Search results for ""pol""
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE A SPECTATOR, WATERSTONES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PROSPECT AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. ‘A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story’ - William Dalrymple, Financial Times ‘A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour’ - Spectator ‘Beautifully written and masterfully researched, this has the makings of a classic’ - Peter Frankopan SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA CROWN AWARDS When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.
£27.00
Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH Asymptotic Perturbation Methods: For Nonlinear Differential Equations in Physics
Asymptotic Perturbation Methods Cohesive overview of powerful mathematical methods to solve differential equations in physics Asymptotic Perturbation Methods for Nonlinear Differential Equations in Physics addresses nonlinearity in various fields of physics from the vantage point of its mathematical description in the form of nonlinear partial differential equations and presents a unified view on nonlinear systems in physics by providing a common framework to obtain approximate solutions to the respective nonlinear partial differential equations based on the asymptotic perturbation method. Aside from its complete coverage of a complicated topic, a noteworthy feature of the book is the emphasis on applications. There are several examples included throughout the text, and, crucially, the scientific background is explained at an elementary level and closely integrated with the mathematical theory to enable seamless reader comprehension. To fully understand the concepts within this book, the prerequisites are multivariable calculus and introductory physics. Written by a highly qualified author with significant accomplishments in the field, Asymptotic Perturbation Methods for Nonlinear Differential Equations in Physics covers sample topics such as: Application of the various flavors of the asymptotic perturbation method, such as the Maccari method to the governing equations of nonlinear system Nonlinear oscillators, limit cycles, and their bifurcations, iterated nonlinear maps, continuous systems, and nonlinear partial differential equations (NPDEs) Nonlinear systems, such as the van der Pol oscillator, with advanced coverage of plasma physics, quantum mechanics, elementary particle physics, cosmology, and chaotic systems Infinite-period bifurcation in the nonlinear Schrodinger equation and fractal and chaotic solutions in NPDEs Asymptotic Perturbation Methods for Nonlinear Differential Equations in Physics is ideal for an introductory course at the senior or first year graduate level. It is also a highly valuable reference for any professional scientist who does not possess deep knowledge about nonlinear physics.
£99.00
BIS Publishers B.V. Burp: The Other Wine Book
"I like the idea that wine can entertain and make you smile. That's why I'm looking forward to receiving my copy of Burp, which focuses on the design and the stories behind the labels." - Tim Atkin, wine writer, critic and Master of Wine There is a story behind every bottle of wine. As a winemaker, you can make a statement with your label. It is the showcase of your company. And more importantly, it can persuade consumers to buy your product. The label should be in line with the wine you can expect in your glass. This is why Jur Baart and Bas Korpel decided to write Burp, because they strongly believe that a wine tastes better when you know the story behind it. In the book, 40 wines are presented, each with a distinct label and a matching story. The selection of wines does not focus on the vinification technique but on the labels of the bottles. What is striking, however, is the exceptionally high proportion of natural wines. It seems this group of winemakers (in some cases new to the profession) is paying more attention to how their products are presented to their customers. Yet Burp also includes a number of all-time classics that should not be missed - essential not only in this book, but also in your wine cellar. Just like folk tales, the stories behind the wine are often passed on - and sometimes spiced up in the retelling. Rest assured that this also happens with the stories in this book. Burp will give you lots of new anecdotes to tell while drinking your next bottle of wine. Well-known producers included in the book: Château Mouton Rothschild, Pol Roger, Marqués de Riscal Well-known winemakers included in the book: Angelo Gaja, Telmo Rodriguez, Francis Ford Coppola
£26.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE A SPECTATOR, WATERSTONES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PROSPECT AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. ‘A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story’ - William Dalrymple, Financial Times ‘A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour’ - Spectator ‘Beautifully written and masterfully researched, this has the makings of a classic’ - Peter Frankopan SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA CROWN AWARDS When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.
£16.99
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE A SPECTATOR, WATERSTONES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE, PROSPECT AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. ‘A triumph of writing and scholarship. It is hard to imagine anyone ever bettering Das's account of this part of the story’ - William Dalrymple, Financial Times ‘A fascinating glimpse of the origins of the British Empire . . . drawn in dazzling technicolour’ - Spectator ‘Beautifully written and masterfully researched, this has the makings of a classic’ - Peter Frankopan SHORTLISTED FOR THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA CROWN AWARDS When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.
