Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
Louis A. DiMarco

Throughout history, cities have been at the center of warfare, from sieges to street-fighting, from peace-keeping to coups de mains. Sun Tzu admonished his readers of The Art of War that the lowest realization of warfare was to attack a fortified city - a maxim that the Russian army should have heeded before it launched its operation to seize the Chechnyan city of Grozny. Indeed, although strategists have advised against it across the millennia, armies and generals have been forced nonetheless to attack and defend cities, and victory has required that they do it well. In Concrete Hell Louis DiMarco has provided a masterful study of the brutal realities of urban warfare, of what it means to seize and hold a city literally block by block. Such a study could not be more timely. We live in an increasingly urbanizing world, a military unprepared for urban operations is unprepared for tomorrow. Fighting in cities requires new skills, new weaponry and new tactics. But there is no better way to prepare than to look at the successes and failure of some of the most famous operations in modern military history including Stalingrad, Hue City and Fallujah.

Storming the City: U.S. Military Performance in Urban Warfare from World War II to Vietnam
Alec Wahlman
In an increasingly urbanized world, urban terrain has become a greater factor in military operations. Simultaneously, advances in military technology have given military forces sharply increased capabilities. The conflict comes from how urban terrain can negate or degrade many of those increased capabilities. What happens when advanced weapons are used in a close-range urban fight with an abundance of cover?
Storming the City explores these issues by analyzing the performance of the US Army and US Marine Corps in urban combat in four major urban battles of the mid-twentieth century (Aachen 1944, Manila 1945, Seoul 1950, and Hue 1968). Alec Wahlman assesses each battle using a similar framework of capability categories, and separate chapters address urban warfare in American military thought.
In the four battles, across a wide range of conditions, American forces were ultimately successful in capturing each city because of two factors: transferable competence and battlefield adaptation. The preparations US forces made for warfare writ large proved generally applicable to urban warfare. Battlefield adaptation, a strong suit of American forces, filled in where those overall preparations for combat needed fine tuning. From World War II to Vietnam, however, there was a gradual reduction in tactical performance in the four battles.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

China’s Impact on the African Renaissance
Kobus Jonker, Bryan Robinson


This 2018 book provides the first comprehensive academic study of what China's trade with, and investment in, African countries mean for the socio-economic well-being of the continent. Based on the African Tree of Organic Growth Framework developed in the book, Jonker and Robinson outline the factors necessary in realizing Africa's Renaissance vision and the impact that the Chinese might have on this process. Using the metaphor of the Baobab tree, the authors analyze the historical, cultural and economic contexts within African countries, the channels available to produce development and growth, and the fruits or social and economic well-being created by this integrated process. The book takes readers on a journey of numerous African examples and case studies, describing and analyzing the challenges and complexities of countries in their desire to achieve organic, cultural, scientific and economic renewal, and the improvement of the well-being of their citizens. This book will be of great value to economists, people who wish to do business in Africa, China-watchers, those who are following the development and growth of Africa, and more.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance
Jeremy Black

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jeremy Black argues that just as the perception of power is central to issues of power, so place, and its constraints and relationships, is partly a matter of perception, not merely map coordinates. Geopolitics, he maintains, is as much about ideas and perception as it is about the actual spatial dimensions of power. Black’s study ranges widely, examining geography and the spatial nature of state power from the 15th century to the present day. He considers the rise of British power, geopolitics and the age of Imperialism, the Nazis and World War II, and the Cold War, and he looks at the key theorists of the latter 20th century, including Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington, Philip Bobbitt, Niall Ferguson, and others.

Jeremy Black is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of many books including Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures (IUP, 2015); Clio’s Battles: Historiography in Practice (IUP, 2015); The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World; War and Technology (IUP, 2013); and Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519-1871 (IUP, 2011).
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

Friendly Fire. The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq
Scott A. Snook
On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy--a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all. With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism he calls "practical drift"--the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from written procedure--to complete his explanation. His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal accident in a highly reliable organization.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age
Hal Brands

The essential resource on military and political strategy and the making of the modern world The New Makers of Modern Strategy is the next generation of the definitive work on strategy and the key figures who have shaped the theory and practice of war and statecraft throughout the centuries. Featuring entirely new entries by a who’s who of world-class scholars, this new edition provides global, comparative perspectives on strategic thought from antiquity to today, surveying both classical and current themes of strategy while devoting greater attention to the Cold War and post-9/11 eras. The contributors evaluate the timeless requirements of effective strategy while tracing the revolutionary changes that challenge the makers of strategy in the contemporary world. Amid intensifying global disorder, the study of strategy and its history has never been more relevant. The New Makers of Modern Strategy draws vital lessons from history’s most influential strategists, from Thucydides and Sun Zi to Clausewitz, Napoleon, Churchill, Mao, Ben-Gurion, Andrew Marshall, Xi Jinping, and Qassem Soleimani. With contributions by Dmitry Adamsky, John Bew, Tami Davis Biddle, Hal Brands, Antulio J. Echevarria II, Elizabeth Economy, Charles Edel, Eric S. Edelman, Andrew Ehrhardt, Lawrence Freedman, John Lewis Gaddis, Francis J. Gavin, Christopher J. Griffin, Ahmed S. Hashim, Eric Helleiner, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Seth G. Jones, Robert Kagan, Jonathan Kirshner, Matthew Kroenig, James Lacey, Guy Laron, Michael V. Leggiere, Margaret MacMillan, Tanvi Madan, Thomas G. Mahnken, Carter Malkasian, Daniel Marston, John H. Maurer, Walter Russell Mead, Michael Cotey Morgan, Mark Moyar, Williamson Murray, S.C.M. Paine, Sergey Radchenko, Iskander Rehman, Thomas Rid, Joshua Rovner, Priya Satia, Kori Schake, Matt J. Schumann, Brendan Simms, Jason K. Stearns, Hew Strachan, Sue Mi Terry, and Toshi Yoshihara.
Looks like a compendium of Western writers. Some are a joke but good to know the thought process.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

China on the Eve of Communist Takeover
A. Doak Barnett

This book attempts to illuminate some of the trends and conditions
in China just prior to, and at the time of, Communist
takeover. It is not, and does not purport to be, either a history
or an exhaustive analysis of those years. It is composed, in fact, of
reports I wrote in China during that period, and, like all current
reporting in times of rapid change, these reports have certain unavoidable
limitations; they inevitably tend to be fragmentary and
lack the kind of perspective only time can provide. Nevertheless,
I believe that they do contain information unavailable elsewhere,
and that they may convey a "feel" for many of the complex problems
involved in the revolutionary upheaval in China which
could not be obtained except from on-the-spot observation and
study.


