|
This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on
drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more
than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000
child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the
eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child
soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine
their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone
who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five
years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking
rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d
been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that
he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told
with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
|
| |
|
|
In this profoundly affecting memoir from the internationally
renowned author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story,
from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her
intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under
armed guard in the West.One of today's most admired and controversial political
figures, Ayaan Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines following an Islamist's
murder of her colleague, Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the movie Submission.
Infidel is the eagerly awaited story of the coming of age of this elegant,
distinguished -- and sometimes reviled -- political superstar and champion of free
speech. With a gimlet eye and measured, often ironic, voice, Hirsi Ali recounts the
evolution of her beliefs, her ironclad will, and her extraordinary resolve to fight
injustice done in the name of religion. Raised in a strict Muslim family and
extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female mutilation, brutal beatings,
adolescence as a devout believer during the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and
life in four troubled, unstable countries largely ruled by despots. In her
early twenties, she escaped from a forced marriage and sought asylum in the
Netherlands, where she earned a college degree in political science, tried
to help her tragically depressed sister adjust to the West, and fought for
the rights of Muslim immigrant women and the reform of Islam as a member
of Parliament. Even though she is under constant threat -- demonized by
reactionary Islamists and politicians, disowned by her father, and expelled
from her family and clan -- she refuses to be silenced. Ultimately a
celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright
little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering
freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals
with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.
|
| |
|
|
Travelers' Tales is a new kind of travel anthology, marrying the best of the
guidebook and travel literature. Thailand is the first book in this series: a
wonderful collection of place-specific tales previously scattered far and wide.
Veteran travel writers James O'Reilly and Larry Habegger read hundreds of stories
to select those that best capture the experience of Thailand. Thailand, one of
the most intriguing travel destinations of the nineties, should satisfy just
about any traveler's hunger for the exotic, the beautiful, the thrillingly
different. A country of contrasts, Thailand is a microcosm of all that is right
and wrong with tourism, including the traveler's role as pilgrim, adventurer,
and consumer. As the editors write in the Preface: "The world is not our private
zoo or theme park; we need to be better prepared before we go, so that we might
become honored guests and not vilified intruders." To give readers a taste of
this country and its people, the book is organized into five sections: "Essence
of Thailand" contains stories that reflect some essential character of the
landscape, the people, or the traveler's experience of the country. "Some Things
to Do" has accounts of particular places and activities that previous travelers
have found worthwhile. "Going Your Own Way" contains experiences that are farther
off the tourist track, relayed by an author who interacted more intimately with
the local people or was willing to travel farther afield. "In the Shadows"
explores the darker side of Thailand; so that visitors might be aware of the
complexities beyond the cheerful face presented to tourists. "The Last Word" has
one last magical moment, to remind the reader just why Thailand is worth visiting.
There is perhaps no better way to prepare for a trip, or to vicariously experience
another country, than to listen to those who have gone before; Travelers' Tales
Thailand brings the best of those voices together for the first time in "Essence
of Thailand"; "Some Things to Do"; "Going Your Own Way"; "In the Shadows"; and
"The Last Word." Awarded the "Best Travel Book" gold medal from the Society of
American Travel Writers.
|
| |
|
|
Covering the past three centuries of Thai history, this book reveals how a
landscape of sparsely populated forest and jungle was transformed into villages and paddy fields,
with a rural society of smallholder peasants and an urban society populated mainly by migrants from
southern China. It demonstrates how throughout the twentieth century, Thailand has been drawn into
the international system, the American camp in the Cold War, the economic gambit of rising Japan,
and more recently, the forces of globalization. The authors also survey the country's transformation
accompanying massive social evolution over recent decades. (Control of the nation state is still
contested between forces with a patriarchal belief in change from above, and advocates of democracy
and liberal values.)
|
| |
|
|
Well, so much for the future. Michael Moore, the award-winning provocateur behind
Roger & Me and the bestseller Downsize This!, now returns to size up the new
century - and that big, ugly special-interest group that's laying waste to the
world as we know it: stupid white men. Whether he's calling for United Nations
action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta, calling on African-Americans to place
'whites only' signs over the entrances of unfriendly businesses, or praying that
Jesse Helms will get kissed by a man, Stupid White Men is Mike's Manifesto on
Malfeasance and Mediocrity. So if you're feeling the same way and you're wondering
what's going to give out first - the economy, Dick Cheney's pacemaker, or your
new VW Beetle - here's the book for you.
|
| |
|
|
The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious. |
| |
|
|
Travel, associated as it is with strangeness, marvels, and excitement, has always
proved an irresistible subject for writers. 'The Oxford Book of Travel Stories'
brings together some of the best short fiction on this most exhilarating of
subjects from writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Ring Larner,
William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, Beryl Bainbridge, and V. S.
Pritchett. Readers of this anthology will be able to revel in the atmosphere of
nineteenth-century Palestine, the Riviera of the 1920s, or a botanical tour of
Greece. There are stories set in far distant locations - China, Australia - and
others closer to home, such as Benedict Kiely's entrancing 'A Journey to the
Seven Streams'. Most are high-spirited, in keeping with the theme, some are
wonderfully funny and one or two productively unsettling, such as Flannery O'
Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'. Some deal with the journey itself, and
encounters on train or boat; others see travel as a literal rite of passage, an
escape or a sudden growing-up. All of them illustrate, in various ways, how travel
has to do with stimulus, enrichment, and a sense of achievement - 'Not fare well',
as T. S. Eliot has it, 'but fare forward, voyagers'.
|
| |
|
|
He found Rome made of clay and left it made of marble. As Rome’s first emperor,
Augustus transformed the unruly Republic into the greatest empire the world had ever
seen. His consolidation and expansion of Roman power two thousand years ago laid the
foundations, for all of Western history to follow. Yet, despite Augustus’s
accomplishments, very few biographers have concentrated on the man himself, instead
choosing to chronicle the age in which he lived. Here, Anthony Everitt, the
bestselling author of Cicero, gives a spellbinding and intimate account of his
illustrious subject. Augustus began his career as an inexperienced teenager plucked
from his studies to take center stage in the drama of Roman politics, assisted by two
school friends, Agrippa and Maecenas. Augustus’s rise to power began with the
assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, and culminated
in the titanic duel with Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The world that made Augustus–and
that he himself later remade–was driven by intrigue, sex, ceremony, violence, scandal,
and naked ambition. Everitt has taken some of the household names of history–Caesar,
Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleopatra–whom few know the full truth about, and turned
them into flesh-and-blood human beings. At a time when many consider America an
empire, this stunning portrait of the greatest emperor who ever lived makes for
enlightening and engrossing reading. Everitt brings to life the world of a giant,
rendered faithfully and sympathetically in human scale. A study of power and
political genius, Augustus is a vivid, compelling biography of one of the most
important rulers in history.
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
