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Fiction2017Remorse Test
by Khalil Sweileh
Remorse Test is Sweileh’s follow up to his novel Writing Love, which was the 2009 winner of The Mahfouz Medal for Literature. This semi-autobiographical novel, takes readers through the streets of Damascus and offers a first-hand look at life and loss during the Syrian civil war. The protagonist is a brilliant writer who is navigating a new, war-torn reality. While reminiscing about his past, he shows us what everyday life is like in Damascus—at once brutal and boring—and laments the missed opportunities and destruction the conflict has caused in his country. Drawing on his experience as a journalist, poet and novelist, author Khalil Sweileh writes about the psychological conflicts amid the shattered reality of place and society using language that is full of imagery. Remorse Test is an important addition to Syrian literature, both for its subject matter and unique use of narrative tools and vocabulary. (An extended English-language report on this book will be available soon.)
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2024Romanticizing masculinity in Baathist Syria
Gender, identity and ideology
by Rahaf Aldoughli
This book provides a novel analysis of the conceptual sources and ideological contours of the Assad regime. The book documents the Baathists' fascination with Romanticised and 'muscular' ideas of the nation that emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European social philosophy, and traces the implementation and impacts of these ideologies in the Syrian context. Emphasising the emergence of new forms of public gendered identity in Syria as a unifying feature of nationalism bound closely with the stability of the regime, the book shows how Romantic, muscular nationalism first rose to hegemony and then was shattered by its inherent violence, contradictions and inequalities. The final chapter closes by considering how a new vision of pluralism and civic belonging is today challenging the Romanticised Baathist ideal in contention for Syria's future.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2022Reconstructing lives
Victims of war in the Middle East and Médecins Sans Frontières
by Vanja Kovacic, Bertrand Taithe
This book attempts to establish a more holistic approach to the rehabilitation of war-injured civilians, one that adjusts to the patients' long-term needs. Kovacic not only offers an insight into the daily realities of patients during and after rehabilitation, but seeks to develop a new way to perceive, respect and involve them in health care. Based on comprehensive interviews with patients and MSF staff, as well as extended field observations, Reconstructing lives follows Syrian and Iraqi war-injured civilians in their journey to recovery. From their improvised medical treatment in their home countries, to the MSF-run hospital in Amman Jordan, to their return home, Kovacic explores how individuals attempt to pick up the pieces of their previous lives, add new elements from their treatment and travel experiences, and finally establish a new reconstructed reality. The book explores how the interaction between MSF staff and their patients contributes to the immense task of healing that awaits victims of war. The reader visits the intimate medical and domestic spaces that usually remain closed to the outside observer, spaces rich with human contact, perceptions, emotions, conflicts and reconciliations.
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Humanities & Social SciencesSeptember 2023Civil war London
Mobilizing for parliament, 1641–5
by Jordan S. Downs
This book looks at London's provision of financial and military support for parliament's war against King Charles I. It explores for the first time a series of episodic, circumstantial and unique mobilisations that spanned from late 1641 to early 1645 and which ultimately led to the establishment of the New Model Army. Based on research from two-dozen archives, Civil war London charts the successes and failures of efforts to move London's vast resources and in the process poses a number of challenges to longstanding notions about the capital's 'parliamentarian' makeup. It reveals interactions between London's Corporation, parochial communities and livery companies, between preachers and parishioners and between agitators, propagandists and common people. Within these tangled webs of political engagement reside the untold stories of the movement of money and men, but also of parliament's eventual success in the English Civil War.
