Download or read book The Immaculate Invasion written by Bob Shacochis and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-06-08 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every war brings forth one perfect book. . . . Now we have The Immaculate Invasion, the masterpiece of the 1994 US assault on and occupation of Haiti.” —Chicago Tribune Widely celebrated upon its original publication in 1999, National Book Award winning writer Bob Shacochis’s The Immaculate Invasion is a gritty, poetic, and revelatory look at the American intervention in Haiti. In 1994, the United States embarked on Operation Uphold Democracy, a response to the overthrow of the democratically elected Haitian government by a brutal military coup. As a reporter for Harper’s, Bob Shacochis traveled to Haiti and was embedded—long before the idea became popular in Iraq—with a team of Special Forces commandos for eighteen months. He came away with tremendous insight into Haiti, the character of American fighters, and what can happen when an intervention turns into a misadventure. In The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis captures the exploits and frustrations, the inner lives and heroic deeds of young Americans as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. The Immaculate Invasion is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what has happened in Haiti in the past, its current state, and its future path. “An extraordinary book about an extraordinary event . . . I felt transported to Haiti. I could hear it. I could smell it. At moments I felt moved almost to tears, only to find myself, a page or two later, laughing out loud.” —Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine
Download or read book The Woman Who Lost Her Soul written by Bob Shacochis and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize finalist: “A soaring literary epic about the forces that have driven us to the 9/11 age . . . relentlessly captivating” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post). When humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape riddled with poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed. To make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into his complicated ties to Jackie—and her mysterious past. Shacochis traces Jackie’s shadowy family history from the outlaw terrain of World War II Dubrovnik to 1980s Istanbul. Caught between her first love and her domineering father—an elite Cold War spy pressuring her to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan. But getting out also puts her on the path that turns her into the soulless woman Tom fears as much as desires. Set over fifty years and in four war-torn countries, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis’s masterpiece and a magnum opus. It brings to life an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today.
Download or read book The Next New World written by Bob Shacochis and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “chameleon-like” ABA–winning author of Easy in the Islands offers a new collection of eight “surprising [and] memorable” short stories (Publishers Weekly). The haunting stories in Shacochis’s second collection combine comic wit and carnal certainty with an aura of history. Each of the eight tales here feature outrageously original characters who, through Shacochis’s ability to inhabit a spectacular range of voices, become eerily familiar. Two elderly sisters share a phantom lover; a Virginia patriarch, haunted by ghosts of Confederate soldiers, is buried with their bones; a family celebrates the Fourth of July in the shadow of the father’s Alzheimer’s syndrome; and a musician’s thunderous love turns him into a cannibal. From renaissance England to Cape Hatteras to the Caribbean islands, readers will find themselves submerged in exquisitely crafted fictions “charged with wit and style . . . intelligent, engaging, and richly realized.” (The New York Times Book Review). “Shacochis is a master of voices. . . . In The Next New World he roams about through history and across the globe, tethering his wit to a sense of political conscience. . . . Sometimes more is more.” —The Miami Herald “If we are in the golden age of the short story, Bob Shacochis is one of the writers who got us here.” —Providence Journal
Download or read book Invasions written by Calvin Gimpelevich and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A body-swapping personal trainer and her trans girlfriend turn to a life of crime. A man mourning his dead lover becomes trapped in the mind of the leader of a bathhouse raid. A trans man, recovering from top surgery paid for with a stolen credit card, finds strange connection and condemnation among his fellow patients. The fifteen stories in this debut fiction collection from author Calvin Gimpelevich move in the borderlands between realism and surrealism, investigating gender, class, relationships, and the powers we still hold within spaces of powerlessness. They articulate the invasions we commit, the invitations we receive to cross over into another person's world."--
Download or read book Easy in the Islands written by Bob Shacochis and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Award for First Fiction: “Beguiling stories . . . about an uncommonly fascinating part of the hemisphere” (Time). Easy in the Islands is a “stunning” collection of stories by one of contemporary America’s foremost journalists and fiction writers. Infused with the rhythms of the Caribbean, these vivid tales of paradise sought and paradise lost are as lush, steamy, and invigorating as the islands themselves (The Washington Post). A calypso singer named Lord Short Shoe consorts with a vampish black singer to bilk an American out of his only companion—a monkey. An island bureaucracy confounds the attempts of a hotel owner to get his dead mother out of the freezer and into a real grave—until he resorts to a highly unusual form of burial. Two poor islanders stumble into a high-class dance party and find themselves caught in a violent encounter that just might escalate into revolution. And a young woman sails off into the romantic tropics with the man of her dreams, only to learn the hard way—as Eve did—that paradise is just another place to leave behind. From fishing fleets in remote atolls too small to appear on any map to the sprawling barrios and yacht filled marinas of Miami, Bob Shacochis charts a course across a Caribbean that no tourist will recognize.
