An Intimate History of Killing

An Intimate History of Killing PDF Author: Joanna Bourke
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465007387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, but killing. Politicians and military historians may gloss over human slaughter, emphasizing the defense of national honor, but for men in active service, warfare means being - or becoming - efficient killers. In An Intimate History of Killing, historian Joanna Bourke asks: What are the social and psychological dynamics of becoming the best ”citizen soldiers?” What kind of men become the best killers? How do they readjust to civilian life?These questions are answered in this groundbreaking new work that won, while still in manuscript, the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History. Excerpting from letters, diaries, memoirs, and reports of British, American, and Australian veterans of three wars (World War I, World War II, and Vietnam), Bourke concludes that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can, and often do, become enthusiastic killers without being brutalized.This graphic, unromanticized look at men at war is sure to revise many long-held beliefs about the nature of violence.

An Intimate History of Killing

An Intimate History of Killing PDF Author: Joanna Bourke
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 9780465007387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Get Book

Book Description
The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, but killing. Politicians and military historians may gloss over human slaughter, emphasizing the defense of national honor, but for men in active service, warfare means being - or becoming - efficient killers. In An Intimate History of Killing, historian Joanna Bourke asks: What are the social and psychological dynamics of becoming the best ”citizen soldiers?” What kind of men become the best killers? How do they readjust to civilian life?These questions are answered in this groundbreaking new work that won, while still in manuscript, the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History. Excerpting from letters, diaries, memoirs, and reports of British, American, and Australian veterans of three wars (World War I, World War II, and Vietnam), Bourke concludes that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can, and often do, become enthusiastic killers without being brutalized.This graphic, unromanticized look at men at war is sure to revise many long-held beliefs about the nature of violence.

An Intimate History of Killing

An Intimate History of Killing PDF Author: Joanna Bourke
Publisher: Granta Books (UK)
ISBN: 9781862073210
Category : Combat
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
Bourke uses the letters, diaries, memoirs and reports of veterans from three conflicts - World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War - to establish a picture of the man-at-arms. What she suggests is that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing, and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can become enthusiastic killes without becoming brutalized.

An Intimate History of Killing

An Intimate History of Killing PDF Author: Joanna Bourke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 604

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Book Description
In this study, the author uses the letters, diaries, memoirs, and reports of veterans from three conflicts - the First and Second World Wars and the Vietnam War - to establish a picture of the man-at-arms. She suggests that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing, and that ordinary, gentle human beings in civilian life can become enthusiastic killers without becoming brutalized by the horrors of combat.

Deep Violence

Deep Violence PDF Author: Joanna Bourke
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619025094
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the First World War, and with it comes a deluge of books, documentaries, feature films and radio programs. We will hear a great deal about the horror of the battlefield. Bourke acknowledges wider truths: war is unending and violence is deeply entrenched in our society. But it doesn't have to be this way. This book equips readers with an understanding of the history, culture and politics of warfare in order to interrogate and resist an increasingly violent world. Wounding the World investigates the ways that violence and war have become internalized in contemporary human consciousness in everything from the way we speak, to the way our children play with one another, to the way that we ascribe social characteristics to our guns and other weapons. With a remarkable depth of insight, Bourke argues for a radical overhaul of our collective stance towards militarism from one that simply aims to reduce violence against people to one that would eradicate all violence. Her message is judicious and vital: knowledge about weapons and the violence they bring has simply become too important to cast aside or leave to the experts.

Why Do They Kill?

Why Do They Kill? PDF Author: David Adams (Ed. D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This study of domestic homicide in America examines the lives and moitvation of men who kill their intimate partners.

The Beauty and the Sorrow

The Beauty and the Sorrow PDF Author: Peter Englund
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307739287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.

The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War PDF Author: Geoffrey Ward
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1984897748
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 866

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Based on the celebrated PBS television series, the complete text of an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict, “a significant milestone [that] will no doubt do much to determine how the war is understood for years to come.” —The Washington Post More than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its memory continues to loom large in the national psyche. In this intimate history, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns have crafted a fresh and insightful account of the long and brutal conflict that reunited Vietnam while dividing the United States as nothing else had since the Civil War. From the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive to Hamburger Hill and the fall of Saigon, Ward and Burns trace the conflict that dogged three American presidents and their advisers. But most of the voices that echo from these pages belong to less exalted men and women—those who fought in the war as well as those who fought against it, both victims and victors—willing for the first time to share their memories of Vietnam as it really was. A magisterial tour de force, The Vietnam War is an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict.

Big Trouble

Big Trouble PDF Author: J. Anthony Lukas
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439128103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 884

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Book Description
Hailed as "toweringly important" (Baltimore Sun), "a work of scrupulous and significant reportage" (E. L. Doctorow), and "an unforgettable historical drama" (Chicago Sun-Times), Big Trouble brings to life the astonishing case that ultimately engaged President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the politics and passions of an entire nation at century's turn. After Idaho's former governor is blown up by a bomb at his garden gate at Christmastime 1905, America's most celebrated detective, Pinkerton James McParland, takes over the investigation. His daringly executed plan to kidnap the radical union leader "Big Bill" Haywood from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho sets the stage for a memorable courtroom confrontation between the flamboyant prosecutor, progressive senator William Borah, and the young defender of the dispossessed, Clarence Darrow. Big Trouble captures the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century, when capital and labor, particularly in the raw, acquisitive West, were pitted against each other in something close to class war. Lukas paints a vivid portrait of a time and place in which actress Ethel Barrymore, baseball phenom Walter Johnson, and editor William Allen White jostled with railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, socialist Eugene V. Debs, gunslinger Charlie Siringo, and Operative 21, the intrepid Pinkerton agent who infiltrated Darrow's defense team. This is a grand narrative of the United States as it charged, full of hope and trepidation, into the twentieth century.

The Great Mortality

The Great Mortality PDF Author: John Kelly
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060006935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
La moria grandissima began its terrible journey across the European and Asian continents in 1347, leaving unimaginable devastation in its wake. Five years later, twenty-five million people were dead, felled by the scourge that would come to be called the Black Death. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history -- a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankind's darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.

Murder at the Brown Palace

Murder at the Brown Palace PDF Author: Dick Kreck
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
ISBN: 9781555914639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This tragic story of a spectacular crime of passion.