In particular, it is the story of the West Cork Flying column under Tom Barry, commander of genius and national hero.

    This book combines narrative, analysis, historiography, and scores of contemporary illustrations. This work aims to provide an insight into the misery of the famine and the nightmare of mass evictions that followed.

    His journeys took him from the back kitchens of Belfast, where men joked while making two-thousand-pound bombs, to prisons for interviews with men serving life sentences, and to the graveyards where mourners weep. Each chapter explores a world where history, faith, and human savagery determine life and death. At once moving and harrowing, Rebel Hearts is the most authoritative and insightful book ever written on the IRA.

    Republican prisoners, convicted of grave crimes through special courts and ruthless interrogation procedures, campaigned for political status by refusing to wear prison clothes and daubing their cell with excrement. Were they properly convicted criminals, or martyrs to political injustice? In a masterpiece of investigative journalism, Coogan provides us with the only first-hand account of the protest. His investigation led deep into the social, cultural, and economic maze of Northern Ireland's history to give readers an unmatched analysis of a troubled place and its sorrowful history.

    Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams offers his own unique, intimate account of the early years of his career, from his childhood in working-class Belfast to the more turbulent years of social activism that followed. An engaging and revealing self-portrait. photo insert.

    Gold reserves that exceed those of industrialized nations. Real estate holdings that equal the total area of many countries. Opulent palaces containing the world's greatest art treasures. These are some of the riches of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet in 1929 the Vatican was destitute. Pope Pius XI, living in a damaged, leaky, pigeon-infested Lateran Palace, could hear rats scurrying through the walls, and he worried about how he would pay for even basic repairs to unclog the overburdened sewer lines and update the antiquated heating system. How did the Church manage in less than seventy-five years such an incredible reversal of fortune? The story here told by Church historian Paul Williams is intriguing, shocking, and outrageous.The turnaround began on February 11, 1929, with the signing of the Lateran Treaty between the Vatican and fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Through this deal Mussolini gained the support of the staunchly Catholic Italian populace, who at the time followed the lead of the Church. In return, the Church received, among other benefits, a payment of $90 million, sovereign status for the Vatican, tax-free property rights, and guaranteed salaries for all priests throughout the country from the Italian government. With the stroke of a pen the pope had solved the Vatican's budgetary woes practically overnight, yet he also put a great religious institution in league with some of the darkest forces of the 20th century.Based on his years of experience as a consultant for the FBI, Williams produces explosive and never-before published evidence of the Church's morally questionable financial dealings with sinister organizations over seven decades through today. He examines the means by which the Vatican accrued enormous wealth during the Great Depression by investing in Mussolini's government, the connection between Nazi gold and the Vatican Bank, the vast range of Church holdings in the postwar boom period, Paul VI's appointment of Mafia chieftain Michele Sindona as the Vatican banker, a billion-dollar counterfeit stock fraud uncovered by Interpol and the FBI, the "Ambrosiano Affair" called "the greatest financial scandal of the 20th Century" by the New York Times, the mysterious death of John Paul I, profits from an international drug ring operating out of Gdansk, Poland, and revelations about current dealings.For both Catholics and non-Catholics this troubling exposé of corruption in one of the most revered religious institutions in the world will serve as an urgent call for reform.

    

    What if that's not the case? Alex Perry travels from the South China Sea to the highlands of Afghanistan to the Sahara to see globalisation at the sharp end.

    He spent almost nine years of his life in prison because of his activities as a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). When he died on 5 May 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike against repressive prison conditions in Northern Ireland's H Block prisons, parliaments across the world stopped for a minute silence in his honor. Nelson Mandela followed Sands' example and led a similar hunger strike in South Africa, and Fidel Castro compared his suffering to that of Jesus. Bobby Sand's remarkable life and death have made him an "Irish Che Guevara." He is an enduring figure of resistance whose life has been an inspiration to millions around the world. In Hollywood, actors like Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke and Brad Pitt have flirted with a biopic of his life. But until the publication of Nothing But an Unfinished Song, no book has adequately explored the motivation of the hunger strikers, nor recreated this period of history from within the prison cell. Denis O'Hearn's powerful biography, with new material based on primary research and interviews, illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial and heroic figure.

