Download or read book Tear Down This Wall written by Romesh Ratnesar and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan addressed a crowd of 20,000 people in West Berlin in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. The words he delivered that afternoon would become among the most famous in presidential history. "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate," Reagan said. "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!" In this riveting and fast-paced book, Romesh Ratnesar provides an account of how Reagan arrived at his defining moment and what followed from it. The book is based on interviews with numerous former Reagan administration officials and American and German eyewitnesses to the speech, as well as recently declassified State Department documents and East German records of the president's trip. Ratnesar provides new details about the origins of Reagan's speech and the debate within the administration about how to issue the fateful challenge to Gorbachev. Tear Down This Wall re-creates the charged atmosphere surrounding Reagan's visit to Berlin and explores the speech's role in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall less than two years later. At the heart of the story is the relationship between two giants of the late twentieth century: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Departing from the view that Reagan "won" the Cold War, Ratnesar demonstrates that both Reagan and Gorbachev played indispensable roles in bringing about the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It was the trust that Reagan and Gorbachev built in each other that allowed them finally to overcome the suspicions that had held their predecessors back. Calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Wall, in Reagan's mind, might actually encourage him to do it. Reagan's speech in Berlin was more than a good sound bite. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we can now see the speech as the event that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Elegant and dramatic, Tear Down This Wall is the definitive account of one of the most memorable speeches in recent history and a reminder of the power of a president's words to change the world.
Download or read book Tear Down this Wall written by Ronald Reagan and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a unique and substantive tribute to Ronald Reagan, one of the most important figures in U.S. and world history. It includes Reagan’s most trenchant speeches as President (Evil Empire, Tear down this Wall, remarks commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, his farewell to the nation on leaving the Presidency); essential speeches delivered before holding the Office of President (Rendezvous with Destiny); all-but-impossible-to-find policy articles written by Reagan for National Review; and words of praise – old as well as new following Reagan’s death – from William F. Buckley Jr., Margaret Thatcher, Robert Bork, Paul Johnson, Edwin Meese III, Tom Wolfe, and others.
Download or read book Tear Down the Walls written by Patrick Burke and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rock and roll's most iconic, not to mention wealthy, pioneers are overwhelmingly white, despite their great indebtedness to black musical innovators. Many of these pioneers were insensitive at best and exploitative at worst when it came to the black art that inspired them. Tear Down the Walls is about a different cadre of white rock musicians and activists, those who tried to tear down walls separating musical genres and racial identities during the late 1960s. Their attempts were often naïve, misguided, or arrogant, but they could also reflect genuine engagement with African American music and culture and sincere investment in anti-racist politics. Burke considers this question by recounting five dramatic incidents that took place between August 1968 and August 1969, including Jefferson Airplane's performance with Grace Slick in blackface on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Jean-Luc Godard's 1968 film, Sympathy for the Devil, featuring the Rolling Stones and Black Power rhetoric, and the White Panther Party at Woodstock. Each story sheds light on a significant but overlooked facet of 1960s rock-white musicians and audiences casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting a romanticized vision of African American identity. These radical white rock musicians believed that performing and adapting black music could contribute to what in the Black Lives Matter era is sometimes called "white allyship." This book explores their efforts and asks what lessons can be learned from them. As white musicians and activists today still attempt to find ethical, respectful approaches to racial politics, the challenges and victories of the 1960s can provide both inspiration and a sense of perspective"--
Download or read book Tearing Down the Walls written by Monica Langley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-04-27 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He is one of the world's most accomplished figures of modern finance. As chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup, Sanford "Sandy" Weill has become an American legend, a banking visionary whose innovativeness, opportunism, and even fear drove him from the lowliest jobs on Wall Street to its most commanding heights. In this unprecedented biography, acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley provides a compelling account of Weill's rise to power. What emerges is a portrait of a man who is as vital and as volatile as the market itself. Tearing Down the Walls tells the riveting inside story of how a Jewish boy from Brooklyn's back alleys overcame incredible odds and deep-seated prejudices to transform the financial-services industry as we know it today. Using nearly five hundred firsthand interviews with key players in Weill's life and career -- including Weill himself -- Langley brilliantly chronicles not only his success and scandals but also the shadows of his hidden self: his father's abandonment and his loving marriage; his tyrannical rages as well as his tearful regrets; his fierce sense of loyalty and his ruthless elimination of potential rivals. By highlighting in new and startling detail one man's life in a narrative as richly textured and compelling as a novel, Tearing Down the Walls provides the historical context of the dramatic changes not only in business but also in American society in the last half century.
