Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters
Download Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by : Jason Stearns
Download or read book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters written by Jason Stearns and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "tremendous," "intrepid" history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.
Book Synopsis The War That Doesn't Say Its Name by : Jason K. Stearns
Download or read book The War That Doesn't Say Its Name written by Jason K. Stearns and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international intervention Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a “forever war”—a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003—accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid—has failed to stop the violence. Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors. Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit. Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change. Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players—Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups. He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise. Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.
Book Synopsis Africa's World War by : Gerard Prunier
Download or read book Africa's World War written by Gerard Prunier and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-31 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rwandan genocide sparked a horrific bloodbath that swept across sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately leading to the deaths of some four million people. In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gerard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval. Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-D?sir? Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world. Praise for the hardcover: "The most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994." --New York Review of Books "One of the first books to lay bare the complex dynamic between Rwanda and Congo that has been driving this disaster." --Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times Book Review "Lucid, meticulously researched and incisive, Prunier's will likely become the standard account of this under-reported tragedy." --Publishers Weekly
Book Synopsis Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen by : Lisa Shannon
Download or read book Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen written by Lisa Shannon and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driven by her family’s devastating losses, Congolese expatriate Francisca Thelin embarks, with human rights activist Lisa J. Shannon, on a perilous journey back to her beloved homeland, now under the shadow of one of Africa’s most feared militias—Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. With gunmen camped at the edge of town, Francisca is forced to face a paralyzing clash between her life in America and her family’s rapidly evaporating world—and the reality that their rush to her family’s aid may backfire. Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen weaves Francisca’s journey with stories of the family’s harrowing encounters with gunmen and tales from their past to create a vivid, illuminating portrait of a place and its people. We hear of Mama Koko’s early life as a gap-toothed beauty plotting to escape her inevitable fate of wife and motherhood; of Papa Alexander’s empire of wives, each of whom he married because she cooked and cleaned and made good coffee; and of Francisca’s idyllic childhood, when she ran barefoot through the family’s coffee plantation gorging herself on mangoes and fish that “were the size of small children.” Offering compelling testimony to the strength of the human spirit and the beauty of human connection in the darkest of times, Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen also explores what it means and requires to truly make a difference in an unjust and often violent world.
Book Synopsis The Democratic Republic of Congo by : Michael Deibert
Download or read book The Democratic Republic of Congo written by Michael Deibert and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two decades, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been at the centre of the deadliest series of conflicts since the Second World War, and now hosts the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. In this compelling book, acclaimed journalist Michael Deibert paints a picture of a nation in flux, inching towards peace but at the same time solidifying into another era of authoritarian rule under its enigmatic president, Joseph Kabila. Featuring a wealth of first-hand interviews and secondary sources, the narrative travels from war-torn villages in the country's east to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa in order to bring us the voices of the Congolese - from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials - as it explores the complicated political, ethnic and economic geography of this tattered land. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Africa, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between, Hope and Despair sheds new light on this sprawling and often misunderstood country that has become iconic both for its great potential and dashed hopes.
Book Synopsis Shake Hands With the Devil by : Romeo Dallaire
Download or read book Shake Hands With the Devil written by Romeo Dallaire and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the tenth anniversary of the date that UN peacekeepers landed in Rwanda, Random House Canada is proud to publish the unforgettable first-hand account of the genocide by the man who led the UN mission. Digging deep into shattering memories, General Dallaire has written a powerful story of betrayal, naïveté, racism and international politics. His message is simple and undeniable: “Never again.” When Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in 1993, he thought he was heading off on a modest and straightforward peacekeeping mission. Thirteen months later he flew home from Africa, broken, disillusioned and suicidal, having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in only a hundred days. In Shake Hands with the Devil, he takes the reader with him on a return voyage into the hell of Rwanda, vividly recreating the events the international community turned its back on. This book is an unsparing eyewitness account of the failure by humanity to stop the genocide, despite timely warnings. Woven through the story of this disastrous mission is Dallaire’s own journey from confident Cold Warrior, to devastated UN commander, to retired general engaged in a painful struggle to find a measure of peace, reconciliation and hope. This book is General Dallaire’s personal account of his conversion from a man certain of his worth and secure in his assumptions to a man conscious of his own weaknesses and failures and critical of the institutions he’d relied on. It might not sit easily with standard ideas of military leadership, but understanding what happened to General Dallaire and his mission to Rwanda is crucial to understanding the moral minefields our peacekeepers are forced to negotiate when we ask them to step into the world’s dirty wars. Excerpt from Shake Hands with the Devil My story is not a strictly military account nor a clinical, academic study of the breakdown of Rwanda. It is not a simplistic indictment of the many failures of the UN as a force for peace in the world. It is not a story of heroes and villains, although such a work could easily be written. This book is a cri de coeur for the slaughtered thousands, a tribute to the souls hacked apart by machetes because of their supposed difference from those who sought to hang on to power. . . . This book is the account of a few humans who were entrusted with the role of helping others taste the fruits of peace. Instead, we watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect.