Asia's Giants: Comparing China and India
Edward Friedman, Bruce Gilley

This edited volume reconsiders the conventional wisdom that argues that the comparative performance of China has been superior to that of India, bringing together new paradigms for evaluating two countries in terms of economics, social policy, politics, and diplomacy. Essays show that if not outright wrong, conventional wisdom has proven to be overly simplified. The book brings out the complexity and richness of the India-China comparison.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

This book will help in understanding how woke culture came about

The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno
J. M. Bernstein

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J.M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers--- Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno--- and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics (its concepts of judgement, genious, and the sublime) to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Cyrano »

Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway - film, worth a watch. On Netflix.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

As there is talk of De-Dollarization here is an interesting book

The Decline of Sterling: Managing the Retreat of an International Currency, 1945–1992
Catherine R. Schenk
The demise of sterling as an international currency was widely predicted after 1945, but the process took thirty years to complete. Why was this demise so prolonged? Traditional explanations emphasize British efforts to prolong sterling's role because it increased the capacity to borrow, enhanced prestige, or supported London as a centre for international finance. This book challenges this view by arguing that sterling's international role was prolonged by the weakness of the international monetary system and by collective global interest in its continuation. Using the archives of Britain's partners in Europe, the USA and the Commonwealth, Catherine Schenk shows how the UK was able to convince other governments that sterling's international role was critical for the stability of the international economy and thereby attract considerable support to manage its retreat. This revised view has important implications for current debates over the future of the U.S. dollar as an international currency.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

BOSE or GANDHI : Who Got India Her Freedom?
Maj. Gen. GD Bakshi


This book seeks to answer a seminal question about Nation state
formation in Post colonial India, “Who got us our Freedom and how?” Was
it due to the violence of Bose and His INA- or was it due to the
peaceful and non-violent agitation of Mahatma Gandhi? Where we are going
depends a lot on where we came from.
The author has painstakingly
analysed the documents now available in the British Transfer of Power
Archives. He has methodically identified the key British decision-makers
in London and New Delhi in the critical period from 1945-1947, and
examined their letters and reports about the INA trials and their
violent aftermath (November-December 1945) and then the mutiny in the
Royal Indian Navy (February 1946). Relevant letters from the Viceroy and
military appreciation of the situation by Fd Mshl Auchinleck, along with
reports from the Governors of the various provinces, as also the report
of the Director IB, have been reproduced in the original along with
Letters from the Prime minister Lord Clement Attlee and Secretary of
state for India, Pethik Lawerence. The documentary paper trail is
chillingly clear. The British were shaken by the widespread violence in
support of the INA and the serious question mark it raised about the
continued loyalty of some 2.5 million Indian soldiers then being
de-mobilized after the war. There were less than 40,000 British troops
in India then. They were war-weary and home-sick. How could they have
quelled a revolt by 2.5 million combat-hardened Indian Soldiers? It was
this stark maths that forced the British to leave when they did. Nelson
Mandela in South Africa, continued with the non-violent methods of the
Mahatma. Unfortunately, South Africa got its freedom only in April 1994.
The unfortunate fact is that the British left but handed over power to
an anglophile elite that faithfully carried on with the narratives and
constructs of the Raj.
Also, the British had decided in 1916 they have to partition India for imperial reasons and the rest was all a charade.

Will find the references to this.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by madhu »

ramana wrote: Also, the British had decided in 1916 they have to partition India for imperial reasons and the rest was all a charade.
Will find the references to this.
raman ji, I had also come across this from the book "Pakistan: Courting the Abyss" by Tilak Devasher. he stated “There is a body of literature that has put forward the argument that it was Viceroy Linlithgow who in March 1940 instructed Zafarullah Khan, a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, to convey to the League leadership that the government wanted it to demand a separate state. This could be as a result of pique for the Congress resignations from the ministries on the outbreak of WWII. According to Ishtiaq Ahmed, the idea of a separate state for Muslims was born in the viceroy’s office.” (Loc:472-476)
concluding that it was British that created Pakistan, indirectly giving clean chit to Jinna of Muslim league and Gandhi of Congress who were equally responsible not only for partition but also the bloodshed that happened for it. The question that I think on reading this is, if British did conspire to break “British India” to “Pakistan” and “India” for its long term strategic interest, then how come it is so badly imagined?
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

Let's discuss in another thread.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Hriday »

I plan to write a short summary of several books in this thread at a later time. The contents of the books given below if spread world wide will be powerful boost to the softpower influence of Hinduism. One can say that softpower is everything. It is the softpower that causes a man to kill another man. It is the same softpower that causes him to help others.

The list of the books are given below with a short description of what it contains. I will write the detailed summaries of these books later.

1. 'The Holy Science' by Swami SriYuktesvar Giri. He presents a Yuga calculation which accurately explains the rise and fall of goodness and technology since ancient times to our present times, particularly the knowledge explosion in the world after the year 1900 as predicted by him in the year 1894.


2. 'The Fingerprints of the Gods' and its sequel 'Magicians of the Gods' by Graham Hancock. A part summary of these two books about the coming cataclysm is already provided by me in the 35th page of this thread. Will write additional details later. It explains; the existence and proofs of spiritually and technologically advanced worldwide civilization, the gradual decay of this civilization (the timelines accurately matches with Sri Yultesvar's Yuga theory), why the number 108, 72 (in Islam) is special, what is Samudra Manthan in puranas, the civilizing hero Oannes(man-fish hybrid) of Sumeria(Matsyavatar?).


3. 'Physics of God' by Joseph Selbie. It explains; an overview of latest fundamental discoveries in science, the description of astral world in religious literature on the basis of science, science says that dark matter/energy is of 2 dimensional world, 2 dimensional world is like a mind world thus much freer than material world, science says material world is a condensed form of astral or dark matter/energy world, (Swami SriYuktesvar's description that astral world is far larger than the material universe was later found correct by the science.)


4. 'Proof of Heaven' and its sequel by Dr. Eben Alexander.
It explains; his own near death experience (NDE), his visit to astral world during the coma state, the nature of astral world, how recent medical advances enables patients to recover from coma thus enabling a short visit to astral world.

I will also include short summary of many westerner's NDE which affirms that one does not stay permanently in astral world or heaven just because they believe in Jesus.

5. 'Supernaturals' by Graham Hancock. I had given a short summary of this book in the 35th page of this thread. Will write more details later. It explains his proposal that the modern UFO phenomena recorded on optics and radars are exactly the same one we see in the DMT induced visions of astral world, the ability of astral beings to appear and disappear in this world, time experience differs in earth and astral worlds.

6. 'Jesus lived in India' by Holger Kersten and 'Revelations of Christ: Proclaimed by Paramhansa Yogananda' by Swami Kriyananda. The Hindu or Buddhist nature of a group in which Jesus was closely associated since childhood, his visit to India thus causing 18 years of absence in his homeland, his survival of crucifixation and escape to India, shroud of Turin which shows the image of Jesus, tomb for a Jewish man at Hazratbal mosque in Kashmir, the stunning similarity of teachings of Bible with that of Hinduism, church authorities decision to remove reincarnation concept from Bible.

I will also include some online articles about the origin of Islam from Hinduism.

7. 'Caste, Conversion A Colonial Conspiracy: What Every Hindu and Christian Must Know about Caste' by Pt Satish K. Sharma.

Also an online article which provides the genetic studies which shows that birth based caste determination was not practiced in ancient India.

