Feel the Grass Grow

Feel the Grass Grow
Author: Angela Jill Lederach
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2023-06-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503635694

On November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.

Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green

Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green
Author: Johnny Rico
Publisher: Presidio Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2008-12-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307494187

Outrageous, hilarious, and absolutely candid, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is Johnny Rico’s firsthand account of fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, a memoir that also reveals the universal truths about the madness of war. No one would have picked Johnny Rico for a soldier. The son of an aging hippie father, Johnny was overeducated and hostile to all authority. But when 9/11 happened, the twenty-six-year-old probation officer dropped everything to become an “infantry combat killer.” But if he’d thought that serving his country would be the kind of authentic experience a reader of The Catcher in the Rye would love, he quickly realized he had another thing coming. In Afghanistan he found himself living a Lord of the Flies existence among soldiers who feared civilian life more than they feared the Taliban–guys like Private Cox, a musical prodigy busy “planning his future poverty,” and Private Mulbeck, who didn’t know precisely which country he was in. Life in a combat zone meant carnage and courage–but it also meant tedious hours standing guard, punctuated with thoughtful arguments about whether Bea Arthur was still alive. Utterly uncensored and full of dark wit, Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green is a poignant, frightening, and heartfelt view of life in this and every man’s army.

Blood Makes the Grass Grow: A Norwegian Volunteer's War Against the Islamic State

Blood Makes the Grass Grow: A Norwegian Volunteer's War Against the Islamic State
Author: Mike Peshmerganor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781718059177

The incredible true story of a young Norwegian who put his life on the line to fight the world's most brutal terrorist organization.August 2014: ISIS continues its reign of terror, conquering new areas in Iraq and Syria, leaving tens of thousands of dead and millions displaced in their homelands. International news shows gruesome images of massacres and ethnic cleansing. A horrified Norwegian soldier at Camp Rena, shocked by Norway's unwillingness to commit troops to eradicate the terrorists, decides to take matters into his own hands and travels to the Kurdish front line in Iraq.In this gripping memoir, Mike Peshmerganor recounts how his Kurdish heritage, liberal Norwegian upbringing and military training shaped his worldview and drew him into the fight against militant Islamism. Armed only with gear he purchased himself and the name of a Kurdish contact, Mike is thrust into a military culture completely foreign to Westerners; where soldiers work without pay, adequate food and even ammunition, and their revered leader is a former hitman. Here are dramatic firefights against the world's most feared terrorist organization, and insight into the mindset of a true warrior.Mike Peshmerganor is a pseudonym. He escaped from Kurdistan as an infant with his family, grew up in Eastern Norway and served in Norway's elite Telemark Battalion. "I couldn't think of a single better reason for the government to send troops abroad than to stop an ongoing genocide. And what about all the foreign fighters from Europe who fought for ISIS? Didn't we have a responsibility to stop our own citizens from actively perpetrating war crimes and other atrocities in Iraq? Who will prevent them from returning home and carrying out terrorist attacks here, inour own cities? I realized it was futile to wait for Norway to engage directly in the fight against ISIS. I had to do it on my own."

Journal ...

Journal ...
Author: Canada. Parliament. House of Commons
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1174
Release: 1911
Genre:
ISBN:

Edward Rowland Sill

Edward Rowland Sill
Author: William Belmont Parker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1915
Genre:
ISBN:

Edward Rowland Sill was born April 29, 1841 in Windsor, Connecticut to Dr. Theodore Sill and Elizabeth Newberry Rowland Sill. At the age of 13 both his parents had died, leaving him to be raised by relatives. At the age of 17 he entered Yale College. Here the love for poetry he had inherited from his mother grew and by the time he graduated at the age of 21 still undecided about his future he decided to travel. We learn of his travels from the journal he kept. He married his uncle's daughter Elizabeth Newbury Sill. He spent his life writing poetry and teaching. From 1871 to 1883 he taught English at Oakland, California and the University of California at Berkley. He died Feb. 27,1887. His many friends mourned the loss of this man whom they considered the fittest to carry forward the torch of poetry. Family ancestor names include Walcott, Grant, Edwards, Ellsworth, Rowland, Allyn, Ware and others.