Killing Hope


Book Description

In Killing Hope, William Blum, author of the bestselling Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, provides a devastating and comprehensive account of America's covert and overt military actions in the world, all the way from China in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and - in this updated edition - beyond. Is the United States, as it likes to claim, a global force for democracy? Killing Hope shows the answer to this question to be a resounding 'no'.




The Targeter


Book Description

A CIA analyst's "revealing and utterly engrossing account" of the world of high-stakes foreign intelligence and her role within the campaign to stop top-tier targets inside Al-Qaida (Joby Warrick). In 1999, 30-year-old Nada Bakos moved from her lifelong home in Montana to Washington, D.C., to join the CIA. Quickly realizing her affinity for intelligence work, Nada was determined to rise through the ranks of the agency first as an analyst and then as a Targeting Officer, eventually finding herself on the frontline of America's war against Islamic extremists. In this role, Nada was charged with determining if Iraq had a relationship with 9/11 and Al-Qaida, and finding the mastermind behind this terrorist activity: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Her team's analysis stood the test of time, but it was not satisfactory for some members of the Administration. In a tight, tension-packed narrative that takes the reader from Langley deep into Iraq, Bakos reveals the inner workings of the Agency and the largely hidden world of intelligence gathering post 9/11. Entrenched in the world of the CIA, Bakos, along with her colleagues, focused on leading U.S. Special Operations Forces to the doorstep of one of the world's most wanted terrorists. Filled with on-the-ground insights and poignant personal anecdotes, The Targeter shows us the great personal sacrifice that comes with intelligence work. This is Nada's story, but it is also an intimate chronicle of how a group of determined, ambitious men and women worked tirelessly in the heart of the CIA to ensure our nation's safety at home and abroad.




Anti-Book


Book Description

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.




Boxing


Book Description

Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.




Collected Prose (Esprios Classics)


Book Description

Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, CBE (17 February 1864 - 5 February 1941) was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson was a law clerk with a Sydney-based firm headed by Herbert Salwey, and was admitted as a solicitor in 1886. In the years he practised as a solicitor, he also started writing. Paterson's more notable poems include "Clancy of the Overflow" (1889), "The Man from Snowy River" (1890) and "Waltzing Matilda" (1895), regarded widely as Australia's unofficial national anthem.




A Story in Stones


Book Description

This newly updated and revised second edition of "A Story in Stones" explores the relationship between Portugal and Ethiopia during the XVI and XVII centuries from the unique perspective of stonework. Through research and many years of working in the field, J.J. Hespeler-Boultbee examines the first early Renaissance links between the principal European superpower of the day and the ancient Christian empire of Ethiopia's Highlands - using contemporary architectural vestige as a catalyst for his findings. What began as Portugal's mission to discover an unknown world soon became a quest to find Prester John, the legendary Christian priest/king presumed to be living on the far side of Islam. In an attempt to form a Christian military alliance, the search was both concluded and, in a manner, initiated by explorer P ro da Covilh in 1493 with his overland journey to the Highland court of Emperor Eskendar. This was instrumental in setting up a string of ties between the two nations - diplomatic, military, religious, cultural and (most long-lasting of all) architectural - almost three decades before Portugal's diplomatic mission of 1520. The fascinating story contained in the stones can yet be seen in the Portuguese and "Gondarine" ruins that dot the Gojjam and Lake Tana regions; they continue to influence today's Highland architectural design. Hespeler-Boultbee examines over thirty different sites, many of which are remote and rarely visited. Fully illustrated with colour photos and drawings. About the Author J.J. Hespeler-Boultbee is an Art & Architectural Historian and Associate of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University. He lived for twenty-five years in Portugal, during that time making several forays into the Ethiopian Highlands on behalf of the Department of History and CIDEHUS (Centro de Investiga o e Desenvolvimento em Ci ncias Humanas e Sociais), the research and development institute at the University of vora. For the two year period, 2007-2009, he lived in and conducted research from Bahir Dar on Lake Tana, Ethiopia, during which time he found his historical conclusions were at considerable variance with colleagues in the History Department at Bahir Dar University - disagreements which have prompted the revisions leading to this current updated and revised edition of "A Story in Stones."




The CIA


Book Description

"The CIA: a forgotten history tells the remarkable story of the CIA interventions in more thatn fifty countries, from the earliest actions in China to the present day campaign against Nicaragua. Investigative writer William Blum describes the grim role played by the Agency in overthrowing governments, preventing elections, assassinating leaders, suppressing revolutions, manipulating trade unions and manufacturing 'news' -- in detail that's never before appeared in one book. Blum also shows how the mainstream media have frequently not bothered to probe, highlight or even report many of America's aggressive actions abroad. Effectively, this has helped the US Government camoflague its operations and intentions abroad ever since World War II. Washington's deception and the media's laxity combine to leave us functionally illiterate about the history of modern US foreign policy. And that, the author believes, is good neither for democracy, nor for development and world peace. This immensely readable account has been carefully pieced together from widely disparate sources and with a scrupulous eye to documentation." --




Ketamine


Book Description




Amy and the Orphans


Book Description

When their eighty-five-year-old father dies, sparring siblings Maggie and Jake must face a question: How to break the bad news to their sister Amy, who has Down syndrome and has lived in a state home for years? Along the way, the pair find out just how much they don’t know about their family and each other. It seems only Amy knows who she really is.