Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2008

        National Missile Defence and the politics of US identity

        A poststructural critique

        by Natalie Bormann

        Why adopt a poststructural lens for the reading of the military strategy of national missile defence (NMD)? No doubt, when contemplating an attack on US territory by intercontinental ballistic missiles, consulting Michel Foucault and critical international relations theory scholars may not seem the obvious route to take. The answer to this lies in another question: why has there been so much interest and continuous investment in NMD deployment when there is such ambiguity surrounding the status of threat to which it responds, controversy over its technological feasibility and concern about its cost? Posed in this manner, the question cannot be answered on its own terms - the terms given in official accounts of NMD that justify the system's significance on the basis of strategic feasibility studies and conventional threat predictions guided by worst-case scenarios. Instead, this book argues that the preferences leading to NMD deployment must be understood as satisfying requirements beyond strategic approaches and issues. In turning towards the interpretative modes of inquiry provided by critical social theory and poststructuralism, this book contests the conventional wisdom about NMD and suggests reading the strategy in terms of US identity. Presented as an analysis of discourses on threats to national security, around which the need for NMD deployment is predominantly framed, this book is an effort to let the two fields of critical international relations theory and US foreign policy speak directly to each other. It seeks to do so by showing how the concept of identity can be harnessed to an analysis of a contemporary military-strategic practice. ;

      • Trusted Partner

        Krav Maga: How to Defend Yourself against Physical Attack

        by Grandmaster Imi Sde-Or (Lichtenfeld) & Chief Instructor Eyal Yanilov

        Krav Maga, developed by Grandmaster Imi Sde-Or (Lichtenfeld) since the 1930s, was once a method of hand-to-hand combat strictly confined to security agents and members of the MOSSAD and elite IDF units. The method has been adapted for civilians so that anyone, of any age, sex, or physical ability, can utilize it. Based on natural reactions of the human body, the discipline is easy to learn and perform, and practical to use.  Krav Maga has rapidly gained in popularity and earned recognition by experts the world over. In the US, South America, Europe, Australia, and the Far East, this unique self-defense method has already been taught to and used by official law enforcement agencies, as well as many ordinary citizens.  Written by Imi Sde-Or and his senior disciple Eyal Yanilov as part of the Founder’s Series, Krav Maga: How to Defend Yourself Against Physical Attack is the first of two volumes presenting the key principles and training methods for unarmed combat. Laid out an accessible, step-by-step format, the book covers the basics, from safety in training, warm-up, stretching, and flexibility to principles of attacks, stances, and starting positions. The authors offer strategies for every imaginable scenario: defending punches and kicks, releases from chokes, headlock and nelson, grabs, punches, throws, and more. Also emphasizing the psychological underpinnings of the discipline, the book expands its usefulness with sections on mental training, vulnerable points, multiple attackers, and women’s self-defense.  About the Authors Eyal Yanilov began training in Krav Maga with Grandmaster Imi Sde-Or when he was 15. Yanilov was the first person to begin training Krav Maga instructors outside of Israel, and he has taught special units, the military, and civilians in over 18 countries. Grandmaster Imi Sde-Or, Founder of Krav Maga, passed away in 1998 at age 88. An English-language North-American edition has been scheduled for publication in Fall  2024. Each volume contains 240 pages, altogether 800-plus b/w photos & illustrations; 16.5 x 24 cm

      • Trusted Partner
        Biography & True Stories
        November 2024

        Walking in the dark

        James Baldwin, my father and I

        by Douglas Field

        A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestoes of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the dark, he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2024

        After the end

        Cold War culture and apocalyptic imaginations in the twenty-first century

        by David L. Pike

        After the End argues that the cultural imaginaries and practices of the Cold War continue to deeply shape the present in profound but largely unnoticed ways across the global North and in the global South. The argument draws examples from literature and literary criticism, film, music, the historical and social scientific record and past and present physical sites to consider the bunker as a material form, an image and as a fantasy that took shape in the global North in the 1960s and that spread globally into the twenty-first century. After the End reminds us not only that most of the world's peoples have lived with or died from apocalyptic conditions for centuries, but that the Cold War imaginaries that grew from and fed those conditions, continue to survive as well.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        England’s military heartland

        Preparing for war on Salisbury Plain

        by Vron Ware, Antonia Lucia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar, Alice Cree

        What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? England's military heartland provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, the Salisbury 'super garrison' offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? This book investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        The French empire at War, 1940–1945

        by Martin Thomas

        The French empire at war draws on original research in France and Britain to investigate the history of the divided French empire - the Vichy and the Free French empires - during the Second World War. What emerges is a fascinating story. While it is clear that both the Vichy and Free French colonial authorities were only rarely masters of their own destiny during the war, preservation of limited imperial control served them both in different ways. The Vichy government exploited the empire in an effort to withstand German-Italian pressure for concessions in metropolitan France and it was key to its claim to be more than the mouthpiece of a defeated nation. For Free France too, the empire acquired a political and symbolic importance which far outweighed its material significance to the Gaullist war effort. As the war progressed, the Vichy empire lost ground to that of the Free French, something which has often been attributed to the attraction of the Gaullist mystique and the spirit of resistance in the colonies. In this radical new interpretation, Thomas argues that it was neither of these. The course of the war itself, and the initiatives of the major combatant powers, played the greatest part in the rise of the Gaullist empire and the demise of Vichy colonial control.