£12.99
Stanford University Press Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War
On December 25, 1978, the armed forces of Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. That event marked a turning point in the first and only extended war fought between two communist regimes. The Vietnamese forced out Pol Pot’s Khmers Rouge regime from its seat of power in Phnom Penh, but the ensuing war was a major source of international tension throughout the last decade of the Cold War. This book is the first comprehensive, scholarly analysis of the causes of the Vietnamese invasion. At its core are two separate but related histories covering the years 1930 to 1978. The first concerns the continuing difficult relations between the Vietnamese communist party and the Cambodian communist movement. The second records the fluctuating and often conflicted relations between the Vietnamese communist party and the two most powerful communist states, the Soviet Union and China. These two histories are encased by a theoretical introduction and a conclusion that make clear the need for a “political culture” perspective on international relations. The author argues that key events leading up to the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia present a historical puzzle. Many important decisions made by both the Vietnamese and Cambodian leaders are inexplicable in terms of the “rational actor” assumptions that dominate contemporary international relations theory. Instead, the author argues, these decisions can be explained only if we understand the political cultures of the rival states. This book is the only study of Southeast Asian affairs by a Western scholar who has used the rich archives of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The key sources drawn on constitute confidential records of the former sponsor and ally of Vietnamese communism; they also provide fresh light on Chinese and Soviet foreign policy, as well as recent events in Cambodia. They are supplemented by extensive materials from French and American archives, as well as interviews with some of the main political decisionmakers.
£97.20
Editions Didier Millet Pte Ltd The People's Struggle: Cambodia Reborn
This book is a vivid first-hand account of the career of one of the 20th century’s great guerrilla commanders, Samdech Heng Samrin, who after his years as a soldier played an important role in the political and economic rebirth of Cambodia. Born into a rural village community, and working as a farmer, Heng Samrin campaigned and then fought for the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party. He led a double life – both as a member of the government militia and working for the party. In due course he went fully underground. He describes in detail the experience of coming under attack by US and South Vietnamese aircraft. There followed the guerrilla conflict against military leader Lon Nol, who after a coup declared a republic and allied the country with the US at war with Vietnam. The author was appointed company commander in the People’s Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, and rose to be a regimental and then divisional commander. Heng Samrin describes the schisms that arose within the revolutionary movement, and how he, his Cambodian comrades and his Vietnamese allies ended up fighting, and defeating, the forces of Pol Pot and what had become a viciously cruel Khmer Rouge régime. Thereafter, Heng Samrin played an important part in laying the foundations for the new Kingdom of Cambodia. He served as both Head of State and as secretary-general of the ruling Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, since renamed as the Cambodian People’s Party, of which he still serves as honorary chairman. In 2006 he became president of the National Assembly. Few books capture as powerfully the experience of guerrilla war as seen by its participants. What drove Heng Samrin to persist in fighting for the freedom of Cambodians in the face of extreme danger? How did he outwit the Khmer Rouge and their traps? In this book, he shares his insights, and describes his efforts to help rebuild his country after decades of war.
£17.95
Night Shade Books No Return: A Novel of Jeroun, Book One
Staring into the night sky, the inhabitants of Jeroun call the glittering string of objects they see stretching before the moon the Needle. It’s actually a collection of iron spheres made by the god Adrash, his threatening ultimatum to the people on the planet below:Prove yourselves worthy, or be destroyed.Vedas is a member of the Black Suits, an order of men and women who show their opposition to Adrash by staging battles in the streets. After witnessing the death of a child in his care and knowing himself to be responsible, he sets off on a journey to the decennial fighting tournament in Danoor.Traveling with him across the continent are Churls, a mercenary haunted by the ghost of her daughter, and Berun, a constructed man made of modular spheres possessed by the soul of his creator. Both come to understand that Vedas's victory would start an all-out religious war.Unbeknownst to these three travelers, the aristocratic outbound mage Ebn and her protégé Pol are using powerful alchemy to travel into space, with plans to engage Adrash in ways that threaten to bring the god’s wrath down upon the world.No Return combines the mythic inventiveness of early Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany, the dark weirdness of China Mieville, and the epic scope of George R. R. Martin, creating a literary science fiction novel that defies easy categorization and resulting in one of the most critically acclaimed debuts of 2013.Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
£12.86
Columbia University Press Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938
