Baghdad Bound

Baghdad Bound
Author: Mohamed Fadel Fahmy
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2004
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1412019117

As the advent of an attack on Iraq approaches, a young Egyptian man working in the Gulf decides to take up a freelance job as a field translator for the L.A. Times and unsuspectingly embarks on an electrifying roller-coaster ride from Kuwait City to Baghdad. What was to happen to him and his team for the following three months is documented in his book Baghdad Bound. This is a gripping account of the remarkable events that he witnessed before and during the Iraq War: The danger of frontline reporting Dodging bullets and translating between reporters and Iraqis, the author recounts in detail the escape of BBC, CBC, Newsweek, and other news network crews from the Iraqi border after the threat of being besieged by a group of disgruntled and armed locals. The devastation of the lives of Iraqi civilians From Basra to Baghdad, a direct look at the horror of living in fear of coalition bombs as well as Saddam loyalists. The author begins to understand their psychological trauma after a first-hand look at casualties of war and along the way, discovers the real face of the Ba'athi regime. The aftermath In a lawless land, chaos reigns supreme as Iraqis, coalition forces and journalists struggle to make sense of post-war Iraq. The author recounts the mayhem of looting and rubs shoulders with Shi'a leaders and Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi vying for power while Saddam is on the loose. Of all the books that have been published about the Iraq War, Baghdad Bound is a first. A mosaic of thrilling untold stories from the theatre of war, it is an earnest and unique collection of the action-packed memoirs of an Arab interpreter who finds himself caught in an intricate web involving the CIA, the L.A. Times, and Iraqis of various walks of life. Here is a raw view of the war through the eyes of a regular man who stumbled into a defining chapter of modern history...

Baghdad

Baghdad
Author: Justin Marozzi
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2014-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0141948043

In Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, celebrated young travelwriter-historian Justin Marozzi gives us a many-layered history of one of the world's truly great cities - both its spectacular golden ages and its terrible disasters 'Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' - Sunday Telegraph Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and conquerors. Here, in the first new history of Baghdad in nearly 80 years, Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole tumultuous history of what was once the greatest capital on earth. Justin Marozzi is a Councillor of the Royal Geographic Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Buckingham University. He has broadcast for BBC Radio Four, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, for which he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His previous books include the bestselling Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year (2004), and The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus.

Passionate Nomad

Passionate Nomad
Author: Jane Fletcher Geniesse
Publisher: Modern Library
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2010-07-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307756858

A New York Times Notable Book • Finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction “Highly readable biography . . . The woman who emerges from these pages is a complex figure—heroic, driven . . . and entirely human.”—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times Passionate Nomad captures the momentous life and times of Freya Stark with precision, compassion, and marvelous detail. Hailed by The Times of London as “the last of the Romantic Travellers” upon her death in 1993, Freya Stark combined unflappable bravery, formidable charm, fearsome intellect, and ferocious ambition to become the twentieth century’s best-known woman traveler. Digging beneath the mythology, Geniesse uncovers a complex, controversial, and quixotic woman whose indomitable spirit was forged by contradictions: a child of privilege, Stark grew up in near poverty; yearning for formal education, she was largely self-taught; longing for love, she consistently focused on the wrong men. Despite these hardships, Stark’s astonishing career spanned more than sixty years, during which she produced twenty-two books that sealed her reputation as a consummate woman of letters. This edition includes a new Epilogue by the author that, citing newly discovered evidence, calls into question the circumstances of Stark’s birth and adds new insight into this adventurous and lively personality. Praise for Passionate Nomad “Passionate Nomad is a work of nonfiction that reads and sings with the drama and lilt of a fine novel. The story of Freya Stark is stunning, inspiring, sad, funny, unique, and moving. Jane Fletcher Geniesse tells it straight, but with a care for delicious detail and a sympathy for the characters that make this a truly special book.”—Jim Lehrer “Passionate Nomad supplies a fascinating individual thread in the tapestry of twentiethcentury Middle Eastern history. . . . [Geniesse] has achieved, in the end, an admirable focus, at once critical and sympathetic. . . . For all Stark’s unresolved contradictions, . . . her distinction as a latter-day woman of letters survives.”—The New York Times Book Review “Compulsively readable . . . [Geniesse] has done a thorough job re-creating the life of a woman many consider to be the last of the great romantic travelers.”—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Jackals of Samarra

Jackals of Samarra
Author: Benjamin H. Roberts
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2001-01-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595161235

Jackals of Samarra was written in the period immediately preceding the Gulf War. It was just as contemporary then as it is now, as borne out by today's headlines of naval vessels falling victim to terrorist bombs. The Gulf region is a perpetual cauldron, ready to boil over at a moment's notice. The book sets up shop here and uses a scenario of fact and fiction that wends its way back and forth from the Middle East to the West. The plot employs surprise military attacks, espionage, blackmail, oil, and nuclear weapons to culminate in a gut-wrenching, unpredictable situation, with the Iranians catching the West off guard, as the world holds its collective breath. Though Jackals of Samarra is a work of fiction, it comes so uncomfortably close to being real that using a book marker at stopping points might not work too well. After reading the last sentence of Jackals… you might just feel relieved and lucky that it is only fiction. Then again you might not. See for yourself.

From Jailer to Jailed

From Jailer to Jailed
Author: Bernard B. Kerik
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476783713

Bernard Kerik was New York City's police commissioner during the 9/11 attacks, who became an American hero as he led the NYPD through rescue and recovery efforts of the World Trade Center. His résumé as a public servant is long and storied, and includes honors from President Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, and the NYPD's Medal for Valor for saving his partner in a gun battle. In 2004, Kerik was nominated by President George W. Bush to head the US Department of Homeland Security. Now, he is a former Federal Prison Inmate known as #84888-054. Convicted of tax fraud and false statements in 2007, Kerik was sentenced to four years in federal prison. Now for the first time, in this hard-hitting, raw and oftentimes politically incorrect memoir, he talks candidly about his time on the inside: the torture of solitary confinement, the abuse of power, the mental and physical torment of being locked up in a cage, the powerlessness. With his newfound perspective, Kerik makes a plea for change and illuminates why our punishment system doesn't always fit the crime.

Lions and Lambs

Lions and Lambs
Author: Noah Benezra Strote
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300219059

A bold new interpretation of Germany's democratic transformation in the twentieth century, focusing on the generation that shaped the post-Nazi reconstruction Not long after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Germans rebuilt their shattered country and emerged as one of the leading nations of the Western liberal world. In his debut work, Noah Strote analyzes this remarkable turnaround and challenges the widely held perception that the Western Allies--particularly the United States--were responsible for Germany's transformation. Instead, Strote draws from never-before-seen material to show how common opposition to Adolf Hitler united the fractious groups that had once vied for supremacy under the Weimar Republic, Germany's first democracy (1918-1933). His character-driven narrative follows ten Germans of rival worldviews who experienced the breakdown of Weimar society, lived under the Nazi dictatorship, and together assumed founding roles in the democratic reconstruction. While many have imagined postwar Germany as the product of foreign-led democratization, this study highlights the crucial role of indigenous ideas and institutions that stretched back decades before Hitler. Foregrounding the resolution of key conflicts that crippled the country's first democracy, Strote presents a new model for understanding the origins of today's Federal Republic.

The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict

The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict
Author: Michael Kelly
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2019-02-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 303004825X

This Handbook maps the contours of an exciting and burgeoning interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of language and languages in situations of conflict. It explores conceptual approaches, sources of information that are available, and the institutions and actors that mediate language encounters. It examines case studies of the role that languages have played in specific conflicts, from colonial times through to the Middle East and Africa today. The contributors provide vibrant evidence to challenge the monolingual assumptions that have affected traditional views of war and conflict. They show that languages are woven into every aspect of the making of war and peace, and demonstrate how language shapes public policy and military strategy, setting frameworks and expectations. The Handbook's 22 chapters powerfully illustrate how the encounter between languages is integral to almost all conflicts, to every phase of military operations and to the lived experiences of those on the ground, who meet, work and fight with speakers of other languages. This comprehensive work will appeal to scholars from across the disciplines of linguistics, translation studies, history, and international relations; and provide fresh insights for a broad range of practitioners interested in understanding the role and implications of foreign languages in war.

Interpreting Justice

Interpreting Justice
Author: Moira Inghilleri
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1136511857

In this timely study, Inghilleri examines the interface between ethics, language, and politics during acts of interpreting, with reference to two particular sites of transnational conflict: the political and judicial context of asylum adjudication and the geo-political context of war. The book characterizes the social and moral spaces in which the translation of the spoken word occurs in ways that reflect the realities of the trans-nationally constituted, locally and globally informed environments in which interpreters work alongside others. One of the core arguments is that the rather restricted notion of neutrality that remains central to translator and interpreter practices does not adequately reflect the complex and paradoxical nature of these socially and politically inscribed encounters and others like them. This study offers an alternative theoretical perspective on language and ethics to those which have shaped and informed translation and interpreting theory and practice in recent years.

NOC Three Times

NOC Three Times
Author: Nicholas Anderson
Publisher: MIURA!
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1732966141

Third and last part of 'The NOC Trilogy'. Seen through the uncommon perspective of a British covert action MI6 intelligence officer as a one-man station overseas, who is occasionally operational in hostile environments for queen and country. See author's website: www.NicholasAnderson.info

Owls and Eagles

Owls and Eagles
Author: Harlan Ullman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2005
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0742549305

Leading national security strategist Harlan K. Ullman is well known for his aggressive, no nonsense approach to U.S. foreign policy. By his own description, he demands a smarter, realistic policy, one that is 'informed by fact and reason and not ideology and tough when it must be.' The time span of the author's columns, largely for the Washington Times , reprinted in this book is no coincidence. Owls and Eagles begins with the onset of the controversial U.S.-led war in Iraq in March 2003 and ends twenty months later, shortly after President George W. Bush's reelection. What overly ambitious, under informed goals inspired the U.S. to launch the preemptive war? What were the domestic and electoral factors that led to the president's decision? And, perhaps most importantly, what are the consequences of the unilateral war to the standing of the United States in the global community and to the legacy of George W. Bush? These are the provocative questions contemplated in this important book. In the end, the author has achieved his goal of 'informing the public and provoking them to think and to question how well or badly our nation was faring in the fight to keep us safe and secure.'