      • Trusted Partner

        KRAV MAGA

        How to Defend Yourself against Armed Assault

        by Imi Sde-Or and Eyal Yanilov

        A practical self-defense guide based on Krav Maga, the renowned Israeli system of unarmed combat. Though once a secret method strictly confined to security agents and members of elite IDF units, Krav Maga is rapidly gaining in popularity and earning recognition by experts the world over. In the US and several European countries, this unique self-defense method has already been taught to and used by official law enforcement agencies, as well as many ordinary citizens. An English-language edition of How to Defend Yourself against Armed Assault was first published in summer 2001 and has already been reprinted ten times. It was shortly followed by a Japanese edition, as well as Mexican-Spanish and Dutch-language editions (2002). German and European-Spanish editions were published in 2003, and a Czech edition appeared in 2004. French and Hungarian-language editions were published in mid-2006, and a Polish edition was published in fall 2008. A Korean edition was published in summer 2014, And an Italian  edition was published in spring 2015. A Chinese edition was published in late 2020 and already reprinted several times.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Popular imperialism and the military, 1850-1950

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Colonial war played a vital part in transforming the reputation of the military and placing it on a standing equal to that of the navy. The book is concerned with the interactive culture of colonial warfare, with the representation of the military in popular media at home, and how these images affected attitudes towards war itself and wider intellectual and institutional forces. It sets out to relate the changing image of the military to these fundamental facts. For the dominant people they were an atavistic form of war, shorn of guilt by Social Darwinian and racial ideas, and rendered less dangerous by the increasing technological gap between Europe and the world. Attempts to justify and understand war were naturally important to dominant people, for the extension of imperial power was seldom a peaceful process. The entertainment value of war in the British imperial experience does seem to have taken new and more intensive forms from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Themes such as the delusive seduction of martial music, the sketch of the music hall song, powerful mythic texts of popular imperialism, and heroic myths of empire are discussed extensively. The first important British war correspondent was William Howard Russell (1820-1907) of The Times, in the Crimea. The 1870s saw a dramatic change in the representation of the officer in British battle painting. Up to that point it was the officer's courage, tactical wisdom and social prestige that were put on display.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2007

        Martha Gellhorn: The war writer in the field and in the text

        by Kate McLoughlin, Martin Hargreaves

        Martha Gellhorn was the doyenne of twentieth century war correspondence. Opinionated, honest and unafraid, she covered conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to Reagan's wars in Central America in the 1980s. Martha Gellhorn: the war writer in the field and in the text is the first critical study of her Second World War fiction and journalism. Often overlooked in accounts of war literature is the writer's precise position in relation to battle and his or her resultant standing in the text. Kate McLoughlin traces Gellhorn's daring attempts to access the war zone and her constructions of the woman war correspondent in her despatches, novels, short stories and play. Drawing on unpublished letters, close attention is given to Gellhorn's rivalry with Ernest Hemingway (the two were married from 1940 to 1945) over reaching the Normandy beaches on D-Day and its textual outcome in the pages of Collier's magazine. McLoughlin goes on to examine Gellhorn's increasingly negative portrayals of the glamorous female war reporter and to suggests why such disillusionment might have set in. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        England’s military heartland

        Preparing for war on Salisbury Plain

        by Vron Ware, Antonia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar, Alice Cree

        A considered investigation of a long-standing army base's impact on the British countryside. What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? Beyond the barracks provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, the Salisbury 'super garrison' offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? Beyond the barracks investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        2015

        The War that Changed Rondo

        by Art studio Agrafka (Authors), Art studio Agrafka (Illustrators)

        Danko, Zirka and Fabian live peacefully in the small town of Rondo. They have their work and hobbies that always keep them busy... until War comes. The three friends have never experienced War before, and they don’t know how to act. In hopes of stopping War, they talk to it and fight it, but all in vain. Eventually, they discover an effective defense against the darkness of War — the power of Light. With the help of all the residents of Rondo, Danko, Zirka and Fabian build a huge light machine that disperses the darkness and stops War. The War that Changed Rondo reflects the ambiguities of war and it is a touching tribute to peace.   From 4 to 7 years, 1585 words. Rightsholders: ivan.fedechko@starlev.com.ua

      • Trusted Partner
        September 2013

        The World War 1

        by Zhang Wushen

        The First World War was mainly occurs in Europe but affects to the world world war.At that time in the world the majority country has all been involvedin this war.

      • Trusted Partner
        True stories
        2018

        World War II, Uncontrived and Unredacted. Testimonies from Ukraine

        by Vakhtanh Kipiani

        The war separated families, took lives, broke fates ... It is very important to know and remember it at any time. Even many decades later, new details, memories, and testimonies appear. This book gathers several fascinating, true family stories written from accounts of parents, grandparents, etc. The authors, whose articles were collected with the help of the popular scientific publication Historical Truth, tell us about the worst war of the 20th century, about the fate of those people whose lives were divided forever into “before” and “after.” Here we can find first-hand accounts about Ukrainians who fought in various armies, about the lives of deported people, about the fate of people taken to compulsory labor camps, and about the men and women who remain in our memories forever. - Historical Truth - honestly and openly about WWII - exclusive materials

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2022

        The British left and the defence economy

        by Keith Mc Loughlin

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2024

        Governing the military

        by Carlos Solar

      • Trusted Partner
        Children's & YA
        2022

        We Don't Need War

        by Maryana Horyanska (Author), Victor Koriahin (Illustrator)

        In the format of a spelling book, We Don't Need War tells children about universal values that now help Ukrainians to survive, stay together and defeat the enemy. Thus, children can not only learn letters and new words but also understand what kind of human qualities and actions can save the world. Readers will learn more about Ukraine and the actions of real heroes from the frontline to the cities near them.   From 6 to 9 years, 1337 words, Rightsholders: Maria Pankratova, maria.pankratova@ranok.com.ua

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        The 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.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter