Author: Frank Sriepp
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Simon Brett
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 178010412X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Meet Charles Paris: a washed-up actor with a taste for wine, women . . . and solving crimes! A binge-worthy cozy mystery series from the original king of British cozy crime, internationally best-selling, award-winning author Simon Brett, OBE. For fans of Richard Osman - but with added bite! "Like a little malice in your mysteries? Some cynicism in your cosies? Simon Brett is happy to oblige" THE NEW YORK TIMES "Few crime writers are as enchantingly gifted" THE SUNDAY TIMES "One of British crime's most assured craftsmen . . . Perfect entertainment" THE GUARDIAN "A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans" P.D. JAMES "Murder most enjoyable" COLIN DEXTER _______________________ A middle-aged actor - and sometimes sleuth - takes on Hamlet Two TV talent show winners are in the star roles . . . Who has murderous intentions towards Hamlet and Ophelia? That is the question in A DECENT INTERVAL! Eternally struggling, jobbing actor Charles Paris is relieved to be offered the roles of Ghost and First Gravedigger in a production of Hamlet opening at the Grand Theatre, Marlborough. The star roles of Hamlet and Ophelia have been entrusted to TV talent show winners Jared Root and Katrina Selsey to attract a younger, social media savvy audience. With tickets already sold out, it's on the verge of being an overwhelming success - until one of the stage's giant skull bones crashes on to Jared during rehearsals. And when Katrina is found dead during the opening night interval, Charles suspects foul play. Is there a connection between Jared's injury and Katrina's demise? Diva Katrina was roundly disliked, but who despised her enough to commit murder? Fans of Agatha Christie, The Thursday Murder Club, Anthony Horowitz, Alexander McCall Smith, M.C. Beaton and Faith Martin will love this hilarious cozy traditional mystery series featuring one of the funniest antiheroes in crime fiction. Written over a fifty-year-period, it perfectly captures life and contemporary attitudes in 1970s London - and beyond! READERS ADORE CHARLES PARIS: "Brett has a rare gift for balancing humor and detection" Publishers Weekly Starred Review "More than worth the price of admission" Booklist Starred Review "An exhilarating read" Daily Mail "A brilliant, extraordinary whodunit" Ryan, 5* Goodreads review "Effortlessly readable" Adrian, 5* Amazon review "A marvellous book" Paulinderwick, 5* Amazon review "Another great Charles Paris mystery" David, 5* Amazon review THE CHARLES PARIS MYSTERIES, IN ORDER: 1. Cast in Order of Disappearance 2. So Much Blood 3. Star Trap 4. An Amateur Corpse 5. A Comedian Dies 6. The Dead Side of the Mike 7. Situation Tragedy 8. Murder Unprompted 9. Murder in the Title 10. Not Dead, Only Resting 11. Dead Giveaway 12. What Bloody Man is That 13. A Series of Murders 14. Corporate Bodies 15. A Reconstructed Corpse 16. Sicken and So Die 17. Dead Room Farce 18. A Decent Interval 19. The Cinderella Killer 20. A Deadly Habit 15. A Reconstructed Corpse 16. Sicken and So Die 17. Dead Room Farce 18. A Decent Interval 19. The Cinderella Killer 20. A Deadly Habit

Author: Frank Snepp
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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CIA v Snepp was a constitutional train wreck--and you can't avert your eyes from Irreparable Harm, Frank Snepp's hypnotizing and heartbreaking account of his case." --Jeffrey Toobin He began his professional life as a lockstep secret warrior--and wound up an improbable battler for free speech. This is a searingly personal chronicle of the journey that carried Frank Snepp from the innermost circles of the CIA to the Supreme Court itself and forever changed the meaning of one of the most sacred liberties guaranteed to us by the United States Constitution. Irreparable Harm tells of terror and sacrifice, and of the obsessive determination of CIA officials to destroy a man who dared call them on their mistakes. Among the last CIA agents to be airlifted from Saigon in the closing moments of the Vietnam War, Snepp returned to Agency headquarters determined to force his colleagues to assist Vietnamese left behind. But this was the summer of 1975, when the CIA was under investigation by Congress and unwilling to admit to any more transgressions, least of all its final ones in Vietnam. Unable to prompt even an official summary of the disastrous evacuation, Snepp resigned to write his own account in the hope of generating help for those abandoned, and spent the next eighteen months like a fugitive on the run, dodging CIA agents out to silence him. His expose, Decent Interval, was published in total secrecy under conditions reminiscent of a classic espionage operation--the first time any American book had been brought out this way. But it ignited a firestorm of publicity that drove the CIA and Jimmy Carter's White House to launch a campaign of retaliation unparalleled in the annals of American law, a strategy of vengeance designed to leave Snepp impoverished and gagged for life. In struggling to survive, the onetime spy was forced to accept help from ACLU liberals, antiwar activists, and a fiery Harvard professor named Alan Dershowitz, whom he would previously have viewed as his ideological enemy. Snepp's harrowing firsthand account of his ordeals, from his shadowy trench battles with the Agency, to the destruction of his friends and family, to his historic showdown with the CIA in the courts, reads at times like Kafka's The Trial and at times like a John Grisham thriller, and recounts a tale of government persecution that will leave the reader wondering how any of this could have happened in America.

