Hell In A Very Small Place

Author : Jean Casella
Publisher : New Press, The
ISBN 13 : 1620971380
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hell Is a Very Small Place written by Jean Casella and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author : Bernard B. Fall
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 576 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hell in a Very Small Place written by Bernard B. Fall and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu ranks with Stalingrad and Tet for what it ended (imperial ambitions), what it foretold (American involvement), and what it symbolized: A guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French army, convincing the Viet Minh that similar tactics might prevail in battle with the U.S.

Author : Ted Morgan
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1588369803
Total Pages : 769 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Valley of Death written by Ted Morgan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-02-23 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America’s Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of a crucial colony. Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use of exclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement’s rebellion against French occupation after World War II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat—which instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that “no military victory was possible in that type of theater.” Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried on bicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.

Author : Steven L. Peck
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780983748441
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Short Stay in Hell written by Steven L. Peck and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A damned man struggles to find meaning in a library, the dimensions of which are measured in light years.

Author : Bernard B. Fall
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 9780306802317
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hell In A Very Small Place written by Bernard B. Fall and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1985-03-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The siege of Dien Bien Phu, in which a guerrilla force of Viet Minh destroyed a technologically superior French colonial army, must rank with Waterloo, Gettysburg, Midway, Stalingrad, and Tet as one of the decisive battles in military history. Not only did Dien Bien Phu put an end to French imperial efforts in Indo-china, but it also convinced the Viet Minh, when they came to power in Communist North Vietnam, that similar tactics would prevail in their war with the United States. As an American army officer told Bernard Fall during the Vietnam War: ”What we're doing here basically is, we're exorcising Dien Bien Phu.”Bernard Fall in this monumental work has written an exhaustive, revelatory, and vivid account of the battle, leading the reader from the conference rooms of the U.S. State Department to the French Foreign Office to the front lines of Indo-China and the strategy sessions led by General Giap and Ho Chi Minh. Among the many historical curiosities here disclosed is evidence that then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered atomic bombs to the beleaguered French, and that then-Senator Lyndon Johnson played a key role in defeating a proposal to aid the French with critical air support. Without U. S. aid, the fortress at Dien Bien Phu fell on the very day that the cease-fire conference opened in Geneva.Based on hitherto unavailable documentation from the French Defense Ministry, and replete with detailed maps of the many assaults, Hell in a Very Small Place is a first-rate military history. But even more powerful is the political wisdom it imparts about a war that was not only the beginning of the end of the French colonial empire but a rehearsal for American involvement in Vietnam.

Author : M.J. Armitage
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1349041920
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Air Power in the Nuclear Age, 1945–82 written by M.J. Armitage and published by Springer. This book was released on 1983-06-18 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Greg Lockhart
Publisher : Allen & Unwin
ISBN 13 : 1741761921
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Minefield written by Greg Lockhart and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the Australian minefield laid in the Phuc Tuy Province in 1967 that played havoc with Australia's military operations in Vietnam and constituted the greatest tactical blunder in Australian military history since World War Two.

Author : John Prados
Publisher : Diversion Books
ISBN 13 : 0989333140
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Operation Vulture written by John Prados and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the little known story of how the American President and his cabinet carried the United States to the brink of war in Indochina and potentially China—in 1954! Americans and the U.S. were intimately involved in the key battle that ended the French occupation of Vietnam. Operation Vulture tells the story of secret U.S. efforts to sustain the French in Indochina, of the men who labored alongside the French military, of the frantic behind-closed-door meetings and confrontations in Washington as diplomats sought the American’s intervention, and of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s reluctant step back from sending in the Marines and using atomic bombs. Presenting the story from the U.S., French, and Vietnamese points of view, this eBook edition of Operation Vulture is completely revised and rewritten, with new text on almost every international facet of the Dien Bien Phu battle. It provides the most detailed treatment of the secret plan to drop tactical nuclear weapons there. It includes fresh material on American naval and air operations, on the CIA and French intelligence, on U.S. and French efforts to relieve the besieged fortress, on the historical disputes over the diplomacy of Dien Bien Phu and Geneva, and on the cover-up of Eisenhower era records of these events. Also included are new maps specifically prepared for this edition. PRAISE: “A detailed and readable study…” —Foreign Affairs “Dr. Prados’s perceptive...account gains impressive credence from his extensive use of recently declassified material.” —Army Magazine “John Prados is a clever and prodigious digger of historical fact.” —Evan Thomas, New York Times Bestselling Author

Author : James S. Corum
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 536 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Airpower in Small Wars written by James S. Corum and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of airpower in wartime calls to mind the massive bombings of World War II, but airplanes have long been instrumental in small wars as well. Ever since its use by the French to put down rebellious Moroccan tribes in 1913, airpower has been employed to fight in limited but often lengthy small conflicts around the globe. This is the first comprehensive history of airpower in small wars-conflicts pitting states against non-state groups such as insurgents, bandits, factions, and terrorists-tracing it from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day. It examines dozens of conflicts with strikingly different scenarios: the Greek Civil War, the Philippine Anti-Huk campaign, French and British colonial wars, the war in South Vietnam before the American escalation, counterinsurgency in southern Africa, Latin American counterguerrilla operations, and counterinsurgency and counterterrorist campaigns in the Middle East over the last four decades. For each war, the authors describe the strategies employed on both sides of the conflict, the air forces engaged, and the specific airpower tactics employed. They discuss the ground campaigns and provide the political background necessary to understand the air campaigns, and in each case they judge the utility of airpower in its broadest sense. In their historic sweep, they show how forms of airpower evolved from planes to police helicopters, aircraft of the civilian air reserve, and today's unmanned aircraft. They also disclose how small wars after World War II required new strategies, operational solutions, and tactics. By taking this broad view of small-war airpower, the authors are able to make assessments about the most effective and least effective means of employing airpower. They offer specific conclusions ranging from the importance of comprehensive strategy to the need for the United States and its allies to expand small-wars training programs. Airpower in Small Wars will be invaluable for educating military professionals and policy makers in the subject as well as for providing a useful framework for developing more effective doctrine for employing airpower in the conflicts we are most likely to see in the twenty-first century.

Author : Quang Thi Lâm
Publisher : University of North Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 1574412760
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hell in An Loc written by Quang Thi Lâm and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Three days before Easter last spring, the North Vietnamese struck South Vietnam with a fury unknown to the Vietnam war since the Tet offensive four years earlier. They poured south across the DMZ, smashed into the central highland from Laos, crossed the border from Cambodia and, with an army of 36,000 men and 100 Russian-made tanks, raced toward Saigon, boasting that they'd be in the city by May 19, Ho Chi Minh's birthday. From one end of the country to the other, bases and villages fell before the savagery of their onslaught. By April 5, all that blocked them from Saigon was a ragtag band of 6,800 South Vietnamese regulars and militiamen and a handful of American advisors holed up in An Loc, a once-prosperous rubber-plantation town of 15,000 astride Highway 13, which led to the capital, 60 miles to the south ... In Thi's opinion, reporting the victory of An Loc would contradict the U.S. media's basic premise that the war could not be won because ARVN was a corrupt and ineffective force. Subsequent published studies of the conflict provide a wealth of details about the use of U.S. airpower and the role of the U.S. advisors, but they fail to provide equal coverage to the activities and performance of ARVN units participating in the siege. Thi believes that it is time to set the record straight. Without denying the tremendous contribution of the U.S. advisors and pilots to the success of An Loc, this book is written primarily to tell the South Vietnamese side of the story and, more importantly, to render justice to the South Vietnamese soldier who withstood ninety-four days of horror and prevailed"--Publisher's website.