Book picks similar to
A Game Of War by Alice Becker-Ho


politics
non-fiction
愿望清单
castling

My Battle Of Algiers: A Memoir


Ted Morgan - 2006
    A Yale graduate who had grown up in both France and America -- he was then known as Sanche de Gramont and was then a French citizen -- he was drafted into the French Army and served in Algeria 1956 and '57. In this memoir, Morgan relives the harrowing conflict in which every Arab was considered a terrorist -- and increasingly, many were.As a newly minted second lieutenant, he spends months in the back country -- the bled -- where everyone, including himself, becomes involved in unimaginable barbarities. "You cannot fight a guerrilla war with humanitarian principles," a superior officer tells Morgan early on. He beats up and kills a prisoner who won't talk and may have been responsible for the death of a friend. He kills another man in a firefight. He sees men die in encounters too small to be recorded, ones that his fellow soldiers quickly forget. For Morgan, the memories will never go away.Later, in Algiers, Morgan's journalistic experience -- he had spent all of four months as a reporter on the Worcester, MA, Telegram -- gets him a job writing for an official newspaper. He lives through the day-to-day struggle to put down an Arab urban insurgency, the first in modern history, with its unrelenting menu of bombings, assassinations, torture, show trials, executions, and the deliberate humiliation of prisoners. He misses death when a beach casino explodes just as he is going in for lunch. He becomes disillusioned with the war and what it is doing to his country. He is himself arrested, but not for the real offense he committed, helping a deserter to escape.Though the events Ted Morgan describes so vividly happened nearly half a century ago in Algiers, they might as well have taken place in Baghdad today.

Field of Schemes


Neil deMause - 2008
    

The American Revolution, 1763-1783


Christopher Collier - 1997
    Examines the people and events involved in the significant war by which the thirteen original colonies broke away from England.

The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism, the Rest of Us with Coronavirus, And Why We Aren’t Done With Him Yet


S.V. Date - 2021
    

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century


Timothy Snyder - 2017
    Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror


W. Scott Poole - 2018
    Scott Poole traces the confluence of history, technology, and art that gave us modern horror films and literatureIn the early twentieth century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world’s map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war.From Nosferatu to Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolf Man, from Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Albin Grau to Tod Browning and James Whale, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War. Historian W. Scott Poole chronicles these major figures and the many movements they influenced. Wasteland reveals how bloody battlefields, the fear of the corpse, and a growing darkness made their way into the deepest corners of our psyche.On the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that brought World War I to a close, W. Scott Poole takes us behind the front lines of battle to a no-man’s-land where the legacy of the War to End All Wars lives on.

The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind


Simone Weil - 1949
    In 1943, the final year of her life, unable to join the resistance movement in France, she worked in London for the Free French government in exile. Here she was commissioned to outline a plan for the renewal of Europe after the scourge of Nazism. The Need for Roots was the direct result. In it she seized the opportunity to denounce the false values of contemporary civilisation. In the cult of materials she witnessed a devastating loss of spirit and consequently of human values. To counteract this she sets out a radical vision for spiritual and political renewal with a passion for truth which sweeps through these pages. The book has become a lasting spiritual testament for our age, where we are confronted, as T.S. Eliot comments, by a 'genius akin to that of the saints'.

20 Years of Tomb Raider: Digging Up the Past, Defining the Future


Meagan Marie - 2016
    Rediscover Lara Croft's greatest moments with fascinating coverage of the smash hit Tomb Raider movies, fiction, comics, and collectibles, and be enthralled by the legacy of Tomb Raider across the decades.Packed with exclusive art, photographs, and interviews covering all facets of the Tomb Raider franchise, 20 Years of Tomb Raider is the essential guide to this game's action-packed history and a must-have for every Tomb Raider fan.

The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party


Philip Gould - 1998
    Blair's majority was the culmination of a long struggle to modernize the party, and the politics of his country. Philip Gould is a political strategist and polling adviser who has worked with the Labour leadership since the 1980s. In this book he describes its rise and explains how the transformation was achieved, at the same time exploring the changed political climate in Britain.

Arguments for Socialism


Tony Benn - 1979
    

Life Sentence


Christie Blatchford - 2013
    When Christie Blatchford wandered into a Toronto courtroom in 1978 for the start of the first criminal trial she would cover as a newspaper reporter, little did she know she was also at the start of a self-imposed life sentence. In this book, Christie Blatchford revisits trials from throughout her career and asks the hard questions--about judges playing with the truth--through editing of criminal records, whitewashing of criminal records, pre-trial rulings that kick out evidence the jury can't hear. She discusses bad or troubled judges--how and why they get picked, and what can be done about them. And shows how judges are handmaidens to the state, as in the Bernardo trial when a small-town lawyer and an intellectual writer were pursued with more vigor than Karla Homolka. For anyone interested in the political and judicial fabric of this country, Life Sentence is a remarkable, argumentative, insightful and hugely important book.

The Russians


Hedrick Smith - 1973
    Over steaming samovars, in cramped flats, and on dirt-floors, he has spoken to peasants and bureaucrats, artists and officials. He has studied their customs and their governments and shares his fascinating insights and fresh perspectives with us.

Adjusting Sights


Haim Sabato - 1999
    A month later, Haim returns alone, on his first leave home. Struggling to come to terms with his experiences he wonders what happened to Dov during those fateful days.

The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption


Georges Bataille - 1949
    In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. The History of Eroticism analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life.

The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Matephor of Modernity


Linda Nochlin - 1995
    The grandness of that history no longer fit into the framework of the present, and artists felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishment. This was soon reflected in artistic representation, from Fuseli on. The partial image, the "crop," fragmentation, ruin, and mutilationall expressed grief and nostalgia for the loss of a vanished totality, a utopian wholeness. Often such feelings were expressed in deliberate destructiveness, which became the new way of seeing: the notion of the modern. In The Body in Pieces, the noted critic and art historian Linda Nochlin traces these developments by looking at work produced by artists from Neoclassicism and Romanticism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and beyond. 59 illustrations.