Book Synopsis Why Comrades Go to War by : Philip Roessler
Download or read book Why Comrades Go to War written by Philip Roessler and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1996, a group of ageing Marxists and unemployed youth coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. Backed by a Rwanda-led regional coalition that drew support from Asmara to Luanda, the rebels of the AFDL marched over 1500 kilometers inseven months to crush the dictatorship. To the Congolese rebels and their Pan-Africanist allies, the vanquishing of the Mobutu regime represented nothing short of a "second independence" for Congo and Central Africa as a whole and the dawning of a new regional order of peace and security. Within fifteen months, however, Central Africa's "liberation peace" would collapse, triggering a cataclysmic fratricide between the heroes of the war against Mobutu and igniting the deadliest conflict since World War II. This book gives an account Africa's Great War. It argues that the seeds of Africa's Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu- the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. In particular, the book argues that the overthrow of Mobutu proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the father of Africa's liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution.
Book Synopsis The War in Our Hearts by : Eva Seyler
Download or read book The War in Our Hearts written by Eva Seyler and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-24 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captain Jamie Graham is forever changed when he meets young Aveline Perrault. Both of them broken and walled off from the cruel and cold world around them-made even crueler and colder by the Great War-the pair form an unlikely bond. She finds in him the father she never had, and with her love, he faces the pain from his own childhood.
Book Synopsis Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by : Jason Stearns
Download or read book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters written by Jason Stearns and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the horrors of the years-long war still raging in the Congo by focusing on the personal stories of those most affected by the conflict.
Book Synopsis Battleground Africa by : Lise Namikas
Download or read book Battleground Africa written by Lise Namikas and published by Cold War International History. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition. Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.
Book Synopsis The 48 Laws of Power by : Robert Greene
Download or read book The 48 Laws of Power written by Robert Greene and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human Nature. In the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by drawing from the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Carl Von Clausewitz and also from the lives of figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to P.T. Barnum. Some laws teach the need for prudence (“Law 1: Never Outshine the Master”), others teach the value of confidence (“Law 28: Enter Action with Boldness”), and many recommend absolute self-preservation (“Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally”). Every law, though, has one thing in common: an interest in total domination. In a bold and arresting two-color package, The 48 Laws of Power is ideal whether your aim is conquest, self-defense, or simply to understand the rules of the game.
Download or read book Spies in the Congo written by Williams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spies in the Congo is the untold story of one of the most tightly-guarded secrets of the Second World War: America’s desperate struggle to secure enough uranium to build its atomic bomb. The Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo was the most important deposit of uranium yet discovered anywhere on earth, vital to the success of the Manhattan Project. Given that Germany was also working on an atomic bomb, it was an urgent priority for the US to prevent uranium from the Congo being diverted to the enemy — a task entrusted to Washington’s elite secret intelligence agents. Sent undercover to colonial Africa to track the ore and to hunt Nazi collaborators, their assignment was made even tougher by the complex political reality and by tensions with Belgian and British officials. A gripping spy-thriller, Spies in the Congo is the true story of unsung heroism, of the handful of good men — and one woman — in Africa who were determined to deny Hitler his bomb.
Book Synopsis Making Sense of the Central African Republic by : Tatiana Carayannis
Download or read book Making Sense of the Central African Republic written by Tatiana Carayannis and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lying at the centre of a tumultuous region, the Central African Republic and its turbulent history have often been overlooked. Democracy, in any kind of a meaningful sense, has eluded the country. Since the mid-1990s, army mutinies and serial rebellion in CAR have resulted in two major successful coups. Over the course of these upheavals, the country has become a laboratory for peacebuilding initiatives, hosting a two-decade-long succession of UN and regional peacekeeping, peacebuilding and special political missions. Drawing together the foremost experts on the Central African Republic, this much-needed volume provides the first in-depth analysis of the country’s recent history of rebellion, instability, and international and regional intervention.
