Author : Patrick McGinley
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 31,11 MB
Release : 2012-06-29
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1448209641
McGinley foregoes his usual murder mystery genre; instead, he presents an historical novel set during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919 to 1921. The story opens and closes with Declan Osborne in jail, being interrogated by British officers. In between, we learn of the sequence of events that has led him there. Set in Ireland at the time of the Black and Tans, Declan is a young man who sets out to join the cause full of doomed idealism.
Author : James Webb
Publisher : Dell
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 11,39 MB
Release : 2002-08-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0440240913
Once in a great while there comes a novel of such emotional impact and acute insight that it forever changes the way a reader sees a nation or an era. Writing with an unerring sense of suspense and of history experienced firsthand, James Webb takes us on a myth-shattering cultural odyssey deep into the heart of contemporary Vietnam, with a riveting thriller that tells a love story — love for those who perished, for family and friends, and between a soldier and the land where he had always been ready to die. Brandon Condley survived five years of combat as a U.S. Marine only to lose the woman he loved to an enemy assassin. Now he is back in Vietnam, working to recover the remains of unknown American soldiers. On a routine mission, Condley finds a body that doesn’t match its dog tags — a body that propels him into a vortex of violence and intrigue where past and present become one. As the mystery of the dead man unravels, a link is revealed to two well-known killers: “Salt and Pepper,” a pair of treasonous Americans who led a deadly Viet Cong ambush against Condley’s own men. Galvanized by a fresh trail to these long-lost deserters, Condley has finally found a purpose: Under the auspices of his government job, he is going to hunt down the traitors. On his own, he is going to kill them. Condley’s hunt cannot be kept secret from his former enemies, or his friends. And in the shadows that linger from Vietnam’s long season of darkness and terror, he has no way of knowing which side is more dangerous. Surrounding him is an unforgettable cast of characters: Dzung, Condley’s closest friend, a South Vietnamese war hero who might have led his country if his side had won the war, now reduced to driving a cyclo as his family starves in Saigon’s District Four. Colonel Pham, a battle-hardened Viet Cong soldier who lost three children to American bombs. Manh, a cutthroat Interior Ministry official who blackmails Dzung into a mission of murder. The Russian soldier Anatolie Petrushinsky, who left his soul in Vietnam as his empire collapsed around him. And the beautiful Van, Colonel Pham’s daughter, who spurns the scars of war as she pursues her dreams of freedom. As Condley stalks his elusive prey across old battlefields and throughout Eurasia, returning always to the brooding streets of Saigon, his mission — and the odds of his surviving it — grow more precarious with each step he takes toward the truth. Lost Soldiers captures the Vietnam of past and present — its beauty and squalor, its politics and people. Propelled by a page-turning mystery, shot through with adventure and intrigue, it irrevocably transforms our view of that haunted land and brings us as complete an understanding as we will ever have of what happened after the war — and why. No writer today is more qualified to take us into that world than James Webb.
Author : George L. Mosse
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 44,70 MB
Release : 1991-12-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0199923442
At the outbreak of the First World War, an entire generation of young men charged into battle for what they believed was a glorious cause. Over the next four years, that cause claimed the lives of some 13 million soldiers--more than twice the number killed in all the major wars from 1790 to 1914. But despite this devastating toll, the memory of the war was not, predominantly, of the grim reality of its trench warfare and battlefield carnage. What was most remembered by the war's participants was its sacredness and the martyrdom of those who had died for the greater glory of the fatherland. War, and the sanctification of it, is the subject of this pioneering work by well-known European historian George L. Mosse. Fallen Soldiers offers a profound analysis of what he calls the Myth of the War Experience--a vision of war that masks its horror, consecrates its memory, and ultimately justifies its purpose. Beginning with the Napoleonic wars, Mosse traces the origins of this myth and its symbols, and examines the role of war volunteers in creating and perpetuating it. But it was not until World War I, when Europeans confronted mass death on an unprecedented scale, that the myth gained its widest currency. Indeed, as Mosse makes clear, the need to find a higher meaning in the war became a national obsession. Focusing on Germany, with examples from England, France, and Italy, Mosse demonstrates how these nations--through memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries honoring the dead as martyrs--glorified the war and fostered a popular acceptance of it. He shows how the war was further promoted through a process of trivialization in which war toys and souvenirs, as well as postcards like those picturing the Easter Bunny on the Western Front, softened the war's image in the public mind. The Great War ended in 1918, but the Myth of the War Experience continued, achieving its most ruthless political effect in Germany in the interwar years. There the glorified notion of war played into the militant politics of the Nazi party, fueling the belligerent nationalism that led to World War II. But that cataclysm would ultimately shatter the myth, and in exploring the postwar years, Mosse reveals the extent to which the view of death in war, and war in general, was finally changed. In so doing, he completes what is likely to become one of the classic studies of modern war and the complex, often disturbing nature of human perception and memory.