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October 2014Farewell, Aleppo
by Claudette E. Sutton
The Jews of Aleppo, Syria, had been part of the city's fabric for more than two thousand years, in good times and bad, through conquerors and kings. But in the middle years of the twentieth century, all that changed. To Selim Sutton, a merchant with centuries of roots in the Syrian soil, the dangers of rising anti-Semitism made clear that his family must find a new home. With several young children and no prospect of securing visas to the United States, he devised a savvy plan for getting his family out: "exporting" his sons.In December 1940, he told the two oldest, Mea¯r and Saleh, that arrangements had been made for their transit to Shanghai, where they would work in an uncle's export business. China, he hoped, would provide a short-term safe harbor and a steppingstone to America.But the world intervened for the young men, now renamed Mike and Sal by their Uncle Joe. Sal became ill with tuberculosis soon after arriving and was sent back to Aleppo alone. And the war that soon would engulf every inhabited land loomed closer each day. Joe, Syrian-born but a naturalized American citizen, barely escaped on the last ship to sail for the U.S. before Pearl Harbor was bombed and the Japanese seized Shanghai.Mike was alone, a teen-ager in an occupied city, across the world from his family, with only his mettle to rely on as he strived to survive personally and economically in the face of increasing deprivation. Farewell, Aleppo is the story–told by Mike's daughter–of the journey that would ultimately take him from the insular Jewish community of Aleppo to the solitary task of building a new life in America.It is both her father's tale that journalist Claudette Sutton describes and also the harrowing experiences of the family members he left behind in Syria, forced to smuggle themselves out of the country after it closed its borders to Jewish emigration. The picture Sutton paints is both a poignant narrative of individual lives and the broader canvas of a people's survival over millennia, in their native land and far away, through the strength of their faith and their communities. Multiple threads come richly together as she observes their world from inside and outside the fold, shares an important and nearly forgotten epoch of Jewish history, and explores universal questions of identity, family, and culture.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017The French empire between the wars
Imperialism, politics and society
by Martin Thomas
By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonization in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2018Syria and the chemical weapons taboo
Exploiting the forbidden
by Michelle Bentley
This book analyses the Syria crisis and the role of chemical weapons in relation to US foreign policy. The Syrian government's use of such weapons and their subsequent elimination has dominated the US response to the conflict, where these are viewed as particularly horrific arms - a repulsion known as the chemical taboo. On the surface, this would seem to be an appropriate reaction: these are nasty weapons and eradicating them would ostensibly comprise a 'good' move. But this book reveals two new aspects of the taboo that challenge this prevailing view. First, actors use the taboo strategically to advance their own self-interested policy objectives. Second, that applying the taboo to Syria has actually exacerbated the crisis. As such, this book not only provides a timely analysis of Syria, but also a major and original rethink of the chemical taboo, as well as international norms more widely.
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The ArtsSeptember 2024The renewal of post-war Manchester
Planning, architecture and the state
by Richard Brook
A compelling account of the project to transform post-war Manchester, revealing the clash between utopian vision and compromised reality. Urban renewal in Britain was thrilling in its vision, yet partial and incomplete in its implementation. For the first time, this deep study of a renewal city reveals the complex networks of actors behind physical change and stagnation in post-war Britain. Using the nested scales of region, city and case-study sites, the book explores the relationships between Whitehall legislation, its interpretation by local government planning officers and the on-the-ground impact through urban architectural projects. Each chapter highlights the connections between policy goals, global narratives and the design and construction of cities. The Cold War, decolonialisation, rising consumerism and the oil crisis all feature in a richly illustrated account of architecture and planning in post-war Manchester.
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Memoirs202277 days of February. Ukraine between two symbolic dates of the Russian war ideology
by Marichka Paplauskaite (Compiler), Authors: Inna Adrug, Anna Argirova, Kateryna Babkina, Tetyana Bezruk, Oleksandra Gorchynska, Inna Zolotukhina, Vera Kuriko, Olena Livytska, Olga Livytska, Svitlana Oslavska, Marichka Paplauskaite, Eva Raiska, Anya Semenyuk, Zoya Khramchenko, Margarita Chimyris, Iryna Yaroshynska
As a child, she could not understand why people in films about the blockade of Leningrad were always lying down. And when Mariupol was besieged by the Russians, and she and her husband lived for many days without water, food and heat under constant shelling, she realized that when you lie down, you save strength and energy. "77 Days of February" included reports written by journalists of the Reporters media in the period between February 23 and May 9 — two symbolic dates for Russian military ideology. The invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine stopped the number of days and pushed Ukrainians back to the intervening time, where February — the month of the beginning of the great war — still lasts. In the meantime and in these candid stories, there is pain, fear, hatred, and sometimes despair. But the main thing is hope. This is a bare nerve and an honest voice of the new Ukrainian reality.
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The ArtsJune 2021The war that won't die
The Spanish Civil War in cinema
by David Archibald
The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers - from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró - rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century - including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.
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The ArtsJanuary 2019The war that won't die
The Spanish Civil War in cinema
by David Archibald
The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers - from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró - rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century - including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.