Download or read book Domesticity written by Bob Shacochis and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bob Shacochis, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, and National Book Award winning-author of such books as Swimming in the Volcano, Easy in the Islands, and The Next New World, hones his nonfiction skills in this tour de force romp through the worlds of eating and eroticism. Domesticity is an irreverent exploration of the sweet and sour evolution of the enduring romance between author and lover. In this relationship, Shacochis stays at home and cooks, all the while reflecting on the ups and downs of a romantic partnership, the connection between heart and stomach, and how the crazed lust of youth evolves into inevitably settling down and, well, simply making dinner. Shacochis's delectable musings on monogamy, emotional and physical separations, dogs, career changes, the stress of the holidays, the aesthetics of food, moving, sex and seafood, friendships, writings and the angst over who is going to do the dishes are deftly folded into seventy-five recipes, half of them of the author's own creation. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is Shacochis's celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point. Guilelessly hilarious, and ever entertaining, Domesticity is a celebration of a life spent in proximity to the boiling point, a "prose stew" of audacious candor, a culinary valentine for lovers of literature.
Download or read book Swimming in the Volcano written by Bob Shacochis and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant portrait of love and politics in the tropics from the National Book Award–winning author: “the finest first novel I have read in many years” (William O’Rourke, Chicago Tribune). Winner of the National Book Award for First Fiction for Easy in the Islands, Bob Shacochis returns to the islands with Swimming in the Volcano, a “splendid first novel” that illuminates the beauty and life of the Caribbean (Library Journal). On the fictional island of St. Catherine, an American expatriate becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially explosive scene enters a woman he once loved and lost, but who remains a powerful temptation—one that proves impossible to resist. Both an enchanting love story and a sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century, Swimming in the Volcano is as brutal and seductive a novel as the world it evokes. “Scores of island people, from conspiring politicians to barbers on the beach, sprawl across the pages like oleander and hibiscus . . . each of [the book’s] scenes is expertly wrought.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Gates of Fire written by Steven Pressfield and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.”—Pat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .
Download or read book Falcon Brigade written by Lawrence E. Casper and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Casper's candid account of Operation Continue Hope and the brigade's involvement in Somalia, showcases the leadership skills and courage necessary for troop survival under beleaguered circumstances.".
Download or read book American Science Fiction and the Cold War written by David Seed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Science Fiction--in both literature and film--has played a key role in the portrayal of the fears inherent in the Cold War. The end of this era heralds the need for a reassessment of the literary output of the forty-year period since 1945. Working through a series of key texts, American Science Fiction and the Cold War investigates the political inflections put on American narratives in the post-war decades by Cold War cultural circumstances. Nuclear holocaust, Russian invasion, and the perceived rise of totalitarianism in American society are key elements in the author's exploration of science fiction narratives that include Fahrenheit 451, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Dr. Strangelove.
Download or read book Immaculate Warfare written by Stephen D. Wrage and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays-written by military officers who analyzed the intelligence, planned the missions, and flew the planes over Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan-offers the most penetrating look to date at the realities of American precision air power. When the gun-camera footage from air strikes during the Gulf War reached America's television screens, people awoke to the astonishing accuracy and power of smart weapons. Yet ten years' experience has taught what these remarkable weapons can and cannot do, and now, as American policy makers look to them to win the global war on terrorism, it is essential to understand the promise and the limits of immaculate warfare. This volume of essays-written by military officers who analyzed the intelligence, planned the missions, and flew the planes over Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan-offers the most penetrating look to date at the realities of American precision air power. Topics include: • The political context of using force from the air • The theoretical considerations involved in the use of air power to coerce an enemy • An insider's view from General Clark's headquarters as he commanded the Kosovo war effort • The tensions between civilian and military leaderships during the Kosovo war • Precision weapons and the paradoxes their use involves • The debate surrounding when precision weapons ought to be employed
Download or read book Japan 1941 written by Eri Hotta and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.
