Download or read book The Selected Works of Enver Hoxha written by Enver Hoxha and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2011-11-05 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enver Halil Hoxha (1908 – 1985) was a Marxist–Leninist revolutionary and the leader of Albania from the end of World War II until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania. He also served as Prime Minister of Albania from 1944 to 1954, Minister of Defence, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chairman of the Democratic Front from 1945 to his death, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Albanian armed forces from 1944 to his death. Hoxha's leadership was characterized by his proclaimed firm adherence to anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism from the mid-1970s onwards. After his break with Maoism in the 1976–1978 period, numerous Maoist parties declared themselves Hoxhaist. The International Conference of Marxist–Leninist Parties and Organizations (Unity & Struggle) is the most well known collection of these parties today.
Download or read book Enver Hoxha written by Blendi Fevziu and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalinism, that particularly brutal phase of the Communist experience, came to an end in most of Europe with the death of Stalin in 1953. However, in one country - Albania - Stalinism survived virtually unscathed until 1990. The regime that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha led from 1944 until his death in 1985 was incomparably severe. Such was the reign of terror that no audible voice of opposition or dissent ever arose in the Balkan state and Albania became isolated from the rest of the world and utterly inward-looking. Three decades after his death, the spectre of Hoxha still lingers over the country, yet many people – inside and outside Albania – know little about the man who ruled the country with an iron fist for so many decades. This book provides the first biography of Hoxha available in English. Using unseen documents and first-hand interviews, journalist Blendi Fevziu pieces together the life of a tyrannical ruler in a biography which will be essential reading for anyone interested in Balkan history and communist studies
Download or read book Mud Sweeter than Honey written by Margo Rejmer and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] incredibly moving collection of oral histories . . . important enough to be added to the history curriculum" Telegraph "A moving evocation of the 'everyday terror' systematically perpetrated over 41 years of Albanian communism . . . An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state." Clarissa de Waal, author of ALBANIA: PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY IN TRANSITION "Albania, enigmatic, mysterious Albania, was always the untold story of the Cold War, the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mud Sweeter Than Honey goes a very long way indeed towards putting that right" New European After breaking ties with Yugoslavia, the USSR and then China, Enver Hoxha believed that Albania could become a self-sufficient bastion of communism. Every day, many of its citizens were thrown into prisons and forced labour camps for daring to think independently, for rebelling against the regime or trying to escape - the consequences of their actions were often tragic and irreversible. Mud Sweeter than Honey gives voice to those who lived in Albania at that time - from poets and teachers to shoe-makers and peasant farmers, and many others whose aspirations were brutally crushed in acts of unimaginable repression - creating a vivid, dynamic and often painful picture of this totalitarian state during the forty years of Hoxha's ruthless dictatorship. Very little emerged from Albania during communist times. With these personal accounts, Rejmer opens a window onto a terrifying period in the country's history. Mud Sweeter than Honey is not only a gripping work of reportage, but also a necessary and unique portrait of a nation. With an Introduction by Tony Barber *Winner of the Polityka Passport Prize**Winner of the Koscielski Award* Translated from the Polish by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Download or read book Free A Child and a Country at the End of History written by Lea Ypi and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.
Download or read book The Artful Albanian written by Enver Hoxha and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Successor written by Ismail Kadare and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This, Ismail Kadare's most recent novel, is a fictional inquiry into the still-unexplained death of Mehmet Shehu, the man who for decades was the designated Number Two political figure in Communist dictator Enver Hoxha's ironfisted and increasingly paranoid regime." "On the night of December 13, 1981, the so-called Successor was shot dead, sometime between midnight and early morning. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? This is the burning question. There are a number of potential murderers: the architect in charge of renovating the Successor's new quarters, who knew of the secret underground passage to his home; a rising political figure, Adrian Hasobeu, who if the current successor were to disappear would surely be named Number Two; the dictator himself - known to his countrymen as the Guide - now ailing and almost blind, unable to countenance even the idea of being replaced; and, incredibly, the Successor's wife." "The Successor combines a tantalizing mystery with a historical novel (Who killed Mehmet Shehu?), a psychological examination (How do you live in a world where nothing is sure?), and an analysis of a dictatorship so repressive that its followers treat it as a religious faith, where love, and indeed all personal relations, are subject to the whims and demands of the state."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book How to Feed a Dictator written by Witold Szablowski and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow? Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szabłowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and massacre of their own citizens—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot—and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously readable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.
Download or read book Negative Space written by Luljeta Lleshanaku and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor” (Sasha Dugdale, Poetry Nation Review) *Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize* “Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman—the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl on top of a shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, as a child discovering a world in a grain of sand.