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Teaching, Language & ReferenceDecember 2020Living politics after war
by Johanna Söderström, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2022Exiting war
The British Empire and the 1918–20 moment
by Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava, Michael Walsh, Alan Lester
Exiting war explores a particular 1918-20 'moment' in the British Empire's history, between the First World War's armistices of 1918, and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. That moment, we argue, was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation, and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918-20 'moment' and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJuly 2024Coup in Damascus
Husni al-Za'im and the birth of Syrian military rule
by Carl Rihan
Coup in Damascus is a history of Syria's first military regime. It plots the the fall of Syria's democracy and the rise of its military rulers, particularly Husni al-Zaim, whose brief rule in 1949 represented a profoundly transformative moment for the Syrian nation. It is a history of the thoughts, intentions and motives of political actors underpinning the events that have marked Syria's history after the first Arab-Israeli war, and focuses mainly on the interaction between local, regional and international actors. Unlike most histories of the modern Middle East that tackle broad intervals and that focus on the sequences of events, this history seeks to reconstruct the thought processes behind the events, and anchor them within the epoch's existing political and socioeconomic conditions. It draws on several methodological influences, particularly R.G. Collingwood's 'history as re-enactment of the past'.
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AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?
An Israeli Political Novel Predicting a Civil War
by Daniel Gelleri
CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL! Though it is seemingly impossible, world media are screaming the headline. Has the greatest experiment in democracy utterly failed? As the Arab world gloats, the United States – the world’s only surviving superpower – is faced with momentous agony. On the stage of international politics, did it back the wrong actor? One hundred and ten years after the birth of Yitzhak Isaac Isserlish, descendant of a prominent East-European rabbinical line, in Krakow, Poland, his great-grandsons are at war with one another in the hills of Jerusalem – a war that may truly prove to the world that Armageddon is at hand! Following the government's decision to return Israel to its pre-1967 borders, ideological controversy tears apart the paper-thin fabric of what the world has always viewed as a beacon of hope, a secure monolith in a sea of discord. What was formerly whispered behind closed doors now explodes onto the streets of every major city and town. Each side is adamant in its view of the final shape of the country. Each side is also intent upon achieving its desired goal. The greatest fear becomes reality: CIVIL WAR! Israeli citizens confront one another, brother against brother. They all love their country, all have its best interest at heart, and all fear for its safety, but conversely and tragically each finds his opponents' vision to be an abomination. In a tiny nation that has faced the enemy without fear for seventy-five years, the impossible is happening: the enemy is within. The enemy is not at the gates; the enemy is inside the gates! Each side is fighting for its own justice, its own faith, its own truth, and its own vision of a Biblical Israel redeemed. In a tightly-woven transgenerational saga, Daniel Gelleri, author of the popular novel Iris, traces the lives of five generations of one Jewish-Israeli family whose members share not only time, place, hopes, and dreams with their forefathers, but who are deeply affected by the nightmares and fears of their own lives. Daniel Gelleri, a senior officer in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Reserves, was originally a secular Jew, who became Orthodox at the age of 25. He lived with his family on the West Bank settlement of Bat-Ayin for ten years. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist, Gelleri began to reexamine his faith and beliefs. After a period of soul searching he returned to his original secular life style and abandoned the religious world in which he had lived. His first novel, Iris, was received with great success.
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May 2022In the Shadow of War
Diary notes from Ukraine
by Christoph Brumme
"What can you learn in war? Do you become numb, do you get used to it at some point? Does war make you "hard", uncaring, above pain? No. These are just clichés. Every day brings new horrors. At best, one learns for some time to suppress strong feelings, because to give in to them would weaken one's life instinct." In a very stirring and shocking, but sometimes humorous language, Christoph Brumme tells of the situation in Ukraine, the everyday life of his family and friends, of fears, longings and political assessments. The diary entries of the war and the resistance of the Ukrainians, starting from the first signs of the impending war in mid-January 2022 until the printing of this book, 1st May 2022, impressively bear witness to the brutality of these events.
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March 2013This is War: Teacher Yuan Tengfei's Lesson of WW1
by Yuan Tengfei
This book tells the story of WW1 in a clear and interesting way with historical facts. This book is totally different from any history book you have read. Readers can take a lot of joy and also understand the history of WW2 at the same time.
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January 2013This is War: Teacher Yuan Tengfei's Lesson of WW2 1
by Yuan Tengfei
This book tells the story of WW2 in a clear and interesting way with historical facts. This book is totally different from any history book you have read. Readers can take a lot of joy and also understand the history of WW2 at the same time.
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April 2013This is War: Teacher Yuan Tengfei's Lesson of WW2 2
by Yuan Tengfei
This book tells the story of WW2 in a clear and interesting way with historical facts. This book is totally different from any history book you have read. Readers can take a lot of joy and also understand the history of WW2 at the same time.
