Title search results
Showing 1 - 13 of 13 items
Assyrians: the continuous saga
By Frederick A Aprim. 2004
Assyrians have been deprived of their rich heritage in their ancestral homelands in Mesopotamia. From one side, history curriculum taught…
in the Middle East's public schools is manipulated and it focuses predominantly on the region's Islamic era.Assyrians: from Bedr Khan to Saddam Hussein : driving into extinction the last Aramaic speakers
By Frederick A Aprim. 1999
After the establishment of Islam as a state religion in the Fertile Crescent by the 8th century, the ferocious attacks…
by the Timurids, plundering the region as they descended from Central Asia in the 14th century, drove many Christian Aramaic speakers who did not convert to Islam into the mountains of the Taurus, Hakkari, and the Zagros for shelter. Others remained in their ancestral villages on the Mosul (Nineveh) Plain only to face heavy pressure to assimilate into Arab culture. The greatest catastrophe to visit the Assyrians in the modern period was the genocide committed against them, as Christians, during the Great War. From the Assyrian renaissance experienced when, miraculously, they became the objects of Western Christian missionary educational and medical efforts, the Assyrians fell into near oblivion. Shunned by the Allies at the treaties that ended WWI, Assyrians drifted into Diaspora, destructive denominationalism, and fierce assimilation tendencies as exercised by chauvinistic Arab, Persian and Turkish state entities.Hiroshima: why America dropped the atomic bomb
By Ronald T Takaki. 1995
The bombing of Hiroshima was one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century, yet this controversial question remains unresolved.…
At the time, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and chief of staff Admiral William Leahy all agreed that an atomic attack on Japanese cities was unnecessary. All of them believed that Japan had already been beaten and that the war would soon end. Was the bomb dropped to end the war more quickly? Or did it herald the start of the Cold War?Midway inquest: why the Japanese lost the Battle of Midway (Twentieth-century Battles Ser.)
By Dallas Woodbury Isom. 2007
Midway, the most famous naval battle in American history, has been the subject of many excellent books. However, none satisfactorily…
explain why the Japanese lost that battle, given their overwhelming advantage in firepower.Operation Babylon: the story of the rescue of the Jews of Iraq
By Shlomo Hillel. 1989
Already a bestseller in Israel, and winner of Yitzak Sadeh prize - that country's most prestigious literary award, here is…
the extraordinary true story of the exodus, from 1947 to 1952, of the Jews in Iraq. As a young man, author Shlomo Hillel as an agent of Mossad, the Jewish Secret Service was instrumental in helping 125,000 Iraqi Jews escape to safety. Now, forty years later, he reveals all the drama and intrigue of this, the largest air migration in history - a first-hand account never before told. Played out against the chaos of Middle East politics, and with a compelling cast of Jewish agents, Iraqi Secret Police, British diplomats, and American soldiers of fortune, Operation Babylon has all the power of an international thriller ...a breathtaking story of adventure, daring, tragedy and human triumph.Among the dead cities: was the allied bombing of civilians in WWII a necessity or a crime?
By A. C Grayling. 2006
Among the Dead Cities is both a lucid and revealing work of modern history and an urgent moral investigation. Grayling…
details the industrial nature of the area bombing in Germany, and also of the US bombing of Japan that culminated in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He looks at the stands people took, both for and against, and crucially asks what are the lessons that we can learn for today about how people should behave in a world of tension and moral confusion, of terrorism and bitter rivalries.Thirty days: a journey to the end of love
By Mark Raphael Baker. 2017
One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn's dying, I…
prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her." Thirty Days is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark's wife of 33 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer. It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn's letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate. In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on finding the path to a peaceful death.Kublai Khan: from Xanadu to superpower
By John Man. 2006
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree. Kublai Khan lives on in the popular imagination thanks to…
these two lines of poetry by Coleridge. But the true story behind this legend is even more fantastic than the poem would have us believe. He inherited the second largest land empire in history from his grandfather, Genghis Khan. He promptly set about extending this into the biggest empire the world has ever seen, extending his rule from China to Iraq, from Siberia to Afghanistan. His personal domain covered sixty-percent of all Asia, and one-fifth of the world's land area. The West first learnt of this great Khan through the reports of Marco Polo. Kublai had not been born to rule, but had clawed his way to leadership, achieving power only in his 40s. He had inherited Genghis Khan's great dream of world domination. But unlike his grandfather he saw China and not Mongolia as the key to controlling power and turned Genghis' unwieldy empire into a federation. Using China's great wealth, coupled with his shrewd and subtle government, he created an empire that was the greatest since the fall of Rome, and shaped the modern world as we know it today.Letting go: how to plan for a good death
By C. F Corke. 2018
"As Australia's population ages, many individuals are faced with making complex medical decisions, for themselves and for others, in times…
of great stress. How far should doctors go when trying to prolong life? How can we decide what is ‘too far’ and ‘not far enough’ for our loved ones unless we know what their wishes are? Letting Go is an important and timely introduction to, and discussion of, the kinds of decisions that individuals, families, and medical personnel face in a medical crisis. It shows us how to start thinking about our end-of-life stage before we get there; how to make an advance care plan that will help people make decisions on our behalf; and how we can maintain our dignity and autonomy for as long as possible."--Back cover.Life after loss: getting over grief, getting on with life
By Francis Macnab. 1989
Mourning song
By Joyce Landorf Heatherley. 1984
Drawing from her own painful experience of losing loved ones, Joyce eloquently writes about the kaleidoscope of feelings that belong…
to the dying and their companions, friends, and family. Her gift of compassionate, honest expression brings empathy and healing as she guides us in understanding the process of grieving.Travels in American Iraq
By John Martinkus. 2004
SBS journalist John Martinkus provides a riveting portrait of a country on the brink of civil war. When the Coalition…
of the Willing liberated Iraq from the yoke of Saddam in early 2003, George W. Bush announced that the Second Gulf War was over. John Martinkus's account of seven weeks spent travelling independently around Iraq in early 2004 shows just the opposite. He takes us into the key places of the new Iraq - from Abu Gharib prison to the Coalition's sealed-off security zone. He provides an eye-witness account of the March 2004 Karbala bombings, and vivid accounts of meetings with ordinary Iraqis, religious leaders, insurgents and occupying troops - the events that take place beyond the official perspective. Tracing the ever-widening gap between rhetoric and reality, he shows that, amidst a developing guerrilla war and a chaotic reconstruction, the line between liberation and occupation has become thin indeed.1421: the year China discovered the world
By John Cullen, Gavin Menzies. 2003
A fictionalised "alternative history" of the discovery of the New World. On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world…
had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that the Chinese had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, reached America seventy years before Columbus, and Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook.