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Author: Michael Zacchea
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613738447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Deployed to Iraq in March 2004 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, US Marine Michael Zacchea thought he had landed a plum assignment. His team's mission was to build, train, and lead in combat the first Iraqi Army battalion trained by the US military. Quickly, he realized he was faced with a nearly impossible task. With just two weeks' training based on outdated and irrelevant materials, no language instruction, and few cultural tips for interacting with his battalion of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, and others, Zacchea arrived at his base in Kirkush to learn his recruits would need beds, boots, uniforms, and equipment. His Iraqi officer counterparts spoke little English. He had little time to transform his troops—mostly poor, uneducated farmers—into a cohesive rifle battalion that would fight a new insurgency erupting across Iraq. In order to stand up a fighting battalion, Zacchea knew, he would have to understand his men. Unlike other combat Marines in Iraq at the time, he immersed himself in Iraq's culture: learning its languages, eating its foods, observing its traditions—even being inducted into one of its Sunni tribes. A constant source of both pride and frustration, the Iraqi Army Fifth Battalion went on to fight bravely at the Battle of Fallujah against the forces that would eventually form ISIS. The Ragged Edge is Zacchea's deeply personal and powerful account of hopeful determination, of brotherhood and betrayal, and of cultural ignorance and misunderstanding. It sheds light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents and terrorists, precisely when such wartime collaboration is happening more than at any other time in US history.
Author: Michael Zacchea
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613738447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
Get Book Here
Book Description
Deployed to Iraq in March 2004 after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, US Marine Michael Zacchea thought he had landed a plum assignment. His team's mission was to build, train, and lead in combat the first Iraqi Army battalion trained by the US military. Quickly, he realized he was faced with a nearly impossible task. With just two weeks' training based on outdated and irrelevant materials, no language instruction, and few cultural tips for interacting with his battalion of Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Yazidis, and others, Zacchea arrived at his base in Kirkush to learn his recruits would need beds, boots, uniforms, and equipment. His Iraqi officer counterparts spoke little English. He had little time to transform his troops—mostly poor, uneducated farmers—into a cohesive rifle battalion that would fight a new insurgency erupting across Iraq. In order to stand up a fighting battalion, Zacchea knew, he would have to understand his men. Unlike other combat Marines in Iraq at the time, he immersed himself in Iraq's culture: learning its languages, eating its foods, observing its traditions—even being inducted into one of its Sunni tribes. A constant source of both pride and frustration, the Iraqi Army Fifth Battalion went on to fight bravely at the Battle of Fallujah against the forces that would eventually form ISIS. The Ragged Edge is Zacchea's deeply personal and powerful account of hopeful determination, of brotherhood and betrayal, and of cultural ignorance and misunderstanding. It sheds light on the dangerous pitfalls of training foreign troops to fight murderous insurgents and terrorists, precisely when such wartime collaboration is happening more than at any other time in US history.
Author: Steven E. Nash
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962625X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
In this illuminating study, Steven E. Nash chronicles the history of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the mountains of western North Carolina. Nash presents a complex story of the region's grappling with the war's aftermath, examining the persistent wartime loyalties that informed bitter power struggles between factions of white mountaineers determined to rule. For a brief period, an influx of federal governmental power enabled white anti-Confederates to ally with former slaves in order to lift the Republican Party to power locally and in the state as a whole. Republican success led to a violent response from a transformed class of elites, however, who claimed legitimacy from the antebellum period while pushing for greater integration into the market-oriented New South. Focusing on a region that is still underrepresented in the Reconstruction historiography, Nash illuminates the diversity and complexity of Appalachian political and economic machinations, while bringing to light the broad and complicated issues the era posed to the South and the nation as a whole.
Author: John Francis, Ph.D.
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1426207387
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
By the author of Planetwalker, The Ragged Edge of Silence takes us to another level of appreciating, through silence, the beauty of the planet and our place in it. John Francis's real and compelling prose forms a tapestry of questions and answers woven from interviews, stories, personal experience, science, and the power of silence through history, including practice by Native American, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures. Through their time-honored traditions and his own experience of communicating silently for 17 years, Francis's practical exercises lay the groundwork for the reader to build constructive silence into everyday life: to learn more about oneself, to set goals and accomplish dreams, to build strong relationships, and to appreciate and be a steward of the Earth. With its amazing human interest element and first-person expertise, this book is energizing and universally instructive.
Author: Philip F. Gura
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429951346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers—such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal—to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality. This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving of A New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard's The Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers—Hawthorne and Melville most famously—began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self. Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction, Truth's Ragged Edge—the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth—is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.
Author: Jon Lauck
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
During the half-century after the Civil War, intellectuals and politicians assumed the Midwest to be the font and heart of American culture. Despite the persistence of strong currents of midwestern regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, the region went into eclipse during the post–World War II era. In the apt language of Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Midwest slid from being the “warm center” of the republic to its “ragged edge.” This book explains the factors that triggered the demise of the Midwest’s regionalist energies, from anti-midwestern machinations in the literary world and the inability of midwestern writers to break through the cultural politics of the era to the growing dominance of a coastal, urban culture. These developments paved the way for the proliferation of images of the Midwest as flyover country, the Rust Belt, a staid and decaying region. Yet Lauck urges readers to recognize persisting and evolving forms of midwestern identity and to resist the forces that squelch the nation’s interior voices.
Author: Eugene Linden
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452297745
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
A pioneering work of environmental journalism that vividly depicts the people, animals and landscapes on the front lines of change's inexorable march. A species nearing extinction, a tribe losing centuries of knowledge, a tract of forest facing the first incursion of humans-how can we even begin to assess the cost of losing so much of our natural and cultural legacy? For forty years, environmental journalist and author Eugene Linden has traveled to the very sites where tradition, wildlands and the various forces of modernity collide. In The Ragged Edge of the World, he takes us from pygmy forests to the Antarctic to the world's most pristine rainforest in the Congo to tell the story of the harm taking place-and the successful preservation efforts-in the world's last wild places. The Ragged Edge of the World is a critical favorite, and was an editors' pick on Oprah.com.
Author: Charles R. Swindoll
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 9780849932168
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
This is a book for people living in the trenches--for those who are searching for a deeper sense of satisfaction from the daily grind of being alive in the l990sWord to laypeople who feel the call of the Great Commission upon their lives.ess, a better friend.
Author: Juanita Brooks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
Author: Diana Alishouse
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780983977742
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
The author writes from the power of experience, and everyday language. She uses original art quilts to SHOW the reader what depressive illness feels like.
Author: Charles R. Swindoll
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1418559385
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
In the never-ending quest for fulfillment, we sometimes convince ourselves that life would be better if we just had a different career . . . more education . . . a new spouse . . . a fresh start in another location. The solution to life's challenges, we think, is just around the corner, a few steps ahead?always just out of reach. Living on the Ragged Edge Workbook opens the pages of an ancient journal?the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. In this very personal, unbelievably honest book, King Solomon chronicles his search for satisfaction, experiencing everything the world offered. The wisest man who ever lived, he certainly had the intelligence and the vast resources to pursue whatever his heart desired?from personal riches to sexual pleasures. Solomon had it all. He did it all with abandon. And he came to the end of his days with the ultimate secret for the "good life." Do you want to know the secret? Do you want to know how to find joy and peace in this world gone mad? In this bestseller Charles Swindoll delivers his characteristic insights and wisdom in an exploration of the book of Ecclesiastes and brings home to you Solomon's powerful message for living at its best.
