Book picks similar to
Russia by Shreya Sarkar


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Culture Shock! France


Sally Adamson Taylor - 1991
    Get the nuts-and-bolts information you need to survive and thrive wherever you go. "Culture Shock!" country guides are easy-to-read, accurate, and entertaining crash courses in local customs and etiquette. "Culture Shock!" practical guides offer the inside information you need whether you're a student, a parent, a globetrotter, or a working traveler. "Culture Shock!" at your Door guides equip you for daily life in some of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. And "Culture Shock!" Success Secrets guides offer relevant, practical information with the real-life insights and cultural know-how that can make the difference between business success and failure.Each "Culture Shock!" title is written by someone who's lived and worked in the country, and each book is packed with practical, accurate, and enjoyable information to help you find your way and feel at home.

Death Beach


Simon Scarrow - 2014
    With grievous losses amongst the Second Legion's men in a campaign of coordinated enemy attacks, the approaching winter could be catastrophic. When a unit of battle-hardened soldiers is dispatched to rout the native warriors, amongst them is Figulus, an optio whose local knowledge makes him doubt the Commander's confidence in a speedy and successful mission. The unit is deep in enemy territory when it makes a horrifying discovery: of the maimed bodies of brutally tortured Roman prisoners. It's clear what a dreadful fate awaits Figulus and his comrades unless they can outwit and repulse the Britons...

Russka: The Novel of Russia


Edward Rutherfurd - 1991
    Here is a story of a great civilization made human, played out through the lives of four families who are divided by ethnicity but united in shaping the destiny of their land.

Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Lives of Britain's Country Houses 1939-1945


Julie Summers - 2019
    Renowned social historian Julie Summers searches out the best voices from the past who convey the many problems these families faced during the early years of the conflict; where they were sent around the British Isles to live in safety; and what problems and social stigmas they overcame when dropped into parts of the country that at any other time would have seemed foreign to them.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster


Adam Higginbotham - 2019
    The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies. The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told—until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.

My Lost Mexico


James A. Michener - 1992
    Michener set aside a half-completed manuscript. That manuscript was Mexico. It would become an international bestseller in the winter of 1992-93. My Lost Mexico is the story behind the book that took the world by storm.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident


Donnie Eichar - 2013
    Eerie aspects of the incident—unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really happened. This gripping work of literary nonfiction delves into the mystery through unprecedented access to the hikers' own journals and photographs, rarely seen government records, dozens of interviews, and the author's retracing of the hikers' fateful journey in the Russian winter. A fascinating portrait of the young hikers in the Soviet era, and a skillful interweaving of the hikers narrative, the investigators' efforts, and the author's investigations, here for the first time is the real story of what happened that night on Dead Mountain

Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions, 1905-1917


Harrison E. Salisbury - 1977
    In little more than a decade the Romanov dynasty was toppled, and its time-honored institutions repudiated. How did it happen? How could Nicholas and Alexandra, the nobility, middle class anarchists—even Lenin himself—not foresee the catastrophic changes that were shaking the empire? Why could nothing be done? And why were the efforts so ineffectual? Black Night, White Snow captures the rich drama of this whole period. With the artistry of a Balzac, Harrison Salisbury exposes the strata of Russian society, with its decedents, prophetic poets, religious fanatics, and newly liberated serfs. From archival sources within the Soviet Union, interviews, and his personal photography collection, he recreates the story as it happened. Hard data on Russia's economy, a first-hand knowledge of the county, and a historian's gift of compression are combined in a fast-paced narrative that reads with the ease of a good novel and the urgency of a newspaper headline.

Boxer, Beetle


Ned Beauman - 2010
    It is a novel that engages the mind while satisfying those that crave the thrill of a chase. There are riots and sex. There is love and murder. There is Darwinism and Fascism, nightclubs, invented languages and the dangerous bravado of youth. And there are lots of beetles. It is clever. It is distinctive. It is entertaining. We hope you are too.

I Catch Killers: The Life and Many Deaths of a Homicide Detective


Gary Jubelin - 2020
    This is the memoir of a homicide detective.Here I am: tall and broad, shaved head, had my nose broken three times fighting. Black suit, white shirt, the big city homicide detective. I've led investigations into serial killings, child abductions, organised crime hits and domestic murders. But beneath the suit, I've got an Om symbol in the shape of a Buddha tattooed on my right bicep. It balances the tattoo on my left ribs: Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. That's how I choose to live my life.As a cop, I got paid to catch killers and I learned what doing it can cost you. It cost me marriages and friendships. It cost me my reputation. They tell you not to let a case get personal, but I think it has to. Each one has taken a piece out of me and added a piece, until there's only pieces.I catch killers - it's what I do. It's who I am.Gary Jubelin was one of Australia's most celebrated detectives, leading investigations into the disappearance of preschooler William Tyrrell, the serial killing of three Aboriginal children in Bowraville and the brutal gangland murder of Terry Falconer. During his 34-year career, Detective Chief Inspector Jubelin also ran the crime scene following the Lindt Cafe siege, investigated the death of Caroline Byrne and recovered the body of Matthew Leveson. Jubelin retired from the force in 2019. This is his story

The Fat of the Land


John Seymour - 1961
    More than fifty years on, The Fat of the Land remains an important and inspiring book and retains its power to make us think carefully about our own lives.

