Battles of the New Republic

Battles of the New Republic PDF

Author: Prashant Jha

Publisher: Hurst

Published: 2014-01-12

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1849045240

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal is a story of Nepal's transformation from war to peace, monarchy to republic, a Hindu kingdom to a secular state, and a unitary to a potentially federal state. Part-reportage, part-history, part-analysis, part-memoir, and part-biography of the key characters, the book breaks new ground in political writing from the region. With access to the most powerful leaders in the country as well as diplomats, it gives an unprecedented glimpse into Kathmandu's high politics. But this is coupled with ground-level reportage on the lives of ordinary citizens of the hills and the plains, striving for a democratic, just and equitable society. It tracks the hard grind of political negotiations at the heart of the instability in Nepal. It traces the rise of a popular rebellion, its integration into the mainstream, and its steady decline. It investigates Nepal's status as a partly-sovereign country, and reveals India's overwhelming role. It examines the angst of having to prove one's loyalties to one's own country, and exposes the Hindu hill upper-caste dominated power structures. Battles of the New Republic is a story of the deepening of democracy, of the death of a dream, and of that fundamental political dilemma - who exercises power, to what end, and for whose benefit.

Vector Prime: Star Wars Legends

Vector Prime: Star Wars Legends PDF

Author: R.A. Salvatore

Publisher: Random House Worlds

Published: 2003-06-03

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 034546740X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An exciting new era of Star Wars history is about to begin--as fantasy and science fiction's most acclaimed authors propel the legendary epic into the next millennium, introducing us to a rich cast of characters that features old favorites--Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa Solo--along with the next generation of Jedi and never-before seen creatures, droids, and deadly agents of darkness. In Vector Prime, the launch novel for this thrilling new saga, New York Times bestselling author R. A. Salvatore takes the Star Wars universe to previously unscaled heights of action and imagination, expanding the beloved story of a galaxy far, far away . . . Twenty-one years have passed since the heroes of the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Star, breaking the power of the Emperor. Since then, the New Republic has valiantly struggled to maintain peace and prosperity among the peoples of the galaxy. But unrest has begun to spread; tensions erupt in outbreaks of rebellion that, if unchecked, threaten to destroy the Republic's tenuous reign. Into this volatile atmosphere comes Nom Anor, a charismatic firebrand who heats passions to the boiling point, sowing seeds of dissent for his own dark motives. In an effort to avert a catastrophic civil war, Leia travels with her daughter Jaina, her sister-in-law Mara Jade Skywalker, and the loyal protocol droid C-3PO, to conduct face-to-face diplomatic negotiations with Nom Anor. But he proves resistant to Leia's entreaties--and, far more inexplicably, within the Force, where a being should be, was . . . blank space. Meanwhile, Luke is plagued by reports of rogue Jedi Knights who are taking the law into their own hands. And so he wrestles with a dilemma: Should he attempt, in this climate of mistrust, to reestablish the legendary Jedi Council? As the Jedi and the Republic focus on internal struggles, a new threat surfaces, unnoticed, beyond the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim. An enemy appears from outside known space, bearing weapons and technology unlike anything New Republic scientists have ever seen. Suddenly Luke, Mara, Leia, Han Solo, and Chewbacca--along with the Solo children--are thrust again into battle, to defend the freedom so many have fought and died for. But this time, all their courage, sacrifice, and even the power of the Force itself may not be enough. . . . Features a bonus section following the novel that includes a primer on the Star Wars expanded universe, and over half a dozen excerpts from some of the most popular Star Wars books of the last thirty years!

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering PDF

Author: Drew Gilpin Faust

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-01-06

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0375703837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

How White Men Won the Culture Wars

How White Men Won the Culture Wars PDF

Author: Joseph Darda

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0520381459

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2022 A cultural history of how white men exploited the image of the Vietnam veteran to roll back civil rights and restake their claim on the nation “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks,” Frederick Douglass asked in 1875, peering into the nation’s future, “what will peace among the whites bring?” The answer then and now, after civil war and civil rights: a white reunion disguised as a veterans’ reunion. How White Men Won the Culture Wars shows how a broad contingent of white men––conservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and nonvet––transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reconciliation. Conservatives could celebrate white vets as raceless embodiments of the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices must be heard. Erasing Americans of color, Southeast Asians, and women from the war, white men with stories of vets on their mind could agree, after civil rights and feminism, that they had suffered and deserved more. From the POW/MIA and veterans’ mental health movements to Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” they remade their racial identities for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism in the image of the Vietnam vet. No one wins in a culture war—except, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army green.

The Verdict of Battle

The Verdict of Battle PDF

Author: James Q. Whitman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-10-31

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0674071875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. The Verdict of Battle explains why the ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts. Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit made the eighteenth century battle’s golden age. A pitched battle was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils, including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched battles. Ideology rather than politics became war’s just cause. And because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of war dragged on. The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the world in the name of higher moral imperatives.

The Battle of Dorking

The Battle of Dorking PDF

Author: George Chesney

Publisher: DigiCat

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer is an 1871 novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, starting the genre of invasion literature and an important precursor of science fiction. Written just after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country referred to in oblique terms as The Other Power or The Enemy. Excerpt: "You ask me to tell you, my grandchildren, something about my share in the great events that happened fifty years ago. 'Tis sad work turning back to that bitter page in our history, but you may perhaps take profit in your new homes from the lesson it teaches. For us, in England, it came too late. And yet we had plenty of warnings if we had only made use of them."

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear PDF

Author: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1541788486

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.

A History of Nepal

A History of Nepal PDF

Author: John Whelpton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-17

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780521804707

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A comprehensive and accessible one-volume history of Nepal, first published in 2005.

The Bomber Mafia

The Bomber Mafia PDF

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0316296937

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A “truly compelling” (Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war—from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History. In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.