Author: Fredrik Logevall
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520927117
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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In one of the most detailed and powerfully argued books published on American intervention in Vietnam, Fredrik Logevall examines the last great unanswered question on the war: Could the tragedy have been averted? His answer: a resounding yes. Challenging the prevailing myth that the outbreak of large-scale fighting in 1965 was essentially unavoidable, Choosing War argues that the Vietnam War was unnecessary, not merely in hindsight but in the context of its time. Why, then, did major war break out? Logevall shows it was partly because of the timidity of the key opponents of U.S. involvement, and partly because of the staunch opposition of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to early negotiations. His superlative account shows that U.S. officials chose war over disengagement despite deep doubts about the war's prospects and about Vietnam's importance to U.S. security and over the opposition of important voices in the Congress, in the press, and in the world community. They did so because of concerns about credibility—not so much America's or the Democratic party's credibility, but their own personal credibility. Based on six years of painstaking research, this book is the first to place American policymaking on Vietnam in 1963-65 in its wider international context using multiarchival sources, many of them recently declassified. Here we see for the first time how the war played in the key world capitals—not merely in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi, but also in Paris and London, in Tokyo and Ottawa, in Moscow and Beijing. Choosing War is a powerful and devastating account of fear, favor, and hypocrisy at the highest echelons of American government, a book that will change forever our understanding of the tragedy that was the Vietnam War.

Author: Spencer D. Bakich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022610785X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

Author: George Veith
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594037043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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The defeat of South Vietnam was arguably America’s worst foreign policy disaster of the 20th Century. Yet a complete understanding of the endgame—from the 27 January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam’s surrender on 30 April 1975—has eluded us. Black April addresses that deficit. A culmination of exhaustive research in three distinct areas: primary source documents from American archives, North Vietnamese publications containing primary and secondary source material, and dozens of articles and numerous interviews with key South Vietnamese participants, this book represents one of the largest Vietnamese translation projects ever accomplished, including almost one hundred rarely or never seen before North Vietnamese unit histories, battle studies, and memoirs. Most important, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of South Vietnam’s conquest, the leaders in Hanoi released several compendiums of formerly highly classified cables and memorandum between the Politburo and its military commanders in the south. This treasure trove of primary source materials provides the most complete insight into North Vietnamese decision-making ever complied. While South Vietnamese deliberations remain less clear, enough material exists to provide a decent overview. Ultimately, whatever errors occurred on the American and South Vietnamese side, the simple fact remains that the country was conquered by a North Vietnamese military invasion despite written pledges by Hanoi’s leadership against such action. Hanoi’s momentous choice to destroy the Paris Peace Accords and militarily end the war sent a generation of South Vietnamese into exile, and exacerbated a societal trauma in America over our long Vietnam involvement that reverberates to this day. How that transpired deserves deeper scrutiny.

Author: Pierre Asselin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Demonstrating the centrality of diplomacy in the Vietnam War, Pierre Asselin traces the secret negotiations that led up to the Paris Agreement of 1973, which ended America's involvement but failed to bring peace in Vietnam. Because the two sides signed the agreement under duress, he argues, the peace it promised was doomed to unravel. By January of 1973, the continuing military stalemate and mounting difficulties on the domestic front forced both Washington and Hanoi to conclude that signing a vague and largely unworkable peace agreement was the most expedient way to achieve their most pressing objectives. For Washington, those objectives included the release of American prisoners, military withdrawal without formal capitulation, and preservation of American credibility in the Cold War. Hanoi, on the other hand, sought to secure the removal of American forces, protect the socialist revolution in the North, and improve the prospects for reunification with the South. Using newly available archival sources from Vietnam, the United States, and Canada, Asselin reconstructs the secret negotiations, highlighting the creative roles of Hanoi, the National Liberation Front, and Saigon in constructing the final settlement.

Author: George Donelson Moss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315510804
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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This book provides a comprehensive narrative history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, from 1942 to 1975--with a concluding section that traces U.S.-Vietnam relations from the end of the war in 1975 to the present. Unlike most general histories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam--which are either conventional diplomatic or military histories--this volume synthesizes the perspectives to explore both dimensions of the struggle in greater depth, elucidating more of the complexities of the U.S.-Vietnam entanglement. It explains why Americans tried so hard for so long to stop the spread of Communism into Indochina, and why they failed. Key topics: The Fall of Saigon: The End as Prelude. Vietnam: A Place and A People. The Elephant and the Tiger. An Experiment in Nation Building. Raising the Stakes. Going to War. The Chain of Thunders. The Year of the Monkey. A War to End a War. The End of the Tunnel. Market: For anyone curious to know about the long American involvement in Southeast Asia, 1942-1975.

Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312990960
Category : Absence and presumption of death
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico-supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.

Author: M. S. Kohli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Spies in the Himalayas chronicles for the first time the details of these expeditions sanctioned by U.S. and Indian intelligence, telling the story of clandestine climbs and hair-raising exploits. Led by legendary Indian mountaineer Mohan S. Kohli, conqueror of Everest, the mission was beset by hazardous climbs, weather delays, aborted attempts, and even missing radioactive materials that may or may not still pose contamination threat to Indian rivers.