Download or read book Backfield Boys written by John Feinstein and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Backfield Boys, renowned sports journalist and New York Times–bestselling author John Feinstein tells a thrilling story of friendship, football, and a fight for justice. Freshman footballers Jason Roddin and Tom Jefferson are a perfect pair: Jason is a blazing-fast wide-receiver, while his best friend Tom has all the skills a standout quarterback needs. After summer football camp at an elite sports-focused boarding school, the boys are thrilled to be invited back with full-ride scholarships. But on day one of practice, they’re shocked when the team's coaching staff makes Tom, a black kid, a receiver and Jason, a white kid, a quarterback. Confronted with mounting evidence of deep-seated racial bias, the boys speak out, risking their scholarships and chances to play. As tensions ratchet up with coaches and other players, Tom and Jason must decide how much they're willing to lose in a conflict with powerful forces that has nothing—and everything—to do with the game they love.
Book Synopsis The Wizard, the Witch & Two Girls from Jersey by : Lisa Papademetriou
Download or read book The Wizard, the Witch & Two Girls from Jersey written by Lisa Papademetriou and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two mismatched teenage girls must find their way back home to New Jersey after being zapped into the pages of a fantasy novel.
Book Synopsis Patrice Lumumba by : Charles River Editors
Download or read book Patrice Lumumba written by Charles River Editors and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "Without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men." - Patrice Lumumba The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war. This event-known as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885-galvanized a phenomenon that came to be known as the Scramble for Africa. The conference established two fundamental rules for European seizure of Africa. The first of these was that no recognition of annexation would granted without evidence of a practical occupation, and the second, that a practical occupation would be deemed unlawful without a formal appeal for protection made on behalf of a territory by its leader, a plea that must be committed to paper in the form of a legal treaty. One of the most controversial colonization efforts took place in the Congo, which still conjures up contrasting images of jungles, wildlife, warlords, civil wars, blood diamonds, and the ongoing anarchy of ethnic and tribal warfare. Indeed, the vast expanse of Congo remains one of the most enigmatic and little-known regions of Africa. It is also, undeniably, the original African failed state. It has suffered generations of warlord rule, inter-ethnic violence and insecurity, particularly in the remote and isolated east of the country. The original name of the region derives from the Kingdom of Kongo, a pre-colonial power that ruled a limited region surrounding, and extended south of, the mouth of the Congo River. The first Europeans to discover the mouth of the Congo River were the Portuguese, who incrementally explored the coast of Africa throughout the late 15th century and established diplomatic and trade relations with the Kongo Kingdom before assuming control of what later became Portuguese West Africa, and later still Angola. At that point in history, the European trading powers were only really interested in trade, most particularly the Atlantic Slave Trade, and there was little incentive to penetrate the interior to any depth. The Portuguese made no particular effort, therefore, to explore the Congo River any further inland than the Crystal Mountains or the extensive region of rapids that tended to shield the interior from the coast. For generations the Portuguese simply traded off the coast, while what lay beyond in the dark interior remained a matter of myth and speculation. It was in the nature of Belgium's withdrawal from Africa that power was essentially handed over to the first in line to receive it. Very little of the careful preparation that characterized the British withdrawal from Africa was evident in Congo, in major part due to the fact that the Belgian system of administration allowed for no phased entry of Congolese employees into the executive level, so there was no one trained or experienced in running a government who was in a position to take over from the departing Belgians. The same, indeed, was true in the armed forces. As it turned out, the first in line to take power was a tall, stern-featured ideologue by the name of Patrice Lumumba. Though he was still just 35, his life story was already one full of ideology, politics, and chaos, and things would only get more turbulent once he became the Congo's leader. Patrice Lumumba: The Life and Legacy of the Pan-African Politician Who Became Congo's First Prime Minister looks at one of the most important African leaders of the 20th century.
Book Synopsis The Polaris Whisper by : Kenneth Gregory
Download or read book The Polaris Whisper written by Kenneth Gregory and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new vision flashed into Niclaus mind. He saw an army of bloodthirsty Norsemen hunting down a man. Reaching the cliff top, the man jumped. The chase was on. Niclaus has just one aim in life to win the Trial of Endurance to become the next leader of his village. The Trial is not without risks, and many have perished trying to complete it. But little does he realise that Cado, leader and oracle of Newgrange, has very different plans for him; plans that involve taking on the might of Hakon the Black, the most feared Norse lord, and travelling far from everything he knows to defend the White Cross Followers. Hakon's savagery knows no bounds; battle lines are forming; power beyond imagining is at stake and at the heart of it all is Niclaus. Will he have the strength to fulfil his destiny?
