A Man's World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith


Donald McRae - 2015
    However, I love a man and many say this makes me an evil person.' On 24 March 1962, when Emile Griffith stepped into the ring in Madison Square Garden to defend his world title against Benny Paret, he was filled with rage. During their weigh-in, the Cuban challenger had denounced Griffith as a 'faggot' and minced towards him. In the macho world of boxing, where fighters know they are engaged in the hurt game, there could be no greater insult. At that time, it was illegal for people of the same gender to have sex, or even for a bar to knowingly serve a drink to a gay person. It was an insinuation that could have had dangerous consequences for Griffith - especially as it was true. In the fight that followed, Griffith pounded Paret into unconsciousness, and the Cuban would die soon after, leaving Griffith haunted by what he had done. Despite this, he went on to fight more world championship rounds than any other fighter in history in a career that lasted for almost 20 years. In Donald McRae's first sports book in more than a decade, he weaves a compelling tale of triumph over prejudice - Griffith was black, so doubly damned by contemporary society, but refused to cower away as society wished. A Man's World, longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, is sure to become a classic piece of sports writing.

الخوف من البرابرة: ما وراء صدام الحضارات


Tzvetan Todorov - 2009
    A growing immigrant population and worries about cultural and political assimilation—exacerbated by terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and around the world—have provoked reams of commentary from all parts of the political spectrum, a frustrating majority of it hyperbolic or even hysterical.In The Fear of Barbarians, the celebrated intellectual Tzvetan Todorov offers a corrective: a reasoned and often highly personal analysis of the problem, rooted in Enlightenment values yet open to the claims of cultural difference. Drawing on history, anthropology, and politics, and bringing to bear examples ranging from the murder of Theo van Gogh to the French ban on headscarves, Todorov argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect. True freedom, Todorov explains, requires us to strike a delicate balance between protecting and imposing cultural values, acknowledging the primacy of the law, and yet strenuously protecting minority views that do not interfere with its aims. Adding force to Todorov's arguments is his own experience as a native of communist Bulgaria: his admiration of French civic identity—and Western freedom—is vigorous but non-nativist, an inclusive vision whose very flexibility is its core strength.The record of a penetrating mind grappling with a complicated, multifaceted problem, The Fear of Barbarians is a powerful, important book—a call, not to arms, but to thought.

Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society


Sandra Lauderdale Graham - 2002
    The slave woman struggled to avoid an unwanted husband and the woman of privilege assumed a patriarch's role to endow a family of her former slaves with the means for a free life. Sandra Lauderdale Graham casts new light on larger meanings of slave and free, female and male, through these compact histories.

A Study Of Islamic History


K. Ali - 2007
    

The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite, 1945-1963


Michael Swanson - 2013
    It accounts for over 46% of total world arms spending. Before World War II it spent almost nothing on defense and hardly anyone paid any income taxes. You can't have big wars without big government. Such big expenditures are now threatening to harm the national economy. How did this situation come to be? In this book you'll learn how in the critical twenty years after World War II the United States changed from being a continental democratic republic to a global imperial superpower. Since then nothing has ever been the same again. In this book you will discover this secret history of the United States that formed the basis of the world we live in today. By buying this book you will discover: - How the end of European colonialism created a power vacuum that the United States used to create a new type of world empire backed by the most powerful military force in human history. - Why the Central Intelligence Agency was created and used to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations when the United States Constitution had no mechanism for such imperial activities. - How national security bureaucrats got President Harry Truman to approve of a new wild budget busting arms race after World War II that is still going on to this day. - Why President Eisenhower really gave his famous warning against the "military-industrial complex." - Why during the Kennedy administration the nuclear arms race almost led to the end of the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis. - How President Kennedy tried to deal with what had grown into a "permanent government" of power elite national security bureaucrats in the executive branch of the federal government that had become more powerful than the individual president himself. In this book you will discover this secret history of the United States that formed the basis of the world we live in today.

Into Africa


Thomas Sterling - 2016
    But neither that simple drawing nor his matter-of-fact description gave Caillié's countrymen a sufficiently colorful picture to match their preconceptions of how Africa should look. They turned their backs on the young explorer, ignored his accomplishments, and let him die neglected. Here are the epic adventures of the European explorers who opened Africa – from Mongo Park and Vasco da Gama to Francis Burton and David Livingstone and Henry Stanley.

The Syrian Rebellion


Fouad Ajami - 2012
    Focusing on the similarities and differences in skills between former dictator Hafez al-Assad and his successor son, Bashar, Ajami explains how an irresistible force clashed with an immovable object: the regime versus people who conquered fear to challenge a despot of unspeakable cruelty.

Islam: Faith and History


Mahmoud M. Ayoub - 1989
    Taking his own spiritual journey as a starting point, Professor Ayoub explores all aspects of Islam; from the Qur'an and Islamic law to the epic poetry of the Sufis; from the spread of Islam worldwide to reform movements in the US and Europe.

After The Party


Andrew Feinstein - 2007
    Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC member of parliament, recounts how Mandela's successor Thabo Mbeki repressed debate within the party, imposed his AIDS denialism on government, refused to criticize Mugabe's rule in Zimbabwe and stopped an investigation of a multi-billion-dollar arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level graft. Feinstein shows how this infamous deal epitomises all that is rotten at the heart of the ANC. Investigating the payment of up to $200 million worth of bribes, he reveals a web of concealment and corruption involving senior politicians and officials, and figures at the very highest level of South African politics.With an insider's account of the events surrounding the contentious trial of South Africa's colourful President, Jacob Zuma, and the ongoing tragedy in Zimbabwe, After the Party has been acclaimed as the most important book on South Africa since the end of apartheid.

Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer


Bettina Stangneth - 2011
    Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant’s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders—no more, he said, than “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s own recently discovered written notes— as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires—draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself,  an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives. A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazis—from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen—both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaust’s principal organizers as no other book has done

The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran's Global Ambitions


Arash Azizi - 2020
    Known as ‘the shadow commander’, he enacted the wishes of the country’s Supreme Leader across the Middle East, establishing the Islamic Republic as a major force in the region. But all this was a long way from where he began – on the margins of a nation whose ruler was seen as a friend of the West. Through Soleimani, Arash Azizi examines how Iran came to be where it is today. Providing a rare insight into a country whose actions are often discussed but seldom understood, he reveals the global ambitions underlying Iran’s proxy wars, geopolitics and nuclear programme.

Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind


Curtis A. Keim - 1980
    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

Alligator Blood: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the High-rolling Whiz-kid who Controlled Online Poker's Billions


James Leighton - 2013
    That is until he discovered the lucrative world of payment processing for online poker companies. Soon the Australian whiz-kid was living the American dream, raking in as much as $3m a week. Revelling in his jet set lifestyle of fast cars, luxury yachts and VIP nightclubs, he embarked on an epic rollercoaster of champagne fuelled excess which mirrored that of the extraordinary world of online poker, where hot shot college students won millions from the confines of their dorms, and fortunes were won or lost in seconds.However, Tzvetkoff’s move to the neon splattered underworld of Las Vegas would soon see him facing the abyss. Owing millions to the poker companies, and with the FBI hot on his trail, the tarnished boy wonder needed to pull an ace from his sleeve to keep from busting out. And when he did, it resulted in a day that sent a seismic shockwave through the world of online poker and saw him take the blame.

My life and struggle; autobiography of Badshah Khan


Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan - 1969
    Narang. Badshah Khan was the leader of the Khudai Khidmatgar (also known as the Red Shirts) in NWFP.

The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller


Carlo Ginzburg - 1976
    Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records of Domenico Scandella, a miller also known as Menocchio, to show how one person responded to the confusing political and religious conditions of his time.For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."