Download or read book The Collapse written by Mary Sarotte and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West. The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident. In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin. We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control. Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.
Download or read book Tear Down This Myth written by Will Bunch and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges popular conceptions about the 40th president's administration and legacy, arguing that subsequent presidents and conservative policymakers have exploited the country's misunderstandings of Reagan's achievements to promote risky agendas. Reprint.
Download or read book In Uncertain Times written by Melvyn P. Leffler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Uncertain Times considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro have assembled an illustrious roster of officials from the George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations—Robert B. Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric S. Edelman, Walter B. Slocombe, and Philip Zelikow. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanced by the George H. W. Bush administration, the bureaucratic clashes over policy toward the breakup of the USSR, the creation of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the expansion of NATO, the writing of the National Security Strategy Statement of 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A group of eminent scholars address these same topics. Bruce Cumings, John Mueller, Mary Elise Sarotte, Odd Arne Westad, and William C. Wohlforth probe the unstated assumptions, the cultural values, and the psychological makeup of the policymakers. They examine whether opportunities were seized and whether threats were magnified and distorted. They assess whether academicians and independent experts would have done a better job than the policymakers did. Together, policymakers and scholars impel us to rethink how our world has changed and how policy can be improved in the future.
Download or read book Tearing Down The Wall of Sound written by Mick Brown and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2002, the reclusive and legendary record producer Phil Spector gave his first interview in twenty-five years to Mick Brown. The day after it was published an actress named Lana Clarkson was shot dead in Spector's LA castle. This is Brown's odyssey into the strange life and times of Phil Spector. Beginning with that fateful meeting in Spector's home and going on to explore his colourful and extraordinary life and career, including the unfolding of the Clarkson case, this is one of the most bizarre and compelling stories in pop history.
Download or read book How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life written by Peter Robinson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a young speechwriter in the Reagan White House, Peter Robinson was responsible for the celebrated "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. He was also one of a core group of writers who became informal experts on Reagan -- watching his every move, absorbing not just his political positions, but his personality, manner, and the way he carried himself. In How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, Robinson draws on journal entries from his days at the White House, as well as interviews with those who knew the president best, to reveal ten life lessons he learned from the fortieth president -- a great yet ordinary man who touched the individuals around him as surely as he did his millions of admirers around the world.
Download or read book Tear Down This Wall of Silence written by Dale Ingraham and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: a call to churches to be prepared to understand the sin of sexual abuse, to believe and speak the truth, and to take action to help those who have been affected by abuse.
Download or read book The Wall Jumper written by Peter Schneider and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-11 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Wall Jumper, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country.
Download or read book The Fall of the Berlin Wall written by Jeffrey A. Engel and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two decades after the Wall's collapse, this book brings together leading authorities who offer a fresh look at how leaders in four vital centers of world politics--the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and China--viewed the world in the aftermath of this momentous event. Jeffrey Engel contributes a chronological narrative of this tumultuous period, followed by substantive essays by Melvyn Leffler on the United States, Chen Jian on China, James Sheehan on Germany and Europe, and William Taubman and Svetlana Savranskaya on the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Burning Down the Haus written by Tim Mohr and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Rolling Stone * BookPage * Amazon * Rough Trade Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence “[A] riveting and inspiring history of punk’s hard-fought struggle in East Germany.” —The New York Times Book Review “A thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world.” —Rolling Stone “Original and inspiring . . . Mr. Mohr has written an important work of Cold War cultural history.” —The Wall Street Journal “Wildly entertaining . . . A thrilling tale . . . A joy in the way it brings back punk’s fury and high stakes.”—Vogue It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: in their gray surroundings, where everyone’s future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy—quite literally, as it turned out. But as these young kids tried to form bands and became more visible, security forces—including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi—targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and fired from jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of conforming, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. This secret history of East German punk rock is not just about the music; it is a story of extraordinary bravery in the face of one of the most oppressive regimes in history. Rollicking, cinematic, deeply researched, highly readable, and thrillingly topical, Burning Down the Haus brings to life the young men and women who successfully fought authoritarianism three chords at a time—and is a fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of revolution.
Download or read book Speaking My Mind written by Ronald Reagan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important speeches of America's "Great Communicator": Here, in his own words, is the record of Ronald Reagan's remarkable political career and historic eight-year presidency.
Download or read book Teardown written by Gordon Young and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After living in San Francisco for fifteen years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and the “star” of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that had once boasted one of the world’s highest per capita income levels but had become one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer could afford a lavish mansion, speculators scooped up cheap houses by the dozen on eBay, and arson was often the quickest route to neighborhood beautification. Skillfully blending personal memoir, historical inquiry, and interviews with Flint residents, Young constructs a vibrant tale of a once-thriving city still fighting—despite overwhelming odds—to rise from the ashes. He befriends a ragtag collection of urban homesteaders and die-hard locals who refuse to give up as they try to transform Flint into a smaller, greener town that offers lessons for cities all over the world. Hard-hitting, insightful, and often painfully funny, Teardown reminds us that cities are ultimately defined by people, not politics or economics.
Download or read book Berlin 1961 written by Frederick Kempe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." He knew what he was talking about. Much has been written about the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but the Berlin Crisis of 1961 was more decisive in shaping the Cold War-and more perilous. It was in that hot summer that the Berlin Wall was constructed, which would divide the world for another twenty-eight years. Then two months later, and for the first time in history, American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood arrayed against each other, only yards apart. One mistake, one nervous soldier, one overzealous commander-and the tripwire would be sprung for a war that could go nuclear in a heartbeat. On one side was a young, untested U.S. president still reeling from the Bay of Pigs disaster and a humiliating summit meeting that left him grasping for ways to respond. It would add up to be one of the worst first-year foreign policy performances of any modern president. On the other side, a Soviet premier hemmed in by the Chinese, East Germans, and hardliners in his own government. With an all-important Party Congress approaching, he knew Berlin meant the difference not only for the Kremlin's hold on its empire-but for his own hold on the Kremlin. Neither man really understood the other, both tried cynically to manipulate events. And so, week by week, they crept closer to the brink. Based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh-sometimes startling-insights, written with immediacy and drama, Berlin 1961 is an extraordinary look at key events of the twentieth century, with powerful applications to these early years of the twenty-first. Includes photographs
Download or read book The Last Best Hope written by Ronald Reagan and published by Humanix Books. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the time he arrived on the political scene in 1964 – throughout his presidency and beyond, Ronald Reagan – used his speeches to inspire and reinvigorate America. When he spoke, Reagan, said, he was “preaching a sermon.” The American people saw his vision of America and his dreams for the future and they overwhelmingly responded; he was re-elected in 984 by the largest number of electoral votes in the nation’s history. Here in this collection of twenty-eight speeches spanning the Reagan era, readers can find inspiration in Reagan’s “sermons.” From his first speech in the political arena in 1964 to his Last Letter to America, informing Americans of his Alzheimer’s disease, Ronald Regan’s words show a profound belief in God, freedom, individualism, limited government, and his great love for his country. In addition to an introduction by Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, each speech features an informative introduction which puts the speech into historical context, making The Last Best Hope the perfect entrée into the influence of one of the major figures of the 20th century.