The above book quotes a church authority that Varna practice in ancient India is an obstacle for conversion to Christianity as Varna is not based on birth and thus no grievances to exploit, the British practice of assignment of low and high castes to people based on their present job during census, deliberately impoverishing low castes and encouraging conversion by various offers.

8. 'The Secret' by Rhonda Byrne.
It explains that what we thinks it will happen to us in body and also the life circumstances whether it is negative or positive, it cites many people's real life experiences, it supports the Hindu teachings of Karma. Doctors now advises patients to reduce anger, stress and other negative thoughts as these emotions will cause diseases in body.

9. 'Truth and Actuality' by Jiddu Krishnamoorthy. Also 'Be as you are' by David Godman.

It explains; the core teaching of Hinduism which is that the Jeevatma or personal entity or 'I' is a mind made illusion, the mind made 'I' automatically creates immense fear of survival and endless desires, 'I' is automatically and technically hostile to every other 'I', deep understanding of 'I' results in the destruction of 'I'concept, once 'I' is destroyed joy and harmony from God will flow through us , destruction of 'I'concept is called Moksha in Hinduism.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Hriday »

The book in the section numbered 9, Be as you are by David Godman is based on Ramana Maharshi's teachings.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

Hriday, When do you plan to complete it?
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Hriday »

ramana wrote:Hriday, When do you plan to complete it?
Ramana ji, I am planning to complete all the above in about 3 to 5 months. I readed these books many, many years ago. So have to go through them again so as to not miss many critical and interesting points.

I am now battling against laziness to read again. So to compell myself and to organise better I posted the above. Apologies, I will work hard to complete it in about 3 months or lesser.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19
Matt Ridley, Alina Chan


A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Finding out where it came from and how it first jumped into people is an urgent priority, but early expectations that this would prove an easy question to answer have been dashed. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened.

In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometres away in the city of Wuhan. They grapple with the baffling fact that the virus left none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travellers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new host—human beings.

To try to solve this pressing mystery, Viral delves deep into the events of 2019 leading up to 2021, the details of what went on in animal markets and virology laboratories, the records and data hidden from sight within archived Chinese theses and websites, and the clues that can be coaxed from the very text of the virus’s own genetic code.

The result is a gripping detective story that takes the reader deeper and deeper into a metaphorical cave of mystery. One by one the authors explore promising tunnels only to show that they are blind alleys, until, miles beneath the surface, they find themselves tantalisingly close to a shaft that leads to the light.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
What forces lead to democracy's creation? Why does it sometimes consolidate only to collapse at other times? Written by two of the foremost authorities on this subject in the world, this volume develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. It revolutionizes scholarship on the factors underlying government and popular movements toward democracy or dictatorship. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Their book, the subject of a four-day seminar at Harvard's Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, was also the basis for the Walras-Bowley lecture at the joint meetings of the European Economic Association and Econometric Society in 2003 and is the winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association as the best economist working in the United States under age 40. He is the author of the forthcoming text Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. James A. Robinson is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is a Harvard Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Program on Institutions, Organizations, and Growth. He is co-editor with Jared Diamond of the forthcoming book Natural Experiments in History.
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The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats.
In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history.

Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society.

There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, :eek: Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve.

Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.
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Post by ramana »

Modiji was presented this book by the author today in New York.

Skin In The Game: Hidden Asymmetries In Daily Life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility
In his most provocative and practical book yet,one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.
As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:
• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.
• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.
• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others.
• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.
• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.
• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it.
The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

A trilogy on US in WWII.
Will post the rest.


Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941–1943
John C. McManus

An engrossing, epic history of the US Army in the Pacific War, from the acclaimed author of The Dead and Those About to Die
“This eloquent and powerful narrative is military history written the way it should be.”—James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
"Out here, mention is seldom seen of the achievements of the Army ground troops," wrote one officer in the fall of 1943, "whereas the Marines are blown up to the skies." Even today, the Marines are celebrated as the victors of the Pacific, a reflection of a well-deserved reputation for valor. Yet the majority of fighting and dying in the war against Japan was done not by Marines but by unsung Army soldiers.
John C. McManus, one of our most highly acclaimed historians of World War II, takes readers from Pearl Harbor—a rude awakening for a military woefully unprepared for war—to Makin, a sliver of coral reef where the Army was tested against the increasingly desperate Japanese. In between were nearly two years of punishing combat as the Army transformed, at times unsteadily, from an undertrained garrison force into an unstoppable juggernaut, and America evolved from an inward-looking nation into a global superpower.
At the pinnacle of this richly told story are the generals: Douglas MacArthur, a military autocrat driven by his dysfunctional lust for fame and power; Robert Eichelberger, perhaps the greatest commander in the theater yet consigned to obscurity by MacArthur's jealousy; "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, a prickly soldier miscast in a diplomat's role; and Walter Krueger, a German-born officer who came to lead the largest American ground force in the Pacific. Enriching the narrative are the voices of men otherwise lost to history: the uncelebrated Army grunts who endured stifling temperatures, apocalyptic tropical storms, rampant malaria and other diseases, as well as a fanatical enemy bent on total destruction.
This is an essential, ambitious book, the first of two volumes, a compellingly written and boldly revisionist account of a war that reshaped the American military and the globe and continues to resonate today.
Island Infernos: The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944
McManus, John C.
In Fire and Fortitude—winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History—John C. McManus presented a riveting account of the US Army's fledgling fight in the Pacific following Pearl Harbor. Now, in Island Infernos, he explores the Army’s dogged pursuit of Japanese forces, island by island, throughout 1944, a year that would bring America ever closer to victory or defeat.
“A feat of prodigious scholarship.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Wonderful.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch • “Outstanding.”—Publishers Weekly • “Rich and absorbing.”—Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins • “A considerable achievement, and one that, importantly, adds much to our understanding of the Pacific War.”—James Holland, author of Normandy ’44
After some two years at war, the Army in the Pacific held ground across nearly a third of the globe, from Alaska’s Aleutians to Burma and New Guinea. The challenges ahead were enormous: supplying a vast number of troops over thousands of miles of ocean; surviving in jungles ripe with dysentery, malaria, and other tropical diseases; fighting an enemy prone to ever-more desperate and dangerous assaults. Yet the Army had proven they could fight. Now, they had to prove they could win a war.
Brilliantly researched and written, Island Infernos moves seamlessly from the highest generals to the lowest foot soldiers and in between, capturing the true essence of this horrible conflict. A sprawling yet page-turning narrative, the story spans the battles for Saipan and Guam, the appalling carnage of Peleliu, General MacArthur’s dramatic return to the Philippines, and the grinding jungle combat to capture the island of Leyte. This masterful history is the second volume of John C. McManus’s trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, proving McManus to be one of our finest historians of World War II.
To the End of the Earth. The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945
John C. McManus

