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Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin lamented that English settlers were constantly fleeing over to the Indians -- but Indians almost never did the same. Tribal society has been exerting an almost gravitational pull on Westerners for hundreds of years, and the reason lies deep in our evolutionary past as a communal species. The most recent example of that attraction is combat veterans who come home to find themselves missing the...
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One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century.
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"Reaching back into the long history of invasion, occupation and colonization in the region, Robert Fisk sets forth information in a way that makes clear how a history of injustice "has condemned the Middle East to war." He lays open the role of the West in the seemingly endless strife and warfare in the region, traces the growth of the West's involvement and influence there over the past one hundred years, and outlines the West's record of support...
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"How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history ... In May 1315, it started to rain. It didn't stop anywhere in north Europe until August. Next came the four coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europe's livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all...
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"When Phil Klay left the Marines a decade ago, after serving as an officer in Iraq, he found himself part of the community of veterans who have no choice but to grapple with the meaning of their wartime experiences-for themselves and for the country. American identity has always been bound up in war-from the revolutionary war of our founding, to the civil war that ended slavery, to the two world wars that launched America as a superpower. What did...
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Set in an Edwardian country house in 1912, Downton Abbey portrays the lives of the Crawley family and the servants who work for them. In the drawing rooms, library, and beautiful bedrooms, with their tall windows looking across the park, lives the family, but below stairs are other residents, the servants, as fiercely possessive of their ranks as anyone above.
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The War is over and a long-awaited engagement is on, but all is not tranquil at Downton Abbey as wrenching social changes, romantic intrigues, and personal crises grip the majestic English country estate for a third thrilling season. In the wake of World War I, Robert, Earl of Grantham, sticks to his duty to maintain Downton more firmly than ever.
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Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer's release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the "notifiers" who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along their former best friend and her former lover Avram. Avram served in the army alongside...
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"From the frontlines as a firsthand witness to war-torn countries around the world, Potts has worked with ministries and governments and in the trenches with women who have been raped and brutalized as an instrument of war. Combining his personal experience with the latest scientific findings, Potts explains that men have evolved under conditions that favored gang behavior, violence and team aggression, and observations of chimpanzee behavior confirm...
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"The roots of modern horror are found in the First World War. It was the most devastating event to occur in the early 1900s, with 38 million dead and 17 million wounded in the most grotesque of ways, owing to the new machines brought to war. If Downton Abbey showed the ripple effect of this catastrophe above stairs, Wasteland reveals how it made its way into the darker corners of our psyche on the bloody battlefield, the screaming asylum, and desolated...
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As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive. "It gives us purpose, meaning,...
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In this new world order, governments have fallen, communities have been destroyed, and families devastated. You're either a Hater or one of the Unchanged, a killer or a victim. Whichever side you're on, you're at war. The terrified Unchanged masses cower in fear while the war continues to rage all around them with neither the military nor the Haters prepared to stop fighting until the enemy has been destroyed.
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"On August 27, 1943, news broke in the United States that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was on the other side of the world. A closely guarded secret, she had left San Francisco aboard a military transport plane headed for the South Pacific to support and report the troops on WW2's front lines. Meanwhile, for those ten days, Americans had believed she was secluded at home. As Allied forces battled the Japanese for control of the region, Eleanor was...
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"War, the instinct to fight, is inherent in human nature; peace is the aberration in history. War has shaped humanity, its institutions, its states, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out the most vile and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret...
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From small-scale battles of the ancient world to devastating modern conflicts, 1001 Battles That Changed the Course of History provides a definitive record of the combats of the last 5000 years which shaped the political and cultural landscape of the world. From the battles of the ancient world involving only a few thousand infantry, to the devastation of the World Wars, and to the efficient, tactical, military actions of today, this book includes...
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Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment.
Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs...
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A Brief Illustrated History of Warfare charts the history of warfare all the way through from the early charioteers and spear throwers, through Roman legions, knights, and siege machines, through to musketeers and the military arms used in the two world wars, then all the way through to the use of smart weapons today.