Author : Chris J. Hartley
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 36,37 MB
Release : 2018-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0811767647
The Lost Soldier offers a perspective on World War II we don’t always get from histories and memoirs. Based on the letters home of Pete Lynn, the diary of his wife, Ruth, and meticulous research in primary and secondary sources, this book recounts the war of a married couple who represent so many married couples, so many soldiers, in World War II. The book tells the story of this couple, starting with their life in North Carolina and recounting how the war increasingly insinuated itself into the fabric of their lives, until Pete Lynn was drafted, after which the war became the essential fact of their life. Author Chris J. Hartley intricately weaves together all threads—soldier and wife, home front and army life, combat, love and loss, individual and army division—into an intimate, engaging narrative that is at once gripping military history and engaging social history.
Author : Thomas Wallace Knox
Publisher :
Page : 326 pages
File Size : 50,2 MB
Release : 1894
Category : African American soldiers
ISBN :
Two 15-year-old boys of Dubuque, Iowa, enlist to join the war in 1861.
Author : Sylvia Mieszkowski
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 22,94 MB
Release : 2015-07-14
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9401205094
Sonic Interventions makes a compelling case for the importance of sound in theorizing literature, subjectivity and culture. Sound is usually understood as our second sense and – as our belief in a visually dominated culture prevails – remains of secondary interest. Western cultures are considered to be predominantly visual, while other societies are thought to place more importance on the acoustic dimension. This volume questions these assumptions by examining how sound differs from, and acts in relationship to, the visual. It moves beyond theoretical dichotomies (between the visual and the sonic, the oral and literature) and, instead, investigates sonic interventions in their often multi-faceted forms. The case studies deal with political appropriations of music and sounds, they explore the poetic use of the sonic in novels and plays, they develop theoretical concepts out of sonic phenomena, and pertain to identity formation and the practice of mixing in hip hop, opera and dancehall sessions. Ultimately, the book brings to the fore what roles sound may play for the formation of gendered identity, for the stabilization or questioning of race as a social category, and the conception of place. Their intricate interventions beckon critical attention and offer rich material for cultural analysis.
Author : Valerio Massimo Manfredi
Publisher : Pan Macmillan
Page : 435 pages
File Size : 29,22 MB
Release : 2009-07-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0230738389
The 4th century BC. A village in Syria. A woman, dressed in rags and covered in blisters and sores, is seen approaching on the road coming from the north. Suspicious of her, the villagers shout and throw rocks at her. She is struck and falls. She seems dead . . . Her story encompasses one of the great collective acts of heroism of the ancient world. She was the mistress of Xenophon, a general in the vast army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries from virtually every Greek city state that was employed by Cyrus the Younger, in his quest to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II. In The Lost Army Valerio Massimo Manfredi, one of the world's historical experts, has created a rip-roaring adventure seen from the perspective of the women who accompanied the soldiers on their long journey. An intense account of the most celebrated march in man's history, by the acclaimed author of the Alexander trilogy.
Author : Liel Leibovitz
Publisher : WW Norton
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 36,73 MB
Release : 2008-10-28
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393065848
The dramatic story of an iconic love song, its three creators, and their lives under the Nazis. "Lili Marlene," the unlikely anthem of World War II, cut across front lines and ideological divides, uniting soldiers across the globe. This love song, telling the story of a young woman waiting for her lover to return from the battlefield, began as a poem written by a German solider during World War I. The soldier-poet's words found their way to Berlin's decadent cabaret scene in the 1930s, where they were set to music by one of Hitler's favored composers. The song's singer, however, soon found herself torn between her desire for fame and a personal hatred of the Nazi regime. In a gripping and suspenseful narrative, the three artists' remarkable stories of arrests and close calls intertwine with the recollections of soldiers on all sides who fought their way through deserts and towns, seeking solace and finding hope in "Lili Marlene."
Author : Christopher Golden
Publisher : Dark Horse Comics
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 26,25 MB
Release : 1997-06-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1621154270
In 525 B.C., the Persian king Cambyses sent fifty thousand soldiers across the conquered Egyptian desert to take an oasis city not far from where the Libyan border stands today. According to Greek history, a hurricane-force sandstorm struck near the end of their six-hundred-mile trek. The army -- all fifty thousand men -- vanished without a single trace. Fast forward to 1986. A British archaeological team, sent to the edge of the Great Sand Sea to exhume evidence of the incident, has also gone missing. So the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is sending the world's greatest paranormal investigator, Hellboy, to find the missing Brits and to discover what became of The Lost Army. Dark Horse is proud to present a milestone in the history of Hellboy. This illustrated novel is written by Christopher Golden, best-selling author of the book Of Saints and Shadows. Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has done sixty-eight black-and-white illustrations for the story, and those illustrations alone are worth the price of admission.
Author : P.H. Carder
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 29,68 MB
Release : 2014-11-21
Category : History
ISBN : 0786483172
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, "The Battle Cry of Freedom" became perhaps the most common patriotic song echoing throughout the North. The author of that famous tune was George F. Root, and his many other patriotic songs established him as "the musician of the people." This biography follows Root's dual career as a nationally-known traveling teacher and a composer of popular songs. His wartime songs expressed the emotions of the soldiers and of the people at home. His later songs document such events as the assassination of President Lincoln, the settling of the West, the literature and humor of his day, and the many reform movements that defined the values of that era. His biography reveals how he became the musician of the people and how his critics responded.