From the liberation of the Philippines to the Japanese surrender, the final volume of John C. McManus's trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War
The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus’s magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” returns with this brilliant final volume. On the island of Luzon, a months-long stand-off between US and Japanese troops finally breaks open, as American soldiers push into Manila, while paratroopers and amphibious invaders capture nearby Corregidor. The Philippines are soon liberated, and Allied strategists turn their eyes to China, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands themselves.
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The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace
Oscar Jonsson

This book analyzes the evolution of Russian military thought and how Russia's current thinking about war is reflected in recent crises. While other books describe current Russian practice, Oscar Jonsson provides the long view to show how Russian military strategic thinking has developed from the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. He closely examines Russian primary sources including security doctrines and the writings and statements of Russian military theorists and political elites. What Jonsson reveals is that Russia's conception of the very nature of war is now changing, as Russian elites see information warfare and political subversion as the most important ways to conduct contemporary war. Since information warfare and political subversion are below the traditional threshold of armed violence, this has blurred the boundaries between war and peace. Jonsson also finds that Russian leaders have, particularly since 2011-12, considered themselves to be at war with the United States and its allies, albeit with non-violent means. This book provides much-needed context and analysis to be able to understand recent Russian interventions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, how to deter Russia on the eastern borders of NATO, and how the West must also learn to avoid inadvertent escalation.
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Non-violent War.
XJP used PLA also like that in Galwan and Yangtse.
So let us read this book.
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Defeat and Division: France at War, 1939–1942
Douglas Porch
Defeat and Division launches a definitive new account of France in the Second World War. In this first volume, Douglas Porch dissects France's 1940 collapse, the dynamics of occupation, and the rise of Charles de Gaulle's Free France crusade, culminating in the November 1942 Allied invasion of French North Africa. He captures the full sweep of France's wartime experience in Europe, Africa, and beyond, from soldiers and POWs to civilians-in-arms, colonial subjects, and foreign refugees. He recounts France's struggles to reconstruct military power within the context of a global conflict, with its armed forces shattered into warring factions and the country under Axis occupation. Disagreements over the causes of the 1940 debacle and the subsequent requirement for the armistice mirrored long-standing fractures in politics, society, and the French military itself, as efforts to reconstitute French military power crumbled into Vichy collaboration, De Gaulle's exile resistance, Alsace-Moselle occupation struggles, and a scuffle for imperial supremacy.
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Fighting to Lose: The German Intelligence Service in the Second World War, 1939-1941
John Bryden
Based on extensive primary source research, John Bryden’s Fighting to Lose presents compelling evidence that the German intelligence service — the Abwehr — undertook to rescue Britain from certain defeat in 1941. Recently opened secret intelligence files indicate that the famed British double-cross or double-agent system was in fact a German triple-cross system. These files also reveal that British intelligence secretly appealed to the Abwehr for help during the war, and that the Abwehr’s chief, Admiral Canaris, responded by providing Churchill with the ammunition needed in order to persuade Roosevelt to lure the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. These findings and others like them make John Bryden’s Fighting to Lose one of the most fascinating books about World War II to be published for many years.
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The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy
Eric Helleiner
The rapid growth of the field of international political economy since the 1970s has revived an older tradition of thought from the pre-1945 era. The Contested World Economy provides the first book-length analysis of these deep intellectual roots of the field, revealing how earlier debates about the world economy were more global and wide-ranging than usually recognized. Helleiner shows how pre-1945 pioneers of international political economy included thinkers from all parts of the world rather than just those from Europe and the United States featured in most textbooks. Their discussions also went beyond the much-studied debate between economic liberals, neomercantilists, and Marxists, and addressed wider topics, including many with contemporary relevance, such as environmental degradation, gender inequality, racial discrimination, religious worldviews, civilizational values, national self-sufficiency, and varieties of economic regionalism. This fascinating history of ideas sheds new light on current debates and the need for a global understanding of their antecedents.
and

The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History
Eric Helleiner


At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, "The Neomercantilists" helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West.

Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States.

The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.
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Kautilya and Non-Western IR Theory
Deepshikha Shahi

The ancient Indian text of Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra comes forth as a valuable non-Western resource for understanding contemporary International Relations (IR). However, Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra largely suffers from the problem of ‘presentism’, whereby present-day assumptions of the dominant theoretical models of Classical Realism and Neorealism are read back into it, thereby disrupting open reflections on Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra which could retrieve its ‘alternative assumptions’ and ‘unconventional traits’. This book attempts to enable Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra to break free from the problem of presentism – it does so by juxtaposing the elements of continuity and change that showed up at different junctures of the life history of both ‘Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra’ and ‘Eurocentric IR’. The overall exploratory venture leads to a Kautilyan non-Western eclectic theory of IR – a theory that moderately assimilates miscellaneous research traditions of Eurocentric IR, and, in addition, delivers a few innovative features that could potentially uplift not only Indian IR, but also Global IR.
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China's Strategic Opportunity: Change and Revisionism in Chinese Foreign Policy
Yong Deng

This book offers a systematic study of China's great-power diplomacy under President Xi Jinping. It critically applies the Chinese concept of 'strategic opportunity', which is defined by the national ambitions as set by the ruling communist party leadership, the opportunities and risks presented in the international environment, and the policy instruments at the nation's disposal. Applying the dynamic concept, the book identifies key Chinese beliefs that seek to best match its resources with its policy ends and investigates policy patterns in China's management of competition with the United States, the Belt and Road Initiative, economic statecraft, regional and global institutional orders, and its multipolar diplomacy. Taking seriously China's choice, Yong Deng challenges the mainstream structural analysis in International Relations that focuses merely on rising powers' insecurity and discontent in the international system. His study shows how the world's leading contender to, and major stakeholder in, the world order actually evaluates, and actively seeks to control, its international environment.
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The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828
Lynn Hudson Parsons

The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political sum were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life. It was, many historians have argued, the country's first truly democratic presidential election. It was also the election that opened a Pandora's box of campaign tactics, including coordinated media, get-out-the-vote efforts, fund-raising, organized rallies, opinion polling, campaign paraphernalia, ethnic voting blocs, "opposition research," and smear tactics. In The Birth of Modern Politics, Parsons shows that the Adams-Jackson contest also began a national debate that is eerily contemporary, pitting those whose cultural, social, and economic values were rooted in community action for the common good against those who believed the common good was best served by giving individuals as much freedom as possible to promote their own interests. The book offers fresh and illuminating portraits of both Adams and Jackson and reveals how, despite their vastly different backgrounds, they had started out with many of the same values, admired one another, and had often been allies in common causes. But by 1828, caught up in a shifting political landscape, they were plunged into a competition that separated them decisively from the Founding Fathers' era and ushered in a style of politics that is still with us today.
I submit the 2014 elections in India were similar.
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Three books on Nazi-Soviet conflict in WWII

Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany’s Winter Campaign, 1941-1942
David Stahel
A gripping and authoritative revisionist account of the Soviet Winter Offensive of 1941–1942 Germany's winter campaign of 1941–1942 has commonly been seen as its "first defeat." In Retreat from Moscow, David Stahel argues that, in fact, it may have been one of its first true successes. Far from a self-evident triumph, the Soviet counteroffensive was a Pyrrhic victory. Though the Red Army managed to push the Wermacht back from Moscow, the Germans lost fewer men, frustrated their enemy's strategic plan, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative. By the beginning of December 1941, conditions at the front were desperate. Ground mattered far less than resources, which neither regime seemed to grasp. Obsessed with prestige, blinded by ideology, and enabled by uncritical high commands, Hitler and Stalin would order positions to be seized or defended "at any cost." As Stahel reveals, Hitler's famed "halt order," far from being the critical solution that hardened the Germans and prevented wild retreat, was a military disaster that breeded resentment and undermined command structures. Likewise, the Red Army's initial success may have been their downfall. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wermacht, the Red Army mounted an offensive that quickly proved disastrous. Through journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us into the Wolf's Lair and reveals a German command at war with itself, as generals on the ground battle to maintain order and save their troops while Hitler's capricious directives become all the more irrational. And through soldiers' diaries and letters home, he paints a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer fight against frostbite as much as they do Soviet artillery. Continuing his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel's Retreat from Moscow is military history of the highest order.
Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East
David Stahel


In just four weeks in the summer of 1941 the German Wehrmacht wrought unprecedented destruction on four Soviet armies, conquering central Ukraine and killing or capturing three quarters of a million men. This was the Battle of Kiev - one of the largest and most decisive battles of World War II and, for Hitler and Stalin, a battle of crucial importance. For the first time, David Stahel charts the battle's dramatic course and aftermath, uncovering the irreplaceable losses suffered by Germany's 'panzer groups' despite their battlefield gains, and the implications of these losses for the German war effort. He illuminates the inner workings of the German army as well as the experiences of ordinary soldiers, showing that with the Russian winter looming and Soviet resistance still unbroken, victory came at huge cost and confirmed the turning point in Germany's war in the East.
and

Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East
David Stahel

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began the largest and most costly campaign in military history. Its failure was a key turning point of the Second World War. The operation was planned as a Blitzkrieg to win Germany its Lebensraum in the East, and the summer of 1941 is well-known for the German army's unprecedented victories and advances. Yet the German Blitzkrieg depended almost entirely upon the motorised Panzer groups, particularly those of Army Group Centre. Using previously unpublished archival records, David Stahel presents a new history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion.
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Black Cross/Red Star: The Air War Over the Eastern Front, Vol. 1: Operation Barbarossa, 1941
Christer Bergstrom, Andrey Mikhailov



Pacifica Press, 2000 - 340 p.

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, was not only one of the greatest land operations in history, but also one of the largest air operations. Over 3,000 Luftwaffe aircraft and aircraft of nations allied with Germany faced over 10,000 Soviet aircraft across an enormous front. While there have been numerous books about the ground operations in the Soviet Union in 1941, relatively little attention has been devoted to the air operations. Black Cross/Red Star is a useful addition to the literature of airpower history on what was arguably the most decisive front of World War II.The history of the air war over the Soviet Union from June 1941 can be summed up as an initial German victory with the Luftwaffe gaining air superiority over the obsolete and poorly trained Red Air Force, the battle for survival by the Red Air Force, the exhaustion of the Luftwaffe by late full, and the resurgence of Soviet airpower in support of the Soviet counterattack in December 1941. The authors provide a good general history of the air action on the Eastern Front for this period of the war.The book emphasizes the unit actions on the Eastern Front and is written to give the reader a "feel" for typical operations of 1941. It is heavy on wing and group operations and contains plenty of pilot anecdotes. One strength of the book is the inclusion of Soviet accounts of the air operations and plenty of Red Air Force photographs. Indeed, the book is well balanced in this regard, quickly moving from German operations to Red Air Force operations over the same sectors. This book is one of the benefits of the opening of the Soviet archives to historians in the last decade. By including brief accounts of air forces allied with Germany, such as those of the Slovaks and Romanians, Black Cross/Red Star makes an important contribution to understanding the air war over the Eastern Front. It is often forgotten that Germany's allies, usually operating under German direction, made a major contribution to the Luftwaffe's campaign in the east. The 500 Romanian air force aircraft played an important role in defending the vital Ploesti oil fields and in supporting the German/Romanian advance in the south. Surprisingly, the book barely mentions the very important role played by the 500-plus aircraft of the Finnish air force on the northern part of the front.The book is a good start as a general history of the air war in the east, but there are several drawbacks. It focuses almost exclusively on the operational and tactical side of the air war, failing to tie air operations into the context of the ground operations. The strategic issues of the air war get pretty short shrift. There is little mention of the planning of the campaign or of logistical operations of opposing air forces. The maps included in the book are pretty basic and the tables of organization and equipment of the opposing air fleets could have been given in better detail. On the tactical side, when the authors write about the Luftwaffe, they tend to concentrate on the fighter units rather than the bombers. Yet, for the Luftwaffe in 1941, the bombers and the interdiction campaign were the focus of the air effort, with the fighters as a supporting force.
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Three books on China

Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire in a New Global Context (Studies in Security and International Affairs)
Charles Horner

China's sense of today and its view of tomorrow are both rooted in the past--and we need to understand that connection, says China scholar Charles Horner. In Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate, Horner offers a new interpretation of how China's changed view of its modern historical experience has also changed China's understanding of its long intellectual and cultural tradition. Spirited reevaluations of history, strategy, commerce, and literature are cooperating--and competing--to define the future.The capstone of modern China was the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and its rejection of Confucianism, capitalism, and modernity. Yet today's rising China retains few vestiges of what Mao wrought. What then, Horner asks, is post-Mao, postmodern China? Where did it come from? How did it get here? Where is it going?Contemporary views of the great periods in Chinese history are having a significant influence on the development of rising China's national strategy, says Horner. He looks at the revival of interest in, and changing interpretations of, three dynasties--the Yuan (1280-1368), the Ming (1368-1644), and the Qing (1644-1912)--that, together with the People's Republic of China, provide examples of great power success. The future of every major country is now connected to China's, and this book explains how China, now seeing itself as the complex and thriving result of the old and the new, is poised to change the world.

