A firsthand exploration of war and the people who survive it in three of the most war-ravaged countries on earth: Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville.

    The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades – unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story. On checking into the Queen’s Hotel he finds that things are not as straightforward as he imagined, and South Africa is not as he left it. His carefully ordered world is thrown into turmoil as his trip dredges up a long-abandoned past, forcing him to question the assumptions so easily held from the comfort of his London flat. He meets a mixture of locals, visitors, vagrants and migrants, but most momentously, Peter discovers that his bosom friend from school, Bennie Nienaber, is still in Alfredville – and is in fact now, acting station commander at the local police station. Peter re-establishes an awkward friendship with his erstwhile friend and the two warily circle each other, sharing reminiscences that hint at a bond much deeper than nostalgia. As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée’s story, he now starts to rewrite his own – till events take an even more shocking turn….Lost Ground explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go.Michiel Heyns is the author of four previous novels: The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger, The Typewriter’s Tale and Bodies Politic. He is a translator and was professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch.

    But despite Mandela’s mission of reconciliation, rampant inequality remains; race relations are uneasy, violence is endemic and many in the ANC appear to have lost sight of the liberation ideals. With the election in 2009 of Jacob Zuma, a charismatic populist embroiled in scandal, uncertainty over the trajectory of the nation has only intensified. South Africa now stands at a crossroads, and award-winning journalist Alec Russell draws on his deep knowledge of the country to tell us how it got there and to give us a compelling account, revised and updated for this edition, of the journey from Mandela to Zuma.

    A biography of Benjamin Franklin from his birth in Boston in 1706 through his years as printer,statesman, inventor, author, and reformer.

    Although the occasional newspaper headline alerts us to genocide, AIDS, malaria, or civil war in Africa, most of us know very little about the continent. However we still carry strong mental images of Africa, which are reflected in American advertising, movies, amusement parks, cartoons, and many other corners of our society.Few think to question these perceptions or how they came to be so deeply lodged in the collective American consciousness. Curtis Keim’s Mistaking Africa looks at the historical evolution of this mindset and examines the role that popular media play in the creation of our mental images of Africa. Keim addresses the most prevalent myths and preconceptions and demonstrates how these prevent a true understanding of the enormously diverse peoples and cultures of Africa. Updated throughout, the second edition includes an entirely revised chapter on Africa in images, which analyzes portrayals of Africa in popular media, including print advertising by corporations such as Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, IBM, Vogue magazine, Honda, and Snapple. New to the second edition as well is an appendix on learning more about Africa.ContentsPart One: Introduction1. Changing Our Mind about Africa2. How We LearnPart Two: Evolutionism3. The Origins of “Darkest Africa”4. “Our Living Ancestors”: Twentieth-Century Evolutionism5. Real Africa, Wise Africa6. We Should Help ThemPart Three: Further Misperceptions7. Cannibalism: No Accounting for Taste8. Africans Live in Tribes, Don’t They?9. Safari: Beyond Our Wildest Dreams10. Africa in ImagesPart Four: New Directions11. Race and Culture: The Same and the Other12. From Imagination to DialogueAppendix: Learning More

    But before she can work off her debt, an unthinkable chain of events unfolds: a capture by slave traders; weeks in a dark and airless hold; a landing in Cuba, where she and three other children are sold and taken aboard the Amistad; a mutiny aboard ship; a trial in New Haven that eventually goes all the way to the Supreme Court and is argued in the Africans’ favor by John Quincy Adams. Narrated in a remarkable first-person voice, this fictionalized book of memories of a real-life figure retells history through the eyes of a child — from seeing mirrors for the first time and struggling with laughably complicated clothing to longing for family and a home she never forgets. Lush, full-color illustrations by Robert Byrd, plus archival photographs and documents, bring an extraordinary journey to life.

    

    Traveling to Baghdad and then to Mosul with the 1st Cavalry Division, McDonell offers an unforgettable look at the way things stand now—at the translators stranded in a country that doesn’t look kindly on their cooperation, at the infantrymen struggling to make something out of the soft counterinsurgency missions they call chai-ops, at the commanders inured to American journalists and Iraqi officials both—and what the so-called “end of major combat operations” means for where they’re going.

    So at age twenty-six, off she went to Africa! Goodall's up-close observations of chimpanzees changed what we know about them and paved the way for many female scientists who came after her. Now her story comes to life in this biography with black-and-white illustrations throughout.

    On board were thirty barely clad black men, armed with cutlasses, and two white men - Spanish slave owners with an incredible story to tell. A month earlier, the Amistad had set sail from Havana with a valuable cargo of slaves and $40,000 worth of gold doubloons. She was headed for the Cuban coastal town of Puerto Principe - but in a matter of days, the captain and the cook were dead, and the ship was in the control of the slaves. Thus began "the Amistad affair," which, writes Mary Cable, "was to bedevil the diplomatic relations of the United States, Spain, and England for a generation; intensify bitterness over the question of slavery; and lead an ex-president (John Quincy Adams) to go before the Supreme Court and castigate the administration in an eloquent plea for the slaves' freedom. In her fascinating and carefully researched account, Cable takes us right to the heart of these complex matters, dramatically replaying an incredible series of events that converged to form a uniquely exciting and challenging chapter in American history.

    Here, from award-winning historian and journalist Charles Mercer, is the story of the military genius who became a king at twenty told with all the color and drama characteristic of Alexander's time.

    The trail ran like a bright band from religious ceremonies in India to Europe’s Middle Ages, then on to Columbus, who brought the first cane cuttings to the Americas. Sugar was the substance that drove the bloody slave trade and caused the loss of countless lives but it also planted the seeds of revolution that led to freedom in the American colonies, Haiti, and France. With songs, oral histories, maps, and over 80 archival illustrations, here is the story of how one product allows us to see the grand currents of world history in new ways. Time line, source notes, bibliography, index.

    Each story in this book by John Haaren is told in a clear, simple manner, and is well calculated to awaken and stimulate the youthful imagination. Notable characters featured in Famous Men of the Middle Ages include Attila the Hun, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Frederick Barbarossa, Marco Polo, and William Tell. Somewhat surprisingly, Famous Men of the Middle Ages also includes a chapter about one woman: Joan of Arc.

    Both keys slid in unopposed. Both locks operated first time – lifting the heavy lid took all of Lee’s strength.From inside the box the accumulated wealth of twenty years stared up at him. Though he had seen it a hundred times before, under that yellow glare from his cap lamp the buttery glint of raw metal took his breath away.For over two decades, the Goddards have struggled through the uncertainties of war, political upheaval and now, faced with mounting pressure from a corrupt government, they are forced to make decisions that will change their lives forever. As Managing Director of the Empress Deep gold mine, Lee Goddard rolls into play the final ball of an already dangerous game.Fostered by rampant avarice and political uncertainty, life in Zimbabwe is worthless – only the elite survive. For a fortune in gold and tribal treasures, some are willing to sell the very soul of an emergent country.

    It was ordered by then Prime Minister Menachem Begin to rescue thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan and "deliver them to me" in the Jewish state. No stranger to action in enemy countries, the agency established a covert forward base in a deserted holiday village in Sudan, and deployed a handful of operatives to launch and oversee the exodus of the refugees to the Promised Land, by sea and by air, in the early 1980s. Gad Shimron, the author of this book, was one of their number. First published in Hebrew in 1998, this updated English version of the book offers a thrilling firsthand account of how the operation was put in place, and how the Mossad team in Sudan brought it off, despite great personal risk, running a partying vacation spot for wealthy tourists by day as they stole through the Sudanese desert to rescue desperate refugees by night. The book sheds light on American involvement in the latter stages of the operation, when the White House facilitated an airlift of Ethiopian Jews and the CIA station in Khartoum sheltered the last Mossad operatives, on the run from Libyan secret service agents, and spirited them out of Sudan in special boxes labeled Diplomatic Mail. Enhanced by Gad Shimron's wide-ranging historical observations and his crisp, incisive prose, this is at once an entertaining read and a powerful tale of idealistic heroism.