Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Political

1431 is a dangerous time for a woman to be defiant. England has been fighting France for 100 years. At home, power-hungry men within a corrupt government manipulate a weak king - and name Cecily's husband, York's loyal duke, an enemy. As the king's grasp on sanity weakens, plots to destroy York take root. It will take all of Cecily's courage and cunning to save her family. But when the will to survive becomes ambition for a crown, will she risk treason to secure it?

Frank Baltimore is a bit of a loser, struggling by as a carpenter and handyman in rural New England when he gets his big break, building a mansion in the executive suburbs of Hartford. One of his workers is a charismatic 18-year-old kid from Liverpool, Dmitry, in the US in the summer before university. Dmitry is a charming sociopath, who develops a fascination with his autodidactic philosopher boss, perhaps thinking that, if he could figure out what made Frank tick, he could be less of a pig.

When Harry Jones discovers that former friend Zac Kravitz's life is in danger, a debt of honour sends him on a perilous rescue mission to Ta'argistan, a mountainous and landlocked former Soviet republic bordering Russia, China, and Afghanistan.

In the first anthology of its kind, Robert Olen Butler and Phong Nguyen assemble an astounding collection of stories that cause listeners to contemplate war, peace, and social justice in a new light. The fourteen stories featured in this volume explore the varied and often unexpected outcomes of violence. The authors explore the tragedies that occur closer to home—not on military battlefields but rather in places that are never meant to be battlefields, like schools and churches. The fiction reveals the violence that renders our most sacred and seemingly safest of places vulnerable.

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.

Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini's Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war.

Vietnam, 1969. Tweede luitenant Waino Mellas is eenentwintig jaar en net aangekomen op Matterhorn: een Amerikaanse vesting diep in de Vietnamese jungle. Vlak na zijn aankomst krijgt zijn eenheid het bevel in vijandig gebied op zoek te gaan naar een Noord-Vietnamese legerunit. Mellas en zijn mannen zullen ziekte, honger, bloedzuigers, tijgers en een vrijwel onzichtbare vijand moeten trotseren, maar het zijn de raciale spanningen en de valse loyaliteiten die hen ten val dreigen te brengen.

You are US Army military intelligence trainee David Dengler. Following army MI protocol, you are sent on a training exercise to a city you've never visited before and ordered to surveil a public person ("public persons" having little recourse if their privacy is invaded). You can't believe your good fortune. You draw the assignment to surveil Marilyn Monroe. It is early August 1962, and you have just been made a witness to the murder of Hollywood's biggest star.

In 1931, young English-born missionary Jakob Kellner brings all the crusading passion of his untried Christian faith to a China racked by famine and bloody civil war. He burns to save the world's largest nation from Communism. But when he is swept along on the cold, unforgiving Long March, Jakob becomes entangled with Mei-ling, a beautiful and fervent revolutionary. Soon, powerful new emotions challenge and reshape his faith—and entrap him forever in the vast country's tortured destiny.

Rome, 77 B.B. The corrupt Senator Dolabella is about to go on trial for his crimes. But Dolabella owns the jury. He’s hired the best lawyers in the city. And he’s very willing to use violence against those who oppose him. In all of Rome, no man dares accept the role of prosecutor—until, against all odds, an unknown twenty-three-year-old steps out to lead the case, defend the people of the city, and defy the power of the ruling elite. That lawyer’s name is Gaius Julius Caesar.

Daniel Mercier dîne seul dans une fameuse brasserie parisienne quand - il n'en croit pas ses yeux - un illustre convive s'installe à la table voisine : François Mitterrand. Son repas achevé, le Président oublie son chapeau, que Daniel décide de s'approprier en souvenir. Tel un talisman, le feutre noir ne tarde pas à transformer sa vie. Daniel aurait-il percé le mystère du pouvoir suprême ?

What happens when a Prime Minister suddenly stops being Prime Minister? That's the question facing Henry Tobin—Britain's least popular, shortest-serving post-war PM, who's forced into retirement 30 years early after a bruising election defeat. But he's not going to let failure crush his spirits. Instead, he plans to pick himself up, repair his battered reputation and make his name in some other field—though he's not quite sure what that will be.

In the 1950s Gulf Country of Queensland’s far North, black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic’s Mission. When Ivy Koopundi and her mother arrive at the Mission, they are immediately separated and Ivy’s life changes irrevocably. Years later, Mary, a young woman who is working for a city-based Aboriginal Coalition, visits the old Mission and learns of her mother’s and grandmother’s suffering there.

Florence, 1415. Banker Cosimo Medici is looked down upon as a jumped up money-changer. Then he marries the noble Contessina de Bardi and becomes the richest man in Europe. But his wealth and power threaten the Florentine elite, who are determined to bring him down. However, the House of Medici cannot be crushed that easily. Sixty years and many violent deaths later, the family are the unquestioned, ruthless rulers of Florence.

One of the first major American novels to satirize the political milieu of Washington, and the wild speculation schemes that exploded across the nation in the years that followed the Civil War, The Gilded Age gave this remarkable era its name. This rollicking novel is rife with unscrupulous politicians, colourful plutocrats, and blindly optimistic speculators caught up in a frenzy of romance, murder, and surefire deals gone bust.

In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. A century later, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square (Euromaidan) in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych's failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians. This novel follows four individuals over the course of a the Ukrainian winter, as their lives are changed forever by the protests.

In this 1945 novella, barnyard animals rise up against the oppressive rule of human farmers and set about to create a better world for themselves. When two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, emerge as leaders of the new collective, a schism is created with dire implications for the erstwhile utopia. George Orwell's satirical story of Revolutionary Russia and Stalinism is a classic of anti-authoritarianism protest literature.

The dilemma of the outsider in an alien society, and the gap in understanding between cultures, recurrent themes of Paul Bowles’s writings, are dramatized with brutal honesty in this novel set in Fez, Morocco, during that country’s 1954 nationalist uprising. Totally relevant to today’s political situation in the Middle East and elsewhere, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations, The Spider’s House is perhaps Bowles’s best, most beautifully subtle novel.

It’s 1994, and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war.

In 1770, the fuse of revolution is lit by a fateful command - “Fire!” - as England’s peacekeeping mission ignites into the Boston Massacre. The senseless killing of civilians leads to a tumultuous trial in which lawyer John Adams must defend the very enemy who has assaulted and abused the laws he holds sacred. The taut courtroom drama soon broadens into a stunning epic of war as King George III leads a reckless and corrupt government in London toward the escalating abuse of his colonies.