, and gain an even greater understanding of the people and moments that have been a part of the Texas story. "It looked like millions of stars were shooting down to the ground," said Julia Palmer Roberts, with "streaks of fire flying in every direction." The 1833 meteor shower struck fear into the hearts of people across America, including Julia's family in Texas, who met the phenomenon on their knees, praying for help during what they were sure was the end of the world. Julia's is just one of the stories that author and historian T. Lindsay Baker relates in Texas Stories I like to Tell My Friends. Baker has been finding and telling stories from Texas history for decades. Even before he published his popular Ghost Towns of Texas books, Baker was writing a regular column for the local newspaper in Thurber, Texas, inviting readers to laugh and cry with stories from years-gone-by. Texas Stories I like to Tell My Friends brings those stories together for readers all over. This volume focuses on stories that originated in the 1800s, bringing out many details about pioneering, slavery, the Civil War, and forgotten moments in time like the forming of a ghost town, a failed railway strike, the tracking of a horse thief, and more. Alternately startling and enlivening but always interesting, Texas Stories provides a valuable reading experience for anyone interested in the stories of people who came before us.
Download or read book The World Is My Home written by James A. Michener and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary legend James A. Michener was “a Renaissance man, adventurous, inquisitive, unpretentious and unassuming, with an encyclopedic mind and a generous heart” (The New York Times Book Review). In this exceptional memoir, the man himself tells the story of his remarkable life and describes the people, events, and ideas that shaped it. Moving backward and forward across time, he writes about the many strands of his experience: his passion for travel; his lifelong infatuation with literature, music, and painting; his adventures in politics; and the hard work, headaches, and rewards of the writing life. Here at last is the real James Michener: plainspoken, wise, and enormously sympathetic, a man who could truly say, “The world is my home.” BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for The World Is My Home “Michener’s own life makes one of his most engaging tales—a classic American success story.”—Entertainment Weekly “The Michener saga is as full of twists as any of his monumental works. . . . His output, his political interests, his patriotic service, his diligence, and the breadth of his readership are matched only by the great nineteenth-century writers whose works he devoured as he grew up—Dickens, Balzac, Mark Twain.”—Chicago Tribune “There are splendid yarns about [Michener’s] wartime doings in the South Pacific. There are hilarious cautionary tales about his service on government commissions. There are wonderful inside stories from the publishing business. And always there is Michener himself—analyzing his own character, assessing himself as a writer, chronicling his intellectual life, giving advice to young writers.”—The Plain Dealer “A sweepingly interesting life . . . Whether he’s having an epiphany over a campout in New Guinea with head-hunting cannibals or getting politically charged by the melodrama of great opera, James A. Michener’s world is a place and a time worth reading about.”—The Christian Science Monitor
Download or read book The bridge at Andau written by James Albert Michener and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rascals in Paradise written by James A. Michener and published by Dial Press Trade Paperback. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a thrilling collection of nonfiction adventure stories, James A. Michener returns to the most dazzling place on Earth: the islands that inspired Tales of the South Pacific. Co-written with A. Grove Day, Rascals in Paradise offers portraits of ten scandalous men and women, some infamous and some overlooked, including Sam Comstock, a mutinous sailor whose delusions of grandeur became a nightmare; Will Mariner, a golden-haired youth who used his charm to win over his captors; and William Bligh, the notorious HMS Bounty captain who may not have been the monster history remembers him as. From lifelong buccaneers to lapsed noblemen, in Michener and Day’s capable hands these rogues become the stuff of legend. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for Rascals in Paradise “The best book about those far-scattered islands that has appeared in a long time . . . a portfolio of rare and ruthless personalities that is calculated to make the curliest hair stand straight on end.”—The New York Times “[Combines] research and scholarship (A. Grove Day was a professor at the University of Hawaii) with a gift for spinning a yarn and depicting character (Michener, journalist and novelist, needs no introduction).”—Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Imperfect Justice written by Inga Markovits and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an account of the sudden death of Socialist law in East Germany and of the reactions, hopes and fears of some of its survivors. Imagine what happens when overnight a legal system is replaced by its ideological opposite? When people used to being coddled and disciplined by their law have to adjust to a State which expects them to look out for themselves? When men and women trained to serve and to legitimate their political system have to explain their complicity in its corruption? And when in this process of national soul-searching it is the Western victors alone who may ask all the questions? The remarkable transformation of East German law following the collapse of the communist regime and the dismantlement of the Berlin wall in 1990 is related by an author uniquely qualified to understand what happened during this astonishing period. Inga Markovits was born in Germany but has spent 25 years teaching law at the University of Texas in Austin. It was upon returning to Berlin in November 1989, two weeks after the opening of the Wall, that she realized that someone should try to record the events leading up to and following the death of Socialist law. Thus began this diary. When the Wall collapsed, all questions could be asked, but speed was of the essence. Memories were fresh and eyewitnesses, still reeling from the blows of political change, were eager to talk about the world they so suddenly lost. The spontaneity of the author's encounters with lawyers, judges and law professors is preserved in the pages of this diary and will leave an indelible impression upon readers. No lawyer or lay person interested in the future of Germany, the history of Communism and the study of comparative law can fail to be moved and fascinated by this book.
Download or read book Return of a King written by William Dalrymple and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.
Download or read book Titanic and Other Ships written by Charles Herbert LIGHTOLLER and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-07-03 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lightoller remarkably swam away from the sinking Titanic and avoided being sucked under. This is just one of the incredible escapes described in this book.
Download or read book Caribbean written by James A. Michener and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 898 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this acclaimed classic novel, James A. Michener sweeps readers off to the Caribbean, bringing to life the eternal allure and tumultuous history of this glittering string of islands. From the 1310 conquest of the Arawaks by cannibals to the decline of the Mayan empire, from Columbus’s arrival to buccaneer Henry Morgan’s notorious reign, from the bloody slave revolt on Haiti to the rise of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Caribbean packs seven hundred dramatic years into a tale teeming with revolution and romance, authentic characters and thunderous destinies. Through absorbing, magnificent prose, Michener captures the essence of the islands in all of their awe-inspiring scope and wonder. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Hawaii. Praise for Caribbean “Michener is a master.”—Boston Herald “A grand epic . . . [James A. Michener] sympathizes with the struggles of the region’s most oppressed, and succeeds in presenting the Caribbean in its rich diversity.”—The Plain Dealer “Remarkable and praiseworthy . . . utterly engaging.”—The Washington Post Book World “Even American tourists familiar with some of the serene islands will find themselves enlightened. . . . In Caribbean, there appears to be a strong aura of truth behind the storytelling.”—The New York Times
