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Author: Soumen Ray
Publisher: Prowess Publishing
ISBN: 1545747180
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Among all other countries in the West Asia, Syria was the most tranquil one. There was a civil war in its neighbouring country, Lebanon for more than fifteen years. The Palestinians with various militant groups have ben attacking Israel on a continuous basis and the Israeli Defence Force punishing them regularly for their mischievous acts. Iraq on its eastern border, under the worst Arab dictator, was being punished by the international community. On top of these, Syria’s own relations with the mainstream Arab countries in general and, with the West in particular, were frosty. But in Syria the people were leading a normal peaceful life under the leadership of enigmatic President---Hafez al-Assad. The country’s economy was doing well. He ensured that Syria was never in the list of “regime change” of the US and its allies. While there was opposition to his authoritarian rule, it did not affect the social and political fabric of Syria. What went wrong immediately after his death? How his politically novice son and successor, Bashar al-Assad started committing one after another grave mistakes, took self destructive political moves, joined hands with international pariah militant groups to safeguard his position at the cost of Syria and ruined the peaceful oasis? How a secular country where people of different religious faiths living for hundreds of years with perfect harmony and peace, became the hub of militant Islamic fundamentalists and one of the “most dangerous places on the earth”? To provide a perspective to that, I wrote “My Syrian Diary”. I had served as an Indian diplomat in the Middle east for more than a decade. My three years’ tour of duty at the Indian Embassy, Damascus, gave me an excellent opportunity to know the country, its people and the geopolitics of the region.
Author: Soumen Ray
Publisher: Prowess Publishing
ISBN: 1545747180
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Among all other countries in the West Asia, Syria was the most tranquil one. There was a civil war in its neighbouring country, Lebanon for more than fifteen years. The Palestinians with various militant groups have ben attacking Israel on a continuous basis and the Israeli Defence Force punishing them regularly for their mischievous acts. Iraq on its eastern border, under the worst Arab dictator, was being punished by the international community. On top of these, Syria’s own relations with the mainstream Arab countries in general and, with the West in particular, were frosty. But in Syria the people were leading a normal peaceful life under the leadership of enigmatic President---Hafez al-Assad. The country’s economy was doing well. He ensured that Syria was never in the list of “regime change” of the US and its allies. While there was opposition to his authoritarian rule, it did not affect the social and political fabric of Syria. What went wrong immediately after his death? How his politically novice son and successor, Bashar al-Assad started committing one after another grave mistakes, took self destructive political moves, joined hands with international pariah militant groups to safeguard his position at the cost of Syria and ruined the peaceful oasis? How a secular country where people of different religious faiths living for hundreds of years with perfect harmony and peace, became the hub of militant Islamic fundamentalists and one of the “most dangerous places on the earth”? To provide a perspective to that, I wrote “My Syrian Diary”. I had served as an Indian diplomat in the Middle east for more than a decade. My three years’ tour of duty at the Indian Embassy, Damascus, gave me an excellent opportunity to know the country, its people and the geopolitics of the region.
Author: Dick Cheney
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143917623X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 578
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Book Description
In this eagerly anticipated memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney delivers an unyielding portrait of American politics over nearly forty years and shares personal reflections on his role as one of the most steadfast and influential statesmen in the history of our country. The public perception of Dick Cheney has long been something of a contradiction. He has been viewed as one of the most powerful vice presidents—secretive, even mysterious, and at the same time opinionated and unflinchingly outspoken. He has been both praised and attacked by his peers, the press, and the public. Through it all, courting only the ideals that define him, he has remained true to himself, his principles, his family, and his country. Now in an enlightening and provocative memoir, a stately page-turner with flashes of surprising humor and remarkable candor, Dick Cheney takes readers through his experiences as family man, policymaker, businessman, and politician during years that shaped our collective history. Born into a family of New Deal Democrats in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was the son of a father at war and a high-spirited and resilient mother. He came of age in Casper, Wyoming, playing baseball and football and, as senior class president, courting homecoming queen Lynne Vincent, whom he later married. This all-American story took an abrupt turn when he flunked out of Yale University, signed on to build power line in the West, and started living as hard as he worked. Cheney tells the story of how he got himself back on track and began an extraordinary ascent to the heights of American public life, where he would remain for nearly four decades: * He was the youngest White House Chief of Staff, working for President Gerald Ford—the first of four chief executives he would come to know well. * He became Congressman from Wyoming and was soon a member of the congressional leadership working closely with President Ronald Reagan. * He became secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration, overseeing America’s military during Operation Desert Storm and in the historic transition at the end of the Cold War. * He was CEO of Halliburton, a Fortune 500 company with projects and personnel around the globe. * He became the first vice president of the United States to serve out his term of office in the twenty-first century. Working with George W. Bush from the beginning of the global war on terror, he was—and remains—an outspoken defender of taking every step necessary to defend the nation. Eyewitness to history at the highest levels, Cheney brings to life scenes from past and present. He describes driving through the White House gates on August 9, 1974, just hours after Richard Nixon resigned, to begin work on the Ford transition; and he portrays a time of national crisis a quarter century later when, on September 11, 2001, he was in the White House bunker and conveyed orders to shoot down a hijacked airliner if it would not divert. With its unique perspective on a remarkable span of American history, In My Time will enlighten. As an intimate and personal chronicle, it will surprise, move, and inspire. Dick Cheney’s is an enduring political vision to be reckoned with and admired for its honesty, its wisdom, and its resonance. In My Time is truly the last word about an incredible political era, by a man who lived it and helped define it—with courage and without compromise.
Author: Suzy Hansen
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374712441
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.
Author: Luis Francisco Martinez Montes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788494938115
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.
Author: Viet Lê
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012935
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
In Return Engagements artist and critic Việt Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Việt Nam to rethink the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art. Highlighting artists tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn and drawing on a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films, Lê points out that artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of armed conflict and modernization, and shows how desirable art on these themes is on international art markets. As the global art market fetishizes trauma and violence, artists strategically align their work with those tropes in ways that Lê suggests allow them to reinvent such aesthetics and discursive spaces. By returning to and refashioning these themes, artists such as Tiffany Chung, Rithy Panh, and Sopheap Pich challenge categorizations of “diasporic” and “local” by situating themselves as insiders and outsiders relative to Cambodia and Việt Nam. By doing so, they disrupt dominant understandings of place, time, and belonging in contemporary art.
Author: Chris Crawford
Publisher: Microscope Publications Limited
ISBN: 9780914845973
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Author: Gabriele Balbi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110740281
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.
Author: Todd S. Sechser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110710694X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Are nuclear weapons useful for coercive diplomacy? This book argues that they are useful for deterrence but not for offensive purposes.
Author: Tim Marshall
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501121472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Elliott and Thompson Limited.
Author: Daniel Sheldon Hamilton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780990772095
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The future of Europe's east is open. Can the societies of this vast region become more democratic and secure and integrate into the European mainstream? Or are they destined to become failed, fractured lands of grey mired in the stagnation and turbulence historically characteristic of Europe's borderlands? How and why is Russia seeking to influence these developments, and what is the future of Russia itself? How should the West engage?