Postmodernism and China (a boundary 2 book)
Arif Dirlik, Wang Ning, Anthony D.King, Ping-Hui Liao, Xiaoying Wang, Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu, Sebastian Hsiao-pengLu, Chen Xiaoming, Jeroen de Kloet, Chao-yang Liao, Evans Chan, Zhang Yiwu

Few countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With a dynamically growing economy and a rapidly changing social structure, China challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization. Using postmodernism as both a global frame of periodization and a way to break free from the rigid ideology of westernization as modernity, this volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism. Collectively, these essays question the implications of specific phenomena, like literature, architecture, rock music, and film, in a postsocialist society. Some essays address China’s complicity in—as well as its resistance to—the culture of global capitalism. Others evaluate the impact of efforts to redefine national culture in terms of enhanced freedoms and expressions of the imagination in everyday life. Still others discuss the general relaxation of political society in post-Mao China, the emergence of the market and its consumer mass culture, and the fashion and discourse of nostalgia. The contributors make a clear case for both the historical uniqueness of Chinese postmodernism and the need to understand its specificity in order to fully grasp the condition of postmodernity worldwide. Although the focus is on mainland China, the volume also includes important observations on social and cultural realities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose postmodernity has so far been confined—in both Chinese and English-speaking worlds—to their economic and consumer activities instead of their political and cultural dynamism.First published as a special issue of boundary 2, Postmodernism and China includes seven new essays. By juxtaposing postmodernism with postsocialism and by analyzing China as a producer and not merely a consumer of the culture of the postmodern, it will contribute to critical discourses on globalism, modernity, and political economics, as well as to cultural and Asian studies.Contributors. Evans Chan, Arif Dirlik, Dai Jinhua, Liu Kang, Anthony D. King, Jeroen de Kloet, Abidin Kusno, Wendy Larson, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, Wang Ning, Xiaobing Tang, Xiaoying Wang, Chen Xiaoming, Xiaobin Yang, Zhang Yiwu, Xudong Zhang .
Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in the Post-Deng Era
Barry J. Naughton, Dali L. Yang

Despite repeated predictions of collapse and disintegration, China has managed to sustain national unity and gain international stature since the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. Examining the sources and dynamics of the resilience, this volume's contributors reveal how China's leaders have adapted and reinforced key economic and political institutions. They also disclose that implementation of complex policies to regulate economic and social life (employment and migration, population planning, industrial adjustment, and regional disparities) has become more effective over time within a context of growing social and economic diversity.
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About the book, The Holy Science by Swami SriYuktesvar. Dwapara Yuga started in the year 1900 after the previous Kali-yuga.

Swami SriYuktesvar Giri (1855-1936) was the Guru of Paramhansa Yogananda, who was the author of the internationally acclaimed book Autobiography of a Yogi. Apple CEO Steve Jobs decided to gift this book to those who attended his funeral. In this book, Yogananda writes of many miracles performed by SriYuktesvar.

SriYuktesvar wrote the book The Holy Science in 1894. In it, he presented a Yuga theory which is vastly different from the popular belief about Yugas. In it, he predicted that Kali Yuga had ended approximately in the year 1700 and Dwapara Yuga will fully start in the year 1900 after a transition period of 200 years as described by Manu (The first man in Hinduism)

As described in a biography; when the year 1900 arrived, he led a small band of his disciples in a procession in the streets of Kolkata, welcoming the arrival of Dwapara Yuga. Many people threw stones at the procession thinking that people in the procession are violating Hinduism.

As predicted by him there was a massive worldwide explosion of knowledge on every aspect of the world since the year 1900. Not only that, in just 100 years from 1900, genocides, slavery, colonialism, rules of tyrannical Kings, caste oppression etc saw a drastic reduction. Such sudden comprehensive changes were not observed in the last few thousand years.

As per him the length of Satya, Treta, Dwapara, and Kali Yugas are of 4800, 3600, 2400, and 1200 years respectively including transition periods. We ascend from Kali to progressively higher Yugas till we reach Satya Yuga. After that, we enter into a descending cycle starting from another Satya Yuga to Kali Yuga.

He explained that as taught in oriental astronomy; Sun is part of a dual-star system and they revolve around each other. During these motions, Sun comes nearer to and farther from our galactic centre. This galactic centre is the Vishnu Nabhi which emits creative or spiritual power. When the Earth is nearest to the galactic centre it is Satya Yuga and it gradually descends to Kali Yuga as we move away from the galactic centre.

In science, there is a proposal that the black hole at the centre of the galaxies is the source of stars and planets. In the 1920's it was found that our galactic centre emits radio waves throughout the galaxy. These waves possibly could be a lower manifestation of the spiritual waves.

Science had not yet found a dual star for our Sun, but it had found that the majority of stars in the universe are dual or multi-star systems. Many knowledgeable people including Walter Cruttenden are proposing that several phenomena in the solar system including the annual meteor showers are best explained by an extra planet or the dual of the Sun.

Nilesh Oak and Jeevan Rao said that Mahabharata texts mentioned that Kali Yuga began in the year 5561 BCE, Nov 2. But they may be mentioned as general.


For those who want a thorough understanding of the book The Holy Science; a book written by Joseph Selbie and David Steinmetz, The Yugas are very helpful.


Graham Hancock, author of the international best-seller book Fingerprints of the Gods which presents the existence of a spiritually and technologically advanced civilization about 12,000 years ago and its gradual decay endorsed SriYuktesvar's Yuga theory. Yuktesvar's Yuga theory accurately matches the decline of that civilization.

The Yuga concept is thus very vital for those who seek knowledge. Religious literature and teaching of saints in lower Yugas will be in cryptic or symbolic language.
Last edited by Hriday on 23 Jul 2023 13:27, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Ramana ji and others, I had said that I will write the summary of about 15 books here. The first one is the above, The Holy Science.

But due to some unavoidable circumstances, I am unable to complete it. I am sorry about it. I don't know when I will be able to write about the rest of the books.
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https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/ ... les-kepel/

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“Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West” by Gilles Kepel


The first takeaway from Gilles Kepel’s new book Away from Chaos is the immense complexity of Middle East politics. The second is the receding but still formidable danger of the region’s Islamists. The third is the relative decline in importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict amidst the intensifying Sunni-Shiite rivalry in the region. And the final takeaway, though Kepel likely would disagree, is the declining geopolitical importance of the region to the United States, if not the West as a whole.

Kepel, chair of the Middle East and Mediterranean studies at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, is steeped in the region’s history. Away from Chaos begins with the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, proceeds through the rise to power of political Islam with the mullahs’ victory in the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the consequent spread of Islamist terror groups throughout the region and globally, and culminates in the hopeful (to the West) Arab Spring of 2010-2011 and its disappointing (to the West) results throughout the second decade of the 21st century.


As oil prices soared in the wake of the 1973 war with OPEC’s increasing control of the market, Islam gradually superseded Arab nationalism as the driving force in Middle East politics. The war and US shuttle diplomacy enhanced American influence while reducing Soviet influence in the region. While US and Western diplomats focused on a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the region underwent what Kepel calls “the Islamization of the political order”, culminating in the establishment of an Islamic government in Iran. Iran’s revolutionary Shiite regime posed a threat to the region’s monarchs, above all the Saudi Kingdom’s Sunni rulers who attempted to placate their subjects by funding Wahhabi imams, some of whom also preached global jihad. Kepel writes that 1979 was “the year Pandora’s Box opened, unleashing the global Islamic terrorism plaguing us to this day.”

Jihadis from throughout the region flocked to Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in late 1979, and thereby played a role (with US and Saudi support) in ending the Cold War. When in 1990-91, US forces used Saudi Arabia—home to Islam’s holiest sites—as a base from which to wage war against Iraq, Islamists in the region (some of them former US allies against the Soviets in Afghanistan) declared war against the US, beginning what Norman Podhoretz called “World War IV” (World War III being the Cold War). Throughout the 1990s, Islamists led by al-Qaeda, launched a series of strikes against the West, culminating in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. The US declared a “War on Terror”, and attacked jihadists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then waged war against Iraq—becoming bogged down in both countries.

