Author: Robert W. Baloh
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030407462
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
It is one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of science: the mating calls of insects were mistaken for a “sonic weapon” that led to a major diplomatic row. Since August 2017, the world media has been absorbed in the “attack” on diplomats from the American and Canadian Embassies in Cuba. While physicians treating victims have described it as a novel and perplexing condition that involves an array of complaints including brain damage, the authors present compelling evidence that mass psychogenic illness was the cause of “Havana Syndrome.” This mysterious condition that has baffled experts is explored across 11-chapters which offer insights by a prominent neurologist and an expert on psychogenic illness. A lively and enthralling read, the authors explore the history of similar scares from the 18th century belief that sounds from certain musical instruments were harmful to human health, to 19th century cases of “telephone shock,” and more contemporary panics involving people living near wind turbines that have been tied to a variety of health complaints. The authors provide dozens of examples of kindred episodes of mass hysteria throughout history, in addition to psychosomatic conditions and even the role of insects in triggering outbreaks. Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria is a scientific detective story and a case study in the social construction of mass psychogenic illness.
Author: Ann Louise Bardach
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307425428
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
From America’s number one Cuba reporter, PEN award–winning investigative journalist Ann Louise Bardach, comes the big book on Cuba we’ve all been waiting for. An incisive and spirited portrait of the twentieth century’s wiliest political survivor and his fiefdom, Cuba Confidential is the gripping story of the shattered families and warring personalities that lie at the heart of the forty-three-year standoff between Miami and Havana. Famous to many Americans for her cover stories and media appearances, Ann Louise Bardach has been covering Cuba for a decade. She’s talked to the crooks, spooks and politicians who have made history, and to their hired assassins and confidants. Based on exclusive interviews with Fidel Castro, his sister Juanita, his former brother-in-law Rafael Díaz-Balart, the family of Elián González, the friends and family of the legendary American fugitive Robert Vesco, the intrepid terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, and the inner circles of Jeb Bush and the late exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, Cuba Confidential exposes the hardball take-no-prisoners tactics of the Cuban exile leadership, and its manipulation and exploitation by ten American presidents. Bardach homes in on Fidel Castro and his cronies, taking us closer than we’ve ever been—and on the militant exiles who have devoted their lives, with CIA connivance, to trying to eliminate him. From Calle Ocho to Juan Miguel González’s kitchen table in Cárdenas, from Guantánamo Bay to Union City to Washington, D.C., Ann Louise Bardach serves up an unforgettable portrait of Cuba and its exiles.
Author: Lee Klein
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1532037422
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
Author Lee Kleins longtime service in the US Navy took him from World War II as an enlisted man through the Korean and Vietnam eras as a commissioned officer. A gay man, he had to balance his top-secret military life with his loving one. In Two Journeys to One Wondrous Life, Klein shares the story of his life. The seventh of eight children, he was born in 1924 in Lincoln, Nebraska. During his military career, he served in naval bases from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to the North and Baltic Seas, and he worked as a carrier pilot during the Cold War. Klein also worked in the restaurant business, opening his first restaurant in 1972, in Cloverdale, Sonoma County, California. His life of two journeys has been an incredible, wonder-filled, surprisingly serendipitous, and happy. And he hopes that by telling his life story, he can show the new generation what it was like to live through these restrictive times, when many careers were closed to gay men, and how it just gets better. This memoir shares the personal narrative of a gay man who is a veteran of a decades-long military career, recalling his experiences of a life well lived.
Author: Milton H. Jamail
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809323104
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
In his comprehensive and vibrant picture of baseball in Cuba, Milton H. Jamail explores the sport's relationship to U.S. baseball. Jamail, whose personal love of the game matches that of the Cubans, examines the roots and traditions of baseball on the island and explains why Cubans play such excellent baseball. His analysis of the development of Cuban baseball after the 1959 takeover by Fidel Castro includes a detailed description of the formation of the Cuban amateur baseball system that has dominated international competitions for more than three decades. Before 1961, when the U.S. government severed diplomatic relations with Cuba and Castro abolished professional baseball, Cuba provided the bulk of the foreign players in the major leagues (more than one hundred since the color barrier was lifted in 1947). Major league interest in Cuban baseball remains high, Jamail notes, as he examines the changes necessary, both in the United States and Cuba, to return Cuban ballplayers to professional baseball in the United States. He discusses Cuban defectors, including Liván Hernández, and describes the intrigue surrounding agent Joe Cubas's courting of Cuban players and his attempts to spirit them away when the Cuban national team plays outside the country. An academic trained in Latin American politics, Jamail has spent twelve years as a Spanish-speaking journalist writing about Latinos and baseball. To write this book, he conducted extensive interviews with baseball officials, journalists, players, and fans in Cuba, as well as Cuban players who have defected. He also talked to scouts and front office people from U.S. baseball organizations.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cable television
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Author: Ada Ferrer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501154575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN HISTORY “Full of…lively insights and lucid prose” (The Wall Street Journal) an epic, sweeping history of Cuba and its complex ties to the United States—from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day—written by one of the world’s leading historians of Cuba. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Meanwhile, politics in Washington—Barack Obama’s opening to the island, Donald Trump’s reversal of that policy, and the election of Joe Biden—have made the relationship between the two nations a subject of debate once more. Now, award-winning historian Ada Ferrer delivers an “important” (The Guardian) and moving chronicle that demands a new reckoning with both the island’s past and its relationship with the United States. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba: An American History provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation, with its dramatic record of conquest and colonization, of slavery and freedom, of independence and revolutions made and unmade. Along the way, Ferrer explores the sometimes surprising, often troubled intimacy between the two countries, documenting not only the influence of the United States on Cuba but also the many ways the island has been a recurring presence in US affairs. This is a story that will give Americans unexpected insights into the history of their own nation and, in so doing, help them imagine a new relationship with Cuba; “readers will close [this] fascinating book with a sense of hope” (The Economist). Filled with rousing stories and characters, and drawing on more than thirty years of research in Cuba, Spain, and the United States—as well as the author’s own extensive travel to the island over the same period—this is a stunning and monumental account like no other.
Author: Kate O'Shaughnessy
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0593650751
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Twelve-year-old Fern believes she's living a noble life--but what if everything she's been told is a lie? This is a huge-hearted story about a girl learning to question everything—and to trust in herself. Fern’s lived at the Ranch, an off-the-grid, sustainable community in upstate New York, since she was six. The work is hard, but Fern admires the Ranch's leader, Dr. Ben. So when Fern’s mother sneaks them away in the middle of the night and says Dr. Ben is dangerous, Fern doesn't believe it. She wants desperately to go back, but her mom just keeps driving. Suddenly thrust into the treacherous, toxic, outside world, Fern thinks only about how to get home again. She has a plan, but it will take time. As that time goes by, though, Fern realizes there are things she will miss from this place—the library, a friend from school, the ocean—and there are things she learned at the Ranch that are just...not true. Now Fern will have to decide. How much is she willing to give up to return to the Ranch? Should she trust Dr. Ben’s vision for her life? Or listen to the growing feeling that she can live by her own rules?
Author: Alessandro Cosmelli
Publisher: Damiani Limited
ISBN: 9788862085601
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Havana Buzz was shot in 2015 in Havana, Cuba. Once a majestic and cosmopolitan city at the heart of the Spanish colonial empire, turned playground for the American wealthy and powerful in the first half of the 20th century, for nearly 60 years Havana has been the capital of one of the last remaining socialist regimes in the world. This historical U turn is at the core of Havana's unique identity. The anti-urban character of Cuba's communist rule and the inflexible embargo imposed by the United States cast a paralyzing spell on the lavish metropolis, freezing it in time. Havana Buzz explores Cuba's capital at this time of much awaited historical transition. Caught in fleeting glimpses from its public buses, Havana's features are dispassionately laid bare, and the truth is revealed beyond the myth. Behind the romantic languidness of its urban relinquishment, the daily struggles for survival of an impoverished but resourceful population are displayed against the backdrop of anachronistic propaganda billboards, decrepit housing estates, crumbling infrastructures and a lush tropical nature that reclaims its rule after man's neglect. Yet, the signs of change are visible throughout the city and the new appears to seep relentlessly through the cracks of the past, creating a unique blend of antique and nouveau, nostalgia and hope, disillusionment and elation.
Author: Neal V. Loving
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 158834746X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
The uplifting autobiography of a remarkable aviator who was the first African American and first double amputee licensed as a racing pilot In 1926, a young Neal Loving saw a de Havilland DH-4 biplane that propelled his dreams of taking to the sky. Loving’s Love is the inspiring autobiography about his journey to get there. Only a recent high school graduate when he built his first full-size flying machine at a time when most flying schools, airports, and aviation jobs excluded African Americans, Loving went on to design and fly five aircraft, open an aviation school, and become the first African American to be licensed as a racing pilot. Loving faced no small number of obstacles. Barred by racist gatekeeping from serving in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, Loving and a friend created an all-Black squadron to serve their country. And despite undergoing a double leg amputation after a glider crash, Loving shares his story with unflinching optimism. He got fitted with wooden prosthetic legs and was back to flying just two years after his accident. The book offers readers an intimate and engaging look at Loving's career, with a focus on his WR-1 Loving’s Love, a single seat, midget racer he built in 1950 that won him the 1954 Most Outstanding Design award from the Experimental Aircraft Association. At 40 years old, Loving enrolled as an aeronautical engineering student and after graduating spent the next 20 years as a civilian specialist for the Air Force. After retiring, he continued flying for almost a decade. Neal Loving experienced a lifetime of thrills and challenges, and Loving’s Love captures the candid life story of a courageous man who defied the odds again and again.
Author: Ruth Behar
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813541891
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
This is the story of the author's return to learn about and meet the people who are keeping Judaism alive in Cuba today.
