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The rising sun: the decline and fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945
By John Toland. 1971
Chronicles well-known military actions of World War II, such as Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, and Hiroshima, from the Japanese perspective.…
Also details individual motivations and perceptions underlying Japan's military decisions before and during the war. Violence and some strong languageKorea's place in the sun: a modern history
By Bruce Cumings. 1997
Traces the history and transformation of Korea, describing its ancient heritage, its opening to commerce after 1860, its annexation by…
Japan in 1910, its post-World War II partition, its war between North and South in the early 1950s, and its emergence as an industrial power and political force in the worldThe Middle East: a brief history of the last 2,000 years
By Bernard Lewis. 1995
A perspective on historical transformations of the Middle East over twenty centuries. Chronicles the cultural and economic influences of Christianity,…
Islam, and other forces, as well as the "rapid and enforced change" brought about by modern Western technologyJerusalem: one city, three faiths
By Karen Armstrong. 1996
This companion to History of God (DB 38536) explores the history of Jerusalem as a holy city for Jews, Christians,…
and Muslims. Examines the myth and symbolism of a transcendent "sacred place," where believers can reconcile with God. Laments the absence of charity and social justice in the city's tumultuous pastRise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations
By Ronen Bergman. 2018
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The first definitive history of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF's targeted killing programs, hailed…
by The New York Times as "an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject." WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD IN HISTORY NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY JENNIFER SZALAI, THE NEW YORK TIMES NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist The New York Times Book Review BBC History Magazine Mother Jones Kirkus Reviews The Talmud says: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel's DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively. In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman-praised by David Remnick as "arguably [Israel's] best investigative reporter"-offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions. Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country's military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world's most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a "Mossad within the Mossad" that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism). Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel's most secret activities. Bergman traces, from statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel's targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli nation, the Middle East, and the entire world. "A remarkable feat of fearless and responsible reporting...?mportant, timely, and informative."-John le CarreInglorious Empire: What the British Did to India
By Shashi Tharoor. 2018
In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries…
of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannons, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalized racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift"-from the railways to the rule of law-was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialization and the destruction of its textile industry. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy.Saddam Hussein (Témoignage)
By Judith Miller. 1990
"[...] Dans ce livre à trois voix, les auteurs, ardents partisans de la paix au Moyen-Orient, s'interrogent sur le désarroi…
actuel du monde arabe en retraçant les grandes étapes du siècle écoulé : la naissance des Etats du Levant, la politique des mandats, les luttes d'indépendance, la création de l'Etat d'Israël, la succession des conflits israélo-arabes, la guerre au Liban, les guerres du Golfe, les Intifadas, le choc du 11 septembre et l'exacerbation du terrorisme. [...]" -- 4e de couvL'Inde (Culture guides)
By Michel Angot. 2012
Une introduction à la culture indienne à travers son histoire et sa géographie : de la culture harappéenne (ou civilisation…
de l'Indus) à l'indépendance, en passant par les empires avant l'islam, le temps des conquêtes musulmanes, la conquête britannique et l'Empire des Indes. Avec aussi un panorama des religions, du brahmanisme au sikhisme.Le rêve brisé: histoire de l'échec du processus de paix au Proche-Orient, 1995-2002
By Charles Enderlin. 2002
Que s'est-il passé pour qu'à nouveau le sang coule alors que la paix semblait si proche? Le drame se noue…
à Camp David en juillet 2000. Au cour de ce livre, on lira l'extraordinaire reconstitution de ce que se sont dit, jour après jour, heure après heure, les négociateurs israéliens et palestiniens réunis à l'initiative de BilI Clinton, président des États-Unis, en présence de Yasser Arafat et Ehoud Barak, respectivement président de l'Autorité palestinienne et Premier ministre israélien. Nul ne saurait se prononcer sur la responsabilité actuelle des uns et des autres sans prendre connaissance de ce qui s'est exactement dit au cours de ces journées tragiques. D'offensives en ripostes, d'attaques terroristes en représailles, l'auteur a suivi les soubresauts du conflit tant au cour des territoires occupés que dans les salons feutrés des ambassades, depuis l'assassinat en 1995 de Yitzhak Rabin, alors Premier ministre israélien et combattant infatigable de la paix, jusqu'aux événements les plus récents. Soucieux de l'exactitude documentaire, il raconte finalement comment, par la faute des uns et les erreurs de jugement des autres, l'instauration d'un climat de méfiance a conduit à l'effondrement du processus de paix.Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
By Bradley K. Martin. 2006
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader offers in-depth portraits of North Korea's two ruthless and bizarrely Orwellian leaders,…
Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Lifting North Korea's curtain of self-imposed isolation, this book will take readers inside a society, that to a Westerner, will appear to be from another planet. Subsisting on a diet short on food grains and long on lies, North Koreans have been indoctrinated from birth to follow unquestioningly a father-son team of megalomaniacs.To North Koreans, the Kims are more than just leaders. Kim Il-Sung is the country's leading novelist, philosopher, historian, educator, designer, literary critic, architect, general, farmer, and ping-pong trainer. Radios are made so they can only be tuned to the official state frequency. "Newspapers" are filled with endless columns of Kim speeches and propaganda. And instead of Christmas, North Koreans celebrate Kim's birthday--and he presents each child a present, just like Santa.The regime that the Kim Dynasty has built remains technically at war with the United States nearly a half century after the armistice that halted actual fighting in the Korean War. This fascinating and complete history takes full advantage of a great deal of source material that has only recently become available (some from archives in Moscow and Beijing), and brings the reader up to the tensions of the current day. For as this book will explain, North Korea appears more and more to be the greatest threat among the Axis of Evil countries--with some defector testimony warning that Kim Jong-Il has enough chemical weapons to wipe out the entire population of South Korea. If you request this book on CD it will be on 2 or more CDs. You must play the first CD to the end before playing the next CD.Eat the buddha: Life and death in a tibetan town
By Barbara Demick. 2020
A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to…
Envy. &“You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet.&”—Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE WASHINGTON POST Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong&’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of Demick&’s subjects, among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti, an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance, and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese, or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence, or do they fight? Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one&’s culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shockingThe book collectors: A band of syrian rebels and the stories that carried them through a war
By Delphine Minoui. 2020
"An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." ―Susan Orlean Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story…
of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place―a place of homes and families, schools and children, now emptied and broken into bits. And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had six thousand volumes; in a month, fifteen thousand. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity. The library offered a marvelous range of books―from Arabic poetry to American self-help, Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library's founders, twenty-three-year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above. By telling their stories, Minoui makes a far-off, complicated war immediate and reveals these young men to be everyday heroes as inspiring as the books they read. The Book Collectors is a testament to their bravery and a celebration of the power of wordsA Cowherd in Paradise: From China to Canada
By May Q. Wong. 2012
In 2006, the Prime Minister apologized to the Chinese people for the legislated discrimination created by Canada’s head tax laws…
in the first half of the twentieth century, acknowledging the far-reaching and long-term consequences it has had on their families. A Cowherd in Paradise is the story of one such family. The book chronicles the remarkable lives of Wong Guey Dang (1902–1983) and Jiang Tew Thloo (1911–2002). Ah Dang was born into an impoverished family and sold as a child. In 1921, his adoptive father paid a five-hundred-dollar head tax to send Ah Dang to Canada. Eight years later, driven to create a family of his own, Ah Dang returned to China, where he chose Ah Thloo as his bride from a matchmaker’s photo. As a child, Ah Thloo worked as a cowherd and from the age of six was responsible for her family’s fortune—their water buffalo. Ah Thloo not only became a wife and mother, but also grew to be a courageous defender against invaders and a champion of the weak. Married for over half a century, the couple was forced to live apart for twenty-five years because of Canada’s exclusionary immigration laws. In Canada, Ah Dang became a successful Montreal restaurateur; while in China, Ah Thloo struggled to survive through natural disasters, wars, and revolutions. A Cowherd in Paradise is the moving tale of one couple’s search for love, family, and forgiveness.Ghost flames: life & death in a hidden war, Korea 1950-1953