In the Levant (as Kepel refers to it), the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) “kept losing ground to an up-and-coming Hamas”, while Hezbollah gained ground in Lebanon. Islamist terror organizations metastasized throughout the region, using various names and receiving funding from both Sunni and Shiite supporters. Intifadas were launched against Israel. The Levant played host to a dizzying number of terror groups and networks—and Kepel does a remarkable job of explaining each group’s genesis, evolution, and leadership.

The Middle East’s geopolitics became dominated by the Sunni-Shiite divide and a struggle for power between Saudi Arabia (and its smaller Gulf allies) and Iran. In the midst of this struggle, the upheavals known collectively as the “Arab Spring” overthrew despots in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and threatened regimes in Iraq and Syria. Islamist terror also spread to Europe. The Arab Spring coincided with US efforts to “democratize” the region begun by President George W Bush and continued by President Obama. Obama also reached out to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in a futile effort to enlist their support in bringing stability to the region. Anyone who reads Kepel’s book will appreciate just how fanciful were those Bush and Obama policies. “Not only did [Western leaders] fail to analyze the transformations of the Muslim world”, writes Kepel, “but they were unprepared for the onslaught on their home ground that left [their] societies vulnerable to jihadist violence.”

Kepel details the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) and its efforts to establish an Islamic caliphate in the region in preparation for global conversion and/or conquest. Syria and Iraq became key battlefields in this struggle, and Kepel details the horrific brutality of ISIS warriors who crucified and beheaded their enemies and sold women and children into slavery. In one especially gruesome incident, a captured Jordanian pilot was burned alive in a cage. The ISIS caliphate, fortunately, lasted a little less than three years. But the call to jihad lives on in the region.

Kepel’s France, indeed all of Western Europe, has more at stake in the Middle East than does the United States.

The book’s final chapter discusses the “global stakes in the fight for the Levant”. Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the US, and China are to varying degrees involved in the region’s geopolitics. Kepel notes that Russia’s return to the region is due in part to a US pullback from the region begun under President Obama and continued under President Trump. Kepel decries the American retrenchment, but it was probably inevitable after the explosion of the shale and natural gas industry in the US, which transformed that country into the world’s leading energy producer.

Kepel’s France, indeed all of Western Europe, has more at stake in the Middle East than does the United States. Kepel’s concluding vision of a multinational-supported post-ISIS renaissance in the Levant designed to help the region “emerge from chaos” is most likely a mirage.

Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Ardeshir »

Gurus, any recommendations on books about Islam in India? I was recently asked by a non-Indian friend, and Amazon has "Born a Muslim" by Ghazala Wahab as the top recommendation, which going by the author's Twitter profile is very likely to be a "India is growing intolerant since 2014" rant. I want to add perspectives on the violence suffered by the Indics, the destruction of temples and institutions, and the continuing violence (including that promoted by Pakistan). Bonus points if it is in a voice/style somewhat similar to that of Vikram Sampath Sanjeev Sanyal. Thank you!
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ernest »

You can start with Sitaram Goel https://garudabooks.com/sita-ram-goel

Here's one specifically about Islam in India https://garudabooks.com/the-story-of-is ... m-in-india

Happy reading
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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ramana
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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The Making of Roman India. Greek Culture in the Roman World
Grant Parker, The Making of Roman India. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiii, 357. ISBN 9780521858342 $99.00.

Review by Miguel John Versluys, Leiden University. m.j.versluys@arch.leidenuniv.nl

Scholarly literature on India and its civilisation in the Roman world most often deals with specific aspects. Recent studies, for instance, have predominantly focused on trade and trade relations between the Roman Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent;1 other topics (sometimes) dealt with are the alien wisdom of Indian civilisation and, of course, Alexander the Great. By stopping his campaign at the Indus valley Alexander defined India as the edge of the world, an idea that would strongly influence the Romans. This is the first reason why writing a monograph that covers all aspects of ‘India in the Roman world’ would be a formidable task, as it is imperative for the author to master a very wide array of sources and social contexts ranging from Greek philosophy and Roman literature to the archaeology of both the ancient Mediterranean and India. The second reason, however, I consider even more important. India was never conquered by the Romans and was not a province in the sense that other parts of the ancient world were. However, it played an important role in the Roman imagination in various ways, often through traditions that were defined and demarcated in the Hellenistic era (and before). Hence there were two Indias in the Roman world: the physical land at the other side of the Indian Ocean and India as a cultural concept. Now a large majority of scholarly literature, especially that written by historians and archaeologists, only takes the first India, the physical country, into account. But an overall interpretation of India in the Roman world should also, or perhaps even primarily, be concerned with India as a cultural scenario and moreover develop a methodology to integrate both aspects.

In this well written and stimulating book Grant Parker has admirably succeeded in doing both — being a fine Alltertumswissenschaftler and a theoretically engaged intellectual historian at the same time — and the result is therefore a landmark study, not only of India in the Roman world but also of the cultural mentality of the Roman Empire. For Roman history and archaeology in particular, it must also be characterised as an original investigation as far as theory and methodology are concerned, because Parker is refreshingly radical in putting a reception studies approach central to his study. This has become quite common for the interpretation of classical texts; it is still quite unusual for historical and archaeological analyses. This is not a book, therefore, about the presence of Romans or Roman material culture in India or about (commercial and other) contacts between India and Rome; no, this is a book that dares to ask the overarching question: What did India mean to the Romans of the Empire?

The text is clearly divided into three main parts—”Creation of a discourse” (Part I), “Features of a discourse” (Part II) and “Contexts of a discourse” (Part III)—framed by an “Introduction” and a “Conclusion: intersections of a discourse”.

Part I (“Creation of a discourse”) consists of a chapter entitled “Achaemenid India and Alexander” and deals with what would become the origins of the Roman view of India. The various Greek accounts we have (Scylax, Hecataeus, Herodotos, Ctesias) are first discussed and interpreted, and then the campaigns of Alexander and their legacy. An important figure in the latter category is a certain Megasthenes who visited the court of the Maurya emperor Chandragupta as a member of the Seleucid royal entourage somewhere around 320 BC. It turns out that tropes of India as the land of marvels and of wisdom and holiness were already developed in this period: the elements of the image were fixed in an early stage. Moreover, Parker makes a strong and convincing case for the importance of an Achaemenid context for the development of this image. Scylax of Caryanda, the first Greek we know of who travelled to the Indian subcontinent, did so for Darius I, and Herodotos writes on India as part of a survey of Persian satrapies. The campaigns of Alexander would not change this image as dramatically as we perhaps would expect: the tradition is continued in all aspects but at the same time enriched by two important themes, the first of which is autopsy. The credibility of sources like Megasthenes was considered (much) higher because he had been there himself, although simultaneously the marvellous nature of what he said about India continued to be disbelieved. A second important theme is India as place-marker: after Alexander, India more and more comes to represent the utmost Other, a place far away from the Mediterranean, at the very edge of the world.

