Download or read book An Intimate History of Killing written by Joanna Bourke and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2000-11-27 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, but killing. Politicians and military historians may gloss over human slaughter, emphasizing the defense of national honor, but for men in active service, warfare means being - or becoming - efficient killers. In An Intimate History of Killing, historian Joanna Bourke asks: What are the social and psychological dynamics of becoming the best ”citizen soldiers?” What kind of men become the best killers? How do they readjust to civilian life?These questions are answered in this groundbreaking new work that won, while still in manuscript, the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History. Excerpting from letters, diaries, memoirs, and reports of British, American, and Australian veterans of three wars (World War I, World War II, and Vietnam), Bourke concludes that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can, and often do, become enthusiastic killers without being brutalized.This graphic, unromanticized look at men at war is sure to revise many long-held beliefs about the nature of violence.

Download or read book An Intimate History of Killing written by Joanna Bourke and published by Granta Books (UK). This book was released on 2000 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bourke uses the letters, diaries, memoirs and reports of veterans from three conflicts - World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War - to establish a picture of the man-at-arms. What she suggests is that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing, and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can become enthusiastic killes without becoming brutalized.

Download or read book An Intimate History of Killing written by Joanna Bourke and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, the author uses the letters, diaries, memoirs, and reports of veterans from three conflicts - the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War - to establish a picture of the man-at-arms. She suggests that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing, and that ordinary, gentle human beings in civilian life can become enthusiastic killers without becoming brutalized by the horrors of combat.

Download or read book The Beauty and the Sorrow written by Peter Englund and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.

Download or read book Deep Violence written by Joanna Bourke and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the First World War, and with it comes a deluge of books, documentaries, feature films and radio programs. We will hear a great deal about the horror of the battlefield. Bourke acknowledges wider truths: war is unending and violence is deeply entrenched in our society. But it doesn't have to be this way. This book equips readers with an understanding of the history, culture and politics of warfare in order to interrogate and resist an increasingly violent world. Wounding the World investigates the ways that violence and war have become internalized in contemporary human consciousness in everything from the way we speak, to the way our children play with one another, to the way that we ascribe social characteristics to our guns and other weapons. With a remarkable depth of insight, Bourke argues for a radical overhaul of our collective stance towards militarism from one that simply aims to reduce violence against people to one that would eradicate all violence. Her message is judicious and vital: knowledge about weapons and the violence they bring has simply become too important to cast aside or leave to the experts.

Download or read book Why Do They Kill written by David Adams (Ed. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of domestic homicide in America examines the lives and moitvation of men who kill their intimate partners.

Download or read book Once Upon Atari written by Howard Scott Warshaw and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONCE UPON ATARI is an intimate view into the dramatic rise and fall of the early video game industry, and how it shaped the life of one of its key players. This book offers eye-opening details and insights, delivered in a creative style that mirrors the industry it reveals. An innovative work from one of the industry's original innovators.This is a detailed look behind the scenes of the early days of video games, with particular attention to the causative factors leading up to the video game crash of the early 1980s. It is also the journey of one industry pioneer, and how his experience creating some of the world's most noted pieces of interactive entertainment reverberates throughout his life. It is a compelling and dramatic tale of innocence, greed, exuberance, hubris, joy, devastation and ultimately redemption, told in a fresh voice and an unorthodox style.

Download or read book On Killing written by Dave Grossman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial psychological examination of how soldiers’ willingness to kill has been encouraged and exploited to the detriment of contemporary civilian society. Psychologist and US Army Ranger Dave Grossman writes that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to pull the trigger in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning, have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The mental cost for members of the military, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The sociological cost for the rest of us is even worse: Contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army’s conditioning techniques and, Grossman argues, is responsible for the rising rate of murder and violence, especially among the young. Drawing from interviews, personal accounts, and academic studies, On Killing is an important look at the techniques the military uses to overcome the powerful reluctance to kill, of how killing affects the soldier, and of the societal implications of escalating violence.

Download or read book The Vietnam War written by Geoffrey Ward and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Based on the celebrated PBS television series, the complete text of an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict, “a significant milestone [that] will no doubt do much to determine how the war is understood for years to come.” —The Washington Post More than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its memory continues to loom large in the national psyche. In this intimate history, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns have crafted a fresh and insightful account of the long and brutal conflict that reunited Vietnam while dividing the United States as nothing else had since the Civil War. From the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive to Hamburger Hill and the fall of Saigon, Ward and Burns trace the conflict that dogged three American presidents and their advisers. But most of the voices that echo from these pages belong to less exalted men and women—those who fought in the war as well as those who fought against it, both victims and victors—willing for the first time to share their memories of Vietnam as it really was. A magisterial tour de force, The Vietnam War is an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict.

Download or read book The Great Mortality written by John Kelly and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.