    Though there is a war going on in the world outside, they seem hardly touched by it – midnight swims, flower fairies and regatta parties form the backdrop to their enchanted childhood. But as they grow older, changes within Ireland and the wider world encroach upon the family’s private paradise.Turbulent times – the Irish war of independence, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II – are woven into the tapestry upon which this magical story is spun. Events in Spain, Russia and London draw the children in different directions: one travels to Moscow to witness Communism at first had; another runs away to England to take part in the General Strike and then heads off to the Civil War in Spain; another follows the more conventional route of marriage and family.Based upon the extraordinary lives of a real-life Anglo-Irish family, Bolger’s novel superbly recreates a family in flux, driven by idealism, wracked by argument and united by love and the vivid memories of childhood. ‘The Family on Paradise Pier’ shows Bolger at the height of his powers as a master storyteller. A spellbinding and magnificent achievement.

    It concludes with the Mauryan Empire, which, in the 3rd century BC, united an enormous area of the Indian subcontinent. As in The Mughal Throne, Abraham Eraly provides a superb portrait of Indian life and culture.

    Published in Britain to great acclaim--a startling, gut-wrenching memoir of war, personal dissolution, and rebirth based on the author's experiences in Bosnia.

    After a chapter of background on the period from 1921 to 1963, it covers the ensuing period-the descent into violence, the hunger strikes, the Anglo-Irish accord, the bombers in England-to the present shaky peace process. Behind the deluge of information and opinion about the conflict, there is a straightforward and gripping story. Mr. McKittrick and Mr. McVea tell that story clearly, concisely, and, above all, fairly, avoiding intricate detail in favor of narrative pace and accessible prose. They describe and explain a lethal but fascinating time in Northern Ireland's history, which brought not only death, injury, and destruction but enormous political and social change. They close on an optimistic note, convinced that while peace-if it comes-will always be imperfect, a corner has now been decisively turned. The book includes a detailed chronology, statistical tables, and a glossary of terms.

    Paul's largest black neighborhood. African Americans whose families had lived in Minnesota for decades and others who were just arriving from the South made up a vibrant, vital community that was in many ways independent of the white society around it.The Days of Rondo is Evelyn Fairbanks's affectionate memoir of this lively neighborhood. Its pages are filled with fascinating people: Mama and Daddy--Willie Mae and George Edwards--who taught her about love and pride an dignity; Aunt Good, a tall and stately woman with a "queenly secretive attitude"; brother Morris, who "took the time to teach me about the street and the people I would find there"; Mrs. Neal, the genteel activist who showed her the difference between a salad fork and a dessert fork; Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, who started a girls' string band; and a whole assortment of street vendors and playmates who made up the world of her childhoodAs she grew up, Fairbanks saw many different sides of her community. Her words bring to life the all-day Sunday services at the Sanctified church, the "perfect days" of her girlhood, and the ghost stories told on the porch of a soft midwestern summer evening. But she also remembers a visit to relatives in Georgia, the deaths of her Mama and Daddy, and the difficult lessons her free-wheeling brother taught her about friends and money. By the time Evelyn was a teenager, World War II was changing St. Paul and the whole world in ways that touched upon her own life. And through the years she was also discovering what it meant to grow up as a black person in Minnesota.A gifted storyteller, Fairbanks has recreated the patterns of her neighborhood life in a northern city. Her story ends in the mid-1950s, a few years before the Rondo neighborhood was destroyed by freeway construction. In preserving her memories of this distinctive community, Evelyn Fairbanks has added an important dimension to our understanding of Minnesota during those years."Fairbanks spins yarns about St. Paul's black society with the flair of a campfire storyteller." --St. Paul Pioneer Press "Must reading for anyone wanting a clearer understanding of the history of race relations." --Library Journal "Narrative history at its best." --Choice "Her prose is simple and concise and is leavened by a rich sense of humor." --Minnesota Monthly "The Days of Rondo is an interpretive account of events in the life of a black family from the South struggling for survival and meaning in a northern city. Rich in humor and detail, it provides a well-illustrated mosaic of socioeconomic, ethnic, and class realities as seen through the eyes of a young black woman." --David V. Taylor, author of African-Americans in Minnesota

    Slaughterhouse is the definitive explanation of a war that will be remembered as the greatest failure of Western diplomacy since the 1930s. Bosnia was more than a human tragedy. It was the emblem of the international community's failure and confusion in the post-Cold War era. In Bosnia, genocide and ethnic fascism reappeared in Europe for the first time in fifty years. But there was no will to confront them, either on the part of the United States, Western Europe, or the United Nations, for which the Bosnian experience was as catastrophic and demoralizing as Vietnam was for the United States. It is the failure and its implications that Rieff anatomizes in this unforgiving account of a war that might have been prevented and could have been stopped.