Download or read book In the Shadow of the Cold War written by Timothy J. Lynch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines American engagement with the world from the fall of Soviet communism through the opening years of the Trump administration.
Download or read book Making War Thinking History written by Jeffrey Record and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In examining the influence of historical analogies on decisions to use--or not use--force, military strategist Jeffrey Record assesses every major application of U.S. force from the Korean War to the NATO war on Serbia. Specifically, he looks at the influence of two analogies: the democracies? appeasement of Hitler at Munich and America's defeat in the Vietnam War. His book judges the utility of these two analogies on presidential decision-making and finds considerable misuse of them in situations where force was optional. He points to the Johnson administration's application of the Munich analogy to the circumstances of Southeast Asia in 1965 as the most egregious example of their misuse, but also cites the faulty reasoning by historical analogy that prevailed among critics of Reagan's policy in Central America and in Clinton's use of force in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. The author's findings show generational experience to be a key influence on presidential decision-making: Munich persuaded mid-twentieth-century presidents that force should be used early and decisively while Vietnam cautioned later presidents against using force at all. Both analogies were at work for the Gulf War, with Munich urging a decision for war and Vietnam warning against a graduated and highly restricted use of force. Record also reminds us of the times when presidents have used analogies to mobilize public support for action they have already decided to take. Addressing both the process of presidential decision-making and the wisdom of decisions made, this well-reasoned book offers timely lessons to a broad audience that includes political scientists, military historians, defense analysts, and policy makers, as well as those simply curious about history's influence.
Download or read book Salinger written by David Shields and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The official book of the acclaimed documentary film"--Jacket.
Download or read book Kingdoms in the Air written by Bob Shacochis and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “exuberant travel and cultural anthology” by the National Book Award–winning author “brings each setting to life with a perceptive eye” (Booklist, starred review). Best known for his sweeping political novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Bob Shacochis began his career as a journalist and contributing editor for Outside magazine and Harper’s. Kingdoms in the Air brings together the very best of Shacochis’s culture and travel essays in a collection that spans his global adventures and passions; from Kathmandu to Mozambique, from his love of surfing to his obsession with the South American dorado. In the titular essay “Kingdoms,” the longest work in the collection, Shacochis ventures to Nepal with his friend, the photographer Thomas Laird, who was the first foreigner to live in Nepal’s Kingdom of Mustang as the forbidden Shangri-La prepared to open its borders to trekkers and trade. Replete with Shacochis’s swagger, humor, and wisdom, Kingdoms in the Air is an essential collection of travel writing by an author who “has extended his knowledge and imagination into places most of us have never ventured” (Washington Post).
Download or read book Mein Kampf written by Adolf Hitler and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-02-26 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madman, tyrant, animal—history has given Adolf Hitler many names. In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), often called the Nazi bible, Hitler describes his life, frustrations, ideals, and dreams. Born to an impoverished couple in a small town in Austria, the young Adolf grew up with the fervent desire to become a painter. The death of his parents and outright rejection from art schools in Vienna forced him into underpaid work as a laborer. During the First World War, Hitler served in the infantry and was decorated for bravery. After the war, he became actively involved with socialist political groups and quickly rose to power, establishing himself as Chairman of the National Socialist German Worker's party. In 1924, Hitler led a coalition of nationalist groups in a bid to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich. The infamous Munich "Beer-hall putsch" was unsuccessful, and Hitler was arrested. During the nine months he was in prison, an embittered and frustrated Hitler dictated a personal manifesto to his loyal follower Rudolph Hess. He vented his sentiments against communism and the Jewish people in this document, which was to become Mein Kampf, the controversial book that is seen as the blue-print for Hitler's political and military campaign. In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes his strategy for rebuilding Germany and conquering Europe. It is a glimpse into the mind of a man who destabilized world peace and pursued the genocide now known as the Holocaust.