Download or read book Critical Role The Tales of Exandria Volume 1 The Bright Queen written by Matthew Mercer and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game Master Matthew Mercer joins Eisner Award-winning writer Darcy van Poelgeest (LittleBird) and fan-favorite artist CoupleofKooks in a brand new Critical Role story from the mighty Kryn Dynasty, collected in a trade paperback and ready to take its place in your Critical Role library. Could the fabled Luxon be the downfall of the Kryn Dynasty? Leylas Kryn, the Bright Queen, has spent multiple lives in pursuit of assembling the otherworldly Luxon. So when another piece appears nearby, Leylas sends her eternal lover Quana to collect it...with consequences that may threaten the entire Dynasty! Hope for the future clashes with darkness from the past in a stellar new story from the world of Critical Role!

Download or read book Our Bodies Their Battlefields written by Christina Lamb and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice. We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook. In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.

Download or read book Dismembering the Male written by Joanna Bourke and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-05-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some historians contend that femininity was "disrupted, constructed and reconstructed" during World War I, but what happened to masculinity? Using the evidence of letters, diaries, and oral histories of members of the military and of civilians, as well as contemporary photographs and government propoganda, Dismembering the Male explores the impact of the First World War on the male body. Each chapter explores a different facet of the war and masculinity in depth. Joanna Bourke discovers that those who were dismembered and disabled by the war were not viewed as passive or weak, like their civilian counterparts, but were the focus of much government and public sentiment. Those suffering from disease were viewed differently, often finding themselves accused of malingering. Joanna Bourke argues convincingly that military experiences led to a greater sharing of gender identities between men of different classes and ages. Dismembering the Male concludes that ultimately, attempts to reconstruct a new type of masculinity failed as the threat of another war, and with it the sacrifice of a new generation of men, intensified.

Download or read book Murder at the Mission written by Blaine Harden and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 Will Rogers Medallion Award “Terrific.” –Timothy Egan, The New York Times “A riveting investigation of both American myth-making and the real history that lies beneath.” –Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, a “terrifically readable” (Los Angeles Times) account of one of the most persistent “alternative facts” in American history: the story of a missionary, a tribe, a massacre, and a myth that shaped the American West In 1836, two missionaries and their wives were among the first Americans to cross the Rockies by covered wagon on what would become the Oregon Trail. Dr. Marcus Whitman and Reverend Henry Spalding were headed to present-day Washington state and Idaho, where they aimed to convert members of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes. Both would fail spectacularly as missionaries. But Spalding would succeed as a propagandist, inventing a story that recast his friend as a hero, and helped to fuel the massive westward migration that would eventually lead to the devastation of those they had purportedly set out to save. As Spalding told it, after uncovering a British and Catholic plot to steal the Oregon Territory from the United States, Whitman undertook a heroic solo ride across the country to alert the President. In fact, he had traveled to Washington to save his own job. Soon after his return, Whitman, his wife, and eleven others were massacred by a group of Cayuse. Though they had ample reason - Whitman supported the explosion of white migration that was encroaching on their territory, and seemed to blame for a deadly measles outbreak - the Cayuse were portrayed as murderous savages. Five were executed. This fascinating, impeccably researched narrative traces the ripple effect of these events across the century that followed. While the Cayuse eventually lost the vast majority of their territory, thanks to the efforts of Spalding and others who turned the story to their own purposes, Whitman was celebrated well into the middle of the 20th century for having "saved Oregon." Accounts of his heroic exploits appeared in congressional documents, The New York Times, and Life magazine, and became a central founding myth of the Pacific Northwest. Exposing the hucksterism and self-interest at the root of American myth-making, Murder at the Mission reminds us of the cost of American expansion, and of the problems that can arise when history is told only by the victors.

Download or read book The Ukrainian Night written by Marci Shore and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and intimate account of the Ukrainian Revolution, the rare moment when the political became the existential What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices. In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

Download or read book Murder by the Book written by Eric Brown and published by Severn House/ORIM. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is killing the crime writers of London? Find out in this “consistently entertaining . . . crime debut from sci-fi veteran Brown” (Kirkus Reviews). London, 1955. When crime writer Donald Langham’s literary agent asks for his help in sorting out “a delicate matter,” little does Langham realize what he’s getting himself into. For a nasty case of blackmail leads inexorably to murder as London’s literary establishment is rocked by a series of increasingly bizarre deaths. With three members of the London Crime Writers’ Association coming to sudden and violent ends, what at first appeared to be a series of suicides looks suspiciously like murder—and there seems to be something horribly familiar about the various methods of dispatch. With the help of his literary agent’s assistant, the delectable Maria Dupré, Langham finds himself drawing on the skills of his fictional detective hero as he hunts a ruthless and fiendishly clever killer—a killer with old scores to settle. “[A] well-paced first mystery. . . . Readers will hope a sequel is in the works.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Wounding the World written by Joanna Bourke and published by Virago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wars are frequently justified 'in our name'. Militarist values and practices co-opt us, permeating our language, invading our dream space, entertaining us at the movies or in front of game consoles. Our taxes pay for those war machines. Our loved ones are killed and maimed. With killing now an integral part of the entertainment industry in video games and Hollywood films, war has become mainstream.