Today many view Sigmund Freud as an elitist whose psychoanalytic treatment was reserved for the intellectually and financially advantaged. However, in this new work Elizabeth Ann Danto presents a strikingly different picture of Freud and the early psychoanalytic movement. Danto recovers the neglected history of Freud and other analysts' intense social activism and their commitment to treating the poor and working classes. Danto's narrative begins in the years following the end of World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Joining with the social democratic and artistic movements that were sweeping across Central and Western Europe, analysts such as Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Helene Deutsch envisioned a new role for psychoanalysis. These psychoanalysts saw themselves as brokers of social change and viewed psychoanalysis as a challenge to conventional political and social traditions. Between 1920 and 1938 and in ten different cities, they created outpatient centers that provided free mental health care. They believed that psychoanalysis would share in the transformation of civil society and that these new outpatient centers would help restore people to their inherently good and productive selves. Drawing on oral histories and new archival material, Danto offers vivid portraits of the movement's central figures and their beliefs. She explores the successes, failures, and challenges faced by free institutes such as the Berlin Poliklinik, the Vienna Ambulatorium, and Alfred Adler's child-guidance clinics. She also describes the efforts of Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol, a fusion of psychoanalysis and left-wing politics, which provided free counseling and sex education and aimed to end public repression of private sexuality. In addition to situating the efforts of psychoanalysts in the political and cultural contexts of Weimar Germany and Red Vienna, Danto also discusses the important treatments and methods developed during this period, including child analysis, short-term therapy, crisis intervention, task-centered treatment, active therapy, and clinical case presentations. Her work illuminates the importance of the social environment and the idea of community to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
£82.80
University Press of Kansas The Cambodian Wars: Clashing Armies and CIA Covert Operations
For most Americans, Cambodia was a sideshow to the war in Vietnam, but by the time of the Vietnam invasion of Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 and the subsequent war, it had finally moved to centre stage. Kenneth Conboy chronicles the violence that plagued Cambodia from World War II until the end of the twentieth century and peels back the layers of secrecy that surrounded the CIA’s covert assistance to anticommunist forces in Cambodia during that span.Conboy’s path-breaking study provides the first complete assessment of CIA ops in two key periods—during the Khmer Republic’s existence (1970–1975), in support of American military action in Vietnam, and during the Reagan and first Bush presidencies (1981–1991), when the CIA challenged Soviet expansion by supporting exiled royalists, Republicans, and even former Communists trying to expel the Vietnamese from their country. Through interviews with dozens of CIA Cambodia veterans—as well as special forces officers from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia—he sheds new light on the contributions made by foreign intelligence services. Through information gleaned from the U.S. Defense Attache’s Office in Phnom Penh, he offers a detailed look at the development of the Khmer Rouge military structure, while his use of Vietnamese-language histories released by the People’s Army of Vietnam helps more fully illuminate the PAVN’s participation in the Cambodian wars. More than a simple exposé of CIA activities, however, The Cambodian Wars is also an authoritative history of that country’s struggles over half a century. Conboy examines Cambodia as kingdom, colony, republic, revolutionary state, and Vietnamese satellite, and offers fresh insight into the actions of key players—Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Sisowath Sirik Matak, Son Ngoc Thanh, and others—that will enlighten even those who think they know that country’s history.Three decades in the making, The Cambodian Wars tells a little known chapter in the Cold War in which non-communists pulled off a surprising victory. Featuring dozens of photos covering events from 1970 to the trial of Pol Pot in 1997, it is must reading for anyone interested in contemporary Southeast Asian history, CIA covert operations, and the Vietnam War.
£52.34
Cornell University Press Anatomy of the Red Brigades: The Religious Mind-set of Modern Terrorists
The Red Brigades were a far-left terrorist group in Italy formed in 1970 and active all through the 1980s. Infamous around the world for a campaign of assassinations, kidnappings, and bank robberies intended as a "concentrated strike against the heart of the State," the Red Brigades’ most notorious crime was the kidnapping and murder of Italy’s former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. In the late 1990s, a new group of violent anticapitalist terrorists revived the name Red Brigades and killed a number of professors and government officials. Like their German counterparts in the Baader-Meinhof Group and today’s violent political and religious extremists, the Red Brigades and their actions raise a host of questions about the motivations, ideologies, and mind-sets of people who commit horrific acts of violence in the name of a utopia. In the first English edition of a book that has won critical acclaim and major prizes in Italy, Alessandro Orsini contends that the dominant logic of the Red Brigades was essentially eschatological, focused on purifying a corrupt world through violence. Only through revolutionary terror, Brigadists believed, could humanity be saved from the putrefying effects of capitalism and imperialism. Through a careful study of all existing documentation produced by the Red Brigades and of all existing scholarship on the Red Brigades, Orsini reconstructs a worldview that can be as seductive as it is horrifying. Orsini has devised a micro-sociological theory that allows him to reconstruct the group dynamics leading to political homicide in extreme-left and neonazi terrorist groups. This "subversive-revolutionary feedback theory" states that the willingness to mete out and suffer death depends, in the last analysis, on how far the terrorist has been incorporated into the revolutionary sect. Orsini makes clear that this political-religious concept of historical development is central to understanding all such self-styled "purifiers of the world." From Thomas Müntzer’s theocratic dream to Pol Pot’s Cambodian revolution, all the violent "purifiers" of the world have a clear goal: to build a perfect society in which there will no longer be any sin and unhappiness and in which no opposition can be allowed to upset the universal harmony. Orsini’s book reconstructs the origins and evolution of a revolutionary tradition brought into our own times by the Red Brigades.
£25.19
Night Shade Books Jeroun: The Collected Omnibus
Collected in a single omnibus edition, both novels set in Zachary Jernigan’s critically-acclaimed, genre-bending world of fierce sensuality, dangerous alchemy, and awakening gods.The Needle extends over the heads of all who live upon Jeroun. Composed of iron spheres massive enough to affect the tides, it is the god Adrash's ultimatum to the people on the planet below:Prove yourselves worthy, or be destroyed.Vedas is a member of the Black Suits, an order of men and women who show their opposition to Adrash by staging battles in the streets. After witnessing the death of a child in his care, knowing himself to be responsible, he sets off on a journey to the decennial fighting tournament in Danoor.Traveling with him across the continent are Churls, a mercenary haunted by the ghost of her daughter, and Berun, a constructed man possessed by the soul of his creator. Both come to understand that Vedas's victory would start an all-out religious war.Unbeknownst to these three travelers, the aristocratic outbound mage Ebn and her protégé Pol use powerful alchemy to travel into space. Their plan: engage Adrash in ways that threaten to bring the god’s wrath down upon the world.Meanwhile, one of the world’s deepest secrets is gradually revealed. A madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, a pantheon of forgotten gods, offers the most tempting lie of all...Hope.Jeroun collects the two novels No Return and Shower of Stones in a single new omnibus edition. Together these works combine the mythic inventiveness of early Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany, the dark weirdness of China Mieville, and the dramatic scope of George R. R. Martin, creating a literary science fiction epic that defies easy categorization, resulting in one of the most critically acclaimed narratives of recent years.Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
£15.28
Simon & Schuster Ltd In Byron's Wake
A Sunday Times Book of the YearShortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail'A masterful portrait' The Times'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars.Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.
£11.69
Little, Brown Book Group When the Clouds Fell from the Sky: A Daughter's Search for Her Father in the Killing Fields of Cambodia
'Like Auschwitz, like Stalin's purges, the mass murders of the Khmer Rouge are one of those extraordinary events that make us wonder about the human capacity for evil. Through a profoundly moving tale that weaves together the connected stories of a victim, his surviving family, and members of the regime, Robert Carmichael brings us into the heart of the darkness that took over Cambodia, bringing it alive in the way no mere statistics can. I've not seen a comparable book about these horrors.'Adam Hochschild, award-winning author of King Leopold's Ghost'What does it mean to say two million people lost their lives during the years of Khmer Rouge rule? The true answer can only be told in microcosm, as Robert Carmichael has done in this intimate and heartbreaking story of the disappearance of one man, and the decades of suffering that followed as his family searched for answers.'Seth Mydans, former Southeast Asia correspondent for the New York Times'As moving as it is well researched. Robert Carmichael's sharp prose and depth of knowledge of Cambodia's history transforms a daughter's search for her missing father into a nation's journey to find peace and reconciliation with its brutal history of genocide.'Loung Ung, author of First They Killed My FatherDuring the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror, two million people died in Cambodia. In describing one family's quest to learn their husband's and father's fate and the war crimes trial of Comrade Duch, who ran the notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, When the Clouds Fell from the Sky illuminates the tragedy of a nation.Having been found responsible for the deaths of more than 12,000 people, Duch was the first Khmer Rouge member to be jailed for crimes committed during Pol Pot's catastrophic 1975-9 rule during which millions were executed or died from starvation, illness and overwork. The Khmer Rouge closed Cambodia's borders, barred all communication with the outside world and sought to turn the clock back to Year Zero. They outlawed religion, markets, money, education and even the concept of family.But the revolution soon imploded, driven to destruction by the incompetence and paranoia of the leadership. Like hundreds of others, when he returned in 1977, Ouk Ket was utterly unaware of the terrors being wrought in the revolution's name.Carmichael has woven together the stories of five people whose lives intersected to traumatic effect: Duch; Ket's daughter, Neary, who was just two when her father disappeared; Ouk Ket himself; Ket's French wife, Martine; and Ket's cousin, Sady, who never left Cambodia and still lives there today.Through these personal stories and months spent following Duch's trial, Carmichael extrapolates from the experience of one man to tell the story of a nation. In doing so, he reaffirms the value of the individual, countering the Khmer Rouge's nihilistic maxim that: 'To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.'
£13.49