Search results for ""Author Matthew Carr""

Savage Frontier traces the routes over the mountains taken by monks, soldiers, poets, pilgrims and refugees, examining the lives and events that have shaped the Pyrenees across the centuries. Its cast of characters includes Napoleon, Hannibal and Charlemagne; the eccentric British climber Lord Henry Russell; Francisco Sabaté Llopart, the Catalan anarchist who waged a lone war across the Pyrenees against Franco for years after the Civil War; and the cellist Pau Casals, who spent more than twenty-three years in exile only a few miles from the Spanish border, to show his disapproval of the regime. Acclaimed author Matthew Carr uncovers the fascinating story of one of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth—both a forbidding, mountainous frontier zone of stunning beauty and a site of sharp conflict between nations and empires.

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Today, political violence has become the scourge of our world and terrorism is routinely described as a uniquely modern evil. Yet however unprecedented in scope the new terrorist organizations might appear, Matthew Carr argues in this definitive history of terrorism that they are merely offshoots of a spectacular bombing in 1881: the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II by terrorists ...or were they freedom fighters? Thus begins a narrative of extraordinary sweep that Publishers Weekly called 'engrossing, unsettling' and the Boston Globe praised as 'brave and wise' and 'a book for the ages.' In The Infernal Machine, Carr unearths the complex realities of terrorist violence and its indelible impact on nations as different as Italy, Argentina, France, Algeria, Ireland, Russia, Japan, and the United States. Spanning over a century of world history, The Infernal Machine reveals stunning similarities in societies' responses to terrorism despite profound political and cultural differences. Carr demonstrates again and again that the true impact of terrorism has been felt in the overreactions of government and the media to acts of political violence. This encyclopedic and diagnostic primer for our frightening times allows us to see our current predicament against a background of striking historical parallels.

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For nearly thirty years the Berlin Wall symbolised a divided Europe. In the euphoric aftermath of the Cold War, the advent of a new 'borderless' world was hailed, one in which such barriers would become obsolete. Today these utopian predictions have yet to be realised. European governments have enacted the most sustained and far-reaching border enforcement program in history in an attempt to repel migrants seeking work or asylum. Detention and deportation, physical and bureaucratic barriers, naval patrols and satellite technologies: all these form part of the militarised response to immigration adopted by European governments, the human cost of which is often overlooked. These efforts have generated a tragic confrontation between some of the richest countries in the world and a stateless population from the poorest - a clash that occurs within Europe's territorial frontiers and also far beyond them. Fortress Europe investigates that confrontation on Europe's 'hard borders.' In a series of searing dispatches, Carr speaks to border officers and police, officials, migrants, asylum-seekers, and activists.The result is a unique and groundbreaking critique of Europe's exclusionary borders, and an essential guide to the wider drama of migration that will dominate politics for years ahead.

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