Zhukov's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942


David M. Glantz - 1999
    Designed to dislodge the German Army from its position west of Moscow, Mars cost the Soviets an estimated 335,000 dead, missing, and wounded men and over 1,600 tanks. But in Russian history books, it was a battle that never happened. It became instead another victim of Stalin's postwar censorship.David Glantz now offers the first definitive account of this forgotten catastrophe, revealing the key players and detailing the major events of Operation Mars. Using neglected sources in both German and Russian archives, he reconstructs the historical context of Mars and reviews the entire operation from High Command to platoon level.Orchestrated and led by Marshal Georgy Kostantinovich Zhukov, one of the Soviet Union's great military heroes, the twin operations Mars and Uranus formed the centerpiece of Soviet strategic efforts in the fall of 1942. Launched in tandem with Operation Uranus, the successful counteroffensive at Stalingrad, Mars proved a monumental setback. Fought in bad weather and on impossible terrain, the ambitious offensive faltered (despite spectacular initial success in some sectors). Zhukov kept sending in more troops and tanks only to see them decimated by the entrenched Germans.Illuminating the painful progress of Operation Mars with vivid battle scenes and numerous maps and illustrations, Glantz presents Mars as a major failure of Zhukov's renowned command. Yet, both during and after the war, that failure was masked from public view by the successful Stalingrad operation, thus eliminating any stain from Zhukov's public image as a hero of the Great PatrioticWar.For three grueling weeks, Operation Mars was one of the most tragic and agonizing episodes in Soviet military history. Glantz's reconstruction of that failed offensive fills a major gap in our knowledge of World War II, even as it raises important questions about the reputations of national military heroes.

The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook, Expanded Edition: Pressure Test, Plan, Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise


Ian C. MacMillan - 2013
    MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.MacMillan and Thompson used their own systematic framework to publish The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook. To test the market, they offered the first phase in their start-up method (step 1) as a free ebook. Readers were invited to join The Social Entrepreneur's Advisory Group, and nearly 300 aspiring and active social entrepreneurs shared feedback that helped shape the complete edition of the book, which covers all three steps in the start-up to scale-up process.Based on this crowd-sourced feedback from readers of the free ebook and drawing on the authors' more than 26 years' combined experience developing and studying social enterprises in the field across Africa and in the United States, this new edition provides guidance for each phase:Phase One: Pressure Test Your Start-Up Idea. Based on the free ebook, this expanded section now includes advice on setting revenue and social impact goals, how to navigate the sociopolitical landscape, and how to develop a strong concept statement. In addition, MacMillan and Thompson provide advice on how to identify and test a proposed revenue-generating solution and define and segment your target population.Phase Two: Plan Your Social Enterprise. All new to this edition, this critical phase shows you how to frame and scope the venture, determine what it will take to actually deliver a sustainable enterprise, identify the key assumptions that have been made, and design checkpoints to test those assumptions before making major investments.Phase Three: Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise. Available for the first time in this edition, you will learn how to effectively launch your enterprise, manage upside potential and downside risk, and strategically scale up.Filled with accessible frameworks and tools, as well as inspiring stories of social entrepreneurs, The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook is a must-read for any aspiring or active social entrepreneur, as well as philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofits interested in doing more good with fewer resources. Includes access to downloadable planning documents, including user-friendly spreadsheets

Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem


Carol Delaney - 2011
    Five hundred years after Columbus set off on his remarkable journey, debates about his legacy still rage. Once revered, he’s now frequently held to have been destructive, reckless, and responsible for everything that went wrong in the New World. But scholar Carol Delaney offers a profoundly new evaluation of Columbus and the motivation for his famous voyages.Putting the man back into the context of his times, Delaney shows that it was his abiding religious passion that drove him to petition the Spanish monarchy to support his journey. He and much of society believed that the end of the world was imminent and believed that Jerusalem needed to be back under Christian control before the end of days. Delaney asserts that—contrary to the belief that he sought personal wealth and advancement—Columbus’s mission was to obtain enough gold for the Spanish crown to finance a new crusade to Jerusalem that could regain control of the holy city from the Muslims. Delaney recounts the drama of the four voyages, bringing the challenges vividly to life. She depicts Columbus as a thoughtful interpreter of the native cultures that he and his men encountered, explaining the tragic story of how his initial attempts to establish good relations turned badly sour.Filled with illuminating research (informed by a fascinating stint Delaney spent as a sailor on a tall ship), Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem offers not an apologist’s take, but a clear-eyed, thought-provoking, and timely reappraisal of the man and his mission.

Grammar for IELTS


Diana Hopkins - 2006
    It includes a wide range of IELTS tasks from the Academic and General Training Reading, Writing and Listening modules, and contains helpful grammar explanations and a grammar glossary. A Student's Book 'without answers' is also available.Work through the units or focus on areas that need more practice. The answer key includes tape scripts and model writing answers. The book comes with a CD containing all the listening material.