By Charles J Hanley. 2020
The war that broke out in Korea on a Sunday morning seventy years ago has come to be recognized as…
a critical turning point in modern history and the root of a nuclear crisis that grips the world to this day. In this vivid, emotionally compelling, and highly original account, Charles J. Hanley tells the story of the Korean War through the eyes of twenty individuals who lived through itAll We Leave Behind: A Reporter's Journey into the Lives of Others
By Carol Off. 2017
Winner of the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political WritingFinalist for…
the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction Finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction An incredible work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller, All We Leave Behind is the true story of a family fleeing the death sentence of a ruthless warlord, written by the journalist who broke all her own rules to get them to safety.In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became a key figure in their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one of the warlords, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. The family faced an uncertain future. But their dilemma compelled a journalist to cross the lines of disinterested reporting and become deeply involved. Together, they navigated the Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper's government until the family finally found a new home. Carol Off's powerful account traces not only one family's journey and fraught attempts to immigrate to a safe place, it also illustrates what happens when a journalist becomes irrevocably caught up in the lives of the people in her story and finds herself unable to leave them behind.North Korea Journal
By Michael Palin. 2019
In this beautifully illustrated journal based on a TV documentary, writer, comedian and world traveller Michael Palin journeys to North…
Korea, offering a glimpse of life inside the world's most secretive country, uncovering surprises and making friends along the way.In May 2018, former Monty Python stalwart and intrepid globetrotter Michael Palin ventured into the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, camera crew in tow, to gain a glimpse of life in the most notoriously secretive and cut-off nation on earth. His resulting two-part documentary for Channel 5 fascinated millions and won universal plaudits.Now he shares the journal he meticulously kept during his trip, in which he describes his experiences in a country wholly unlike any other he has ever visited: a country where you will find the Tallest Unoccupied Building in the World; where the residents of Pyongyang awake every morning to the strains of 'Where Are You, Dear General?', broadcast from speakers across the city; and where there are fifteen approved styles of haircut. He chronicles a journey of stark contrasts that takes in a gleamingly modern capital complete with triumphal statues and arches one day, and a countryside that has barely changed in decades on another. He travels to the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone, to a centuries-old Confucian academy, and to the heart of North Korea's exquisitely beautiful mountains and lakes. He recounts conversations with official guides, teachers, propaganda artists, farmers and soldiers in which mutual incomprehension and shared humanity are constantly intermingled. And he muses on what makes people tick under a regime that to outsiders seems so utterly alien and so grimly authoritarian. Written with Palin's trademark warmth and wit, and illustrated with beautiful colour photographs throughout, Palin's journal offers a rare insight into the North Korea behind the headlines.This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves
By Madhur Anand. 2020
"Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader…This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual…
tour de force." —Jane Urquhart An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale—we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.Blood and oil: Mohammed bin Salman's ruthless quest for global power
By Bradley Hope. 2020
Hope and Scheck show how Mohammed bin Salman's sudden rise to power coincided with the fraying of the simple bargain…
that had been at the head of U.S.-Saudi relations for more than eighty years: oil in exchange for military protection.Kim Ghattas delivers a gripping account of the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between between Saudi Arabia and Iran,…
born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy. With vivid story-telling, extensive historical research and on-the-ground reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home. She explores how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the region, became mortal enemies after 1979. She shows how they used and distorted religion in a competition that went well beyond geopolitics. Feeding intolerance, suppressing cultural expression, and encouraging sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan, the war for cultural supremacy led to Iran's fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, the assassination of countless intellectuals, the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS. Ghattas also introduces us to a riveting cast of characters whose lives were upended by the geopolitical drama over four decades: from the Pakistani television anchor who defied her country's dictator, to the Egyptian novelist thrown in jail for indecent writings all the way to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018