Download or read book A Short Border Handbook written by Gazmend Kapllani and published by Portobello Books. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It is not a recognized mental illness like agoraphobia or depression ... It's largely a matter of luck whether one suffers from border syndrome: it depends where you were born. I was born in Albania.' After spending his childhood and school years in Albania, imagining that the miniskirts and quiz shows of Italian state TV were the reality of life in the West, and fantasizing accordingly about living on the other side of the border, the death of Hoxha at last enables Gazmend Kapllani to make his escape. However, on arriving in the Promised Land, he finds neither lots of willing leggy lovelies nor a warm welcome from his long-lost Greek cousins. Instead, he gets banged up in a detention centre in a small border town. As Gazi and his fellow immigrants try to find jobs, they begin to plan their future lives in Greece, imagining riches and successes which always remain just beyond their grasp. The sheer absurdity of both their plans and their new lives is overwhelming. Both detached and involved, ironic and emotional, Kapllani interweaves the story of his experience with meditations upon 'border syndrome' - a mental state, as much as a geographical experience - to create a brilliantly observed, amusing and perceptive debut.
Download or read book Imperialism and the Revolution written by Enver Hoxha and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2010-07-18 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Albanian anti-revisionist leader's polemic against the rest of the Socialist Bloc, with a special focus on China.
Download or read book Life is War written by Shannon Woodcock and published by Hammeron Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life is War: Surviving Dictatorship in Communist Albania features six intimate interviews with women and men who survived Enver Hoxha's communist regime. The book reveals how everyday people survived political persecution and oppression, and champions human resilience in the face of unrelenting political terror.
Download or read book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress written by Sijie Dai and published by Knopf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2001 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.
Download or read book Albania at War 1939 1945 written by Bernd Jürgen Fischer and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War in Europe has generated more literature than perhaps any other event in modern history. Much of the interest has focused on military history, occupation policy, puppet governments, and resistance movements in Europe's principal states. Often ignored in this flood of material, however, are the small nations of southeastern Europe. Yet in the small states the human suffering was no less profound, the destruction no less devastating, the heroism no less laudable, the treachery no less despicable, and the impact no less profound. Albania at War reviews the most important developments in Albania from the Italian invasion of the country in 1939 to the accession to power of the Albanian Communist Party and the establishment of a "people's democracy" in 1946. Fischer analyzes in great detail Italian goals and objectives in Albania and explains the eventual failure of Rome's policy, the subsequent German invasion of the country against the Axis Powers. This unique path breaking book provides a vigorous and thought-provoking analysis of competing external interests in Albania and explores the great obstacles that the Albanians faced in regaining their independence at the end of the war. Albania at War, 1939-1945 thoroughly covers the developments in Albania during that turbulent period. It is essential reading for all students of Albanian history.
Download or read book Biografi written by Lloyd Jones and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, all Albanian citizens had their own biografi, a file that was maintained (and often falsified) by the secret police. The information contained in a person's biografi could have devastating effects. When Lloyd Jones visited Albania in 1991, six years after the dictator's death, he heard rumours of a village dentist who, resembling Hoxha in looks and build, had been forced to give up his identity and become the dictator's double. Jones' quest to find Petar Schapallo gives shape not only to an intriguing traveller's tale, but a story about identity-changed, lost or falsified-in a country where identity was strictly controlled.
Download or read book Second Sentence written by Fatos Lubonja and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2009 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prison camps in Communist Albania were as brutal & claustrophobic as Stalin's gulags, with the additional horror that Albanian prisoners could be charged & re-sentenced while already in prison. Lubonja evokes life for prisoners of the state as they struggled to cope with physical & psychological deprivations of imprisonment.
Download or read book Albanian Identities written by Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this study critically de-construct Albanian myths and offer insights into Albanian history and politics. They conclude with contemporary Albanian critiques of the origins and functions of Albanian politics and ideologies.
Download or read book Modern Albania written by Fred Abrahams and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1990s, Albania, arguably Europe’s most closed and repressive state, began a startling transition out of forty years of self-imposed Communist isolation. Albanians who were not allowed to practice religion, travel abroad, wear jeans, or read “decadent” Western literature began to devour the outside world. They opened cafés, companies, and newspapers. Previously banned rock music blared in the streets. Modern Albania offers a vivid history of the Albanian Communist regime’s fall and the trials and tribulations that led the country to become the state it is today. The book provides an in-depth look at the Communists' last Politburo meetings and the first student revolts, the fall of the Stalinist regime, the outflows of refugees, the crash of the massive pyramid-loan schemes, the war in neighboring Kosovo, and Albania’s relationship with the United States. Fred Abrahams weaves together personal experience from more than twenty years of work in Albania, interviews with key Albanians and foreigners who played a role in the country’s politics since 1990—including former Politburo members, opposition leaders, intelligence agents, diplomats, and founders of the Kosovo Liberation Army—and a close examination of hundreds of previously secret government records from Albania and the United States. A rich, narratively-driven account, Modern Albania gives readers a front-row seat to the dramatic events of the last battle of Cold War Europe.