Part II (“Features of a discourse”) discusses how the Romans dealt with this (Achaemenid and Hellenistic) tradition in literature and material culture and is therefore divided into two chapters: “India described” on the one hand and “India depicted” on the other. “India described” discusses the reception of the earlier texts (and their relation to newly acquired knowledge) by authors like Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Arrian and others, always focusing “on the larger contexts within which India featured in Roman thinking” (69). Parker achieves this aim not by looking at individual authors but rather by discussing the genres in which indography features (historiography, geography, natural history and romance/mime) as well as what he describes as “topics of thought” versus “modes of description”. In the first category, he looks at how Roman authors address subjects like social division, gender relations and race in India, showing that not only is the description of these elements stereotyped but also that they are presented in standardised literary forms. Still, Parker cautiously concludes that there is a process of collecting knowledge about India, albeit a slow one. Hence, it largely is a history of ideas we see being described in this chapter, with, not surprisingly, Pliny’s Natural History as a nodal point. “India depicted” is a much shorter chapter in which Parker traces the visual traditions of the representations of India. Here Parker cannot always provide the depth that all the other parts of the book have, partly because there is (much) less material available, but partly also, perhaps, because as a classicist he is, logically, more at ease with texts than with material culture. In the visual tradition there seem to be several significantly different Indias or, to put it another way, different visual discourses each have their own ‘India’. All well known representations of India (or Indians) — like the marble head from the Villa Borghese, the Piazza Armerina mosaic and other personifications, and the 6th century AD platter from Istanbul) — are (critically) discussed, especially as far as their Indian character is concerned. Identification remains difficult, also, as Parker rightly underlines, because the cultural boundaries between different visual traditions are not always as clear cut as most scholars like to have them. ‘India’ and ‘Aethiopia’, for instance, often seem to be interchangeable and hence Parker concludes about the much discussed Piazza Armerina personification (used as illustration on the cover of his book) that “there is no need to make a hard-and-fast decision between an African, Egyptian and Indian identity for the Piazza Armerina woman” (142); instead he sees the figure as a mélange oriental.

Part III presents the “Contexts of a discourse” and does so in three chapters, entitled “Commodities”, “Empire” and “Wisdom”. Here we have the social context for all the images in literature and material culture that have been discussed so far and I found the presentation at this point of this background material most illuminating, especially because Parker maintains his reception studies approach here as well. The chapter on “Commodities”, for instance, is not a reconstruction of the trade between the Roman Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent based on amphora-statistics, but rather an essay in cognitive geography. It is clear that goods regarded by the Romans as distinctly Indian carried with them a sense of the exotic. Parker argues persuasively that in view of the social meanings attached to those products we should not always take the places of origin mentioned for these commodities in ancient literature literally; the materiality of distance has a large role to play here. What matters is not, in fact, whether they were Indian, but whether they were perceived as Indian.”The mapping of India that took place through commodities was thus the mapping of Rome” (202) Parker concludes at the end of the chapter. As a general conclusion in a book revolving around the concept of discourse this sentence does not strike the reader as a surprise; but as the close to a chapter with a detailed description and interpretation of Indian commodities it is most worthwhile. In the chapter on “Empire” Parker follows more or less the same strategy by showing that India was never a real candidate for Roman military expansion (“as desirable in principle as it was unrealistic in practice” 221). It does, however, play an important role in the conception of Empire: India mattered as the edge of the world to underline that Rome was its centre. So, while the Indian subcontinent was not part of the Roman world in a political and military sense, it certainly was part of the Roman mental map. Another important factor here was the image of Alexander. Conquering India was seen as the ultimate goal of military achievement and hence became a symbolic expression of imperial power. This mode of perception would acquire an impressive dynamic of its own: when India was mentioned, Alexander was never far away; and vice versa. After “Commodities” and “Empire”, the chapter on “Wisdom” outlines the third social context important for the understanding of ‘India’ in the Roman world. The mystified knowledge of the Brahmans and Gymnosophists (‘the naked philosophers’) is part of a general Roman conception of the ‘East’ as a place where the priestly authorities are the guardians of special knowledge. Also here, therefore, “it is not so much a question of the Brahmans themselves, but of what underlying issues could be projected onto them” (304). It is their inherent exoticism that makes them attractive, Parker argues, and hence they become a kind of ethnic invention.

In his “Conclusion: intersections of a discourse” Parker summarizes the several phases of indography and illustrates their intertwinement and contextual functioning by an analysis of the India excursus by Curtius Rufus (8.9.1-36) before ending with a short (317-318) plea for the deconstruction of East-West dichotomies.

One of the great merits of this fascinating study is its fine balance between a typically post-modern, Foucauldian analysis and ancient realities. Parker has chosen to show the merits of his theoretical approach in the treatment of his data instead of tiring his readers with extensive summaries of (French) philosophy, and that works. If this is post-modernism in Classics, it’s great. Parker also has been wise to avoid a title with the now ubiquitous phrase “the invention of”. Although “the making of Roman India” is in the same vein, it much better implies the Hellenistic (and Achaemenid) stage on which the Romans built , while showing at a glance that the book excellently fits the Greek Culture in the Roman World series.

It is important to note that the discourse analysis used by Parker is particularly appropriate in the case of India, where ‘representations’ play a much more important role than physical encounters do. It is for that reason that the book has developed into “a history of representations that is concerned with social context” (7) as Parker characterises his own work in his Introduction. As such, however, the analysis proposed in the book is also very promising for the (archaeological) study of Rome and other Others (Greeks, Egyptians, Celts, etc.). In those cases it is often the ‘physical’ aspects alone that get the attention they deserve while the dynamic of the cultural scenarios these cultures represent at the same time remains underdeveloped.2 An important point with regard to the interplay between India real and imagined is Parker’s conclusion that the heightened commercial contacts in the first two centuries AD “made remarkably little impact on indography” (310). The image, so it seems, did not allow itself to be corrected by reality. This prompts all kinds of interesting questions on the relation between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ in the case of Rome and Greece, or Egypt, or the Celts, where social realities did influence cultural discourses. But it also implies that in those instances a discourse analysis of (mainly) literary texts alone is not enough to understand what those cultures meant to the Romans.

In an ambitious and wide ranging book like the one reviewed here the specialist can always disagree with this or that aspect, and I am sure that some of Parker’s analyses of texts of individual writers will meet with criticism. As indicated above, as an archaeologist I myself would have liked to see material culture play a somewhat more important role. There is little to go on indeed but still these sources could sometimes have been better contextualised or have been put in a comparative perspective with other Orientalia to elucidate their contextual meaning.3 A second point of mild criticism concerns the author’s prudence in dealing with scholarly discussions. Most often he takes the middle road; this is intelligent but this reader sometimes would have liked to learn more. Such is the case, for instance, with the evocation of Saïd’s Orientalism or with the relation between the Roman image of India and later perceptions.

I believe, however, that such criticisms are not what a review of The Making of Roman India should be about. The case-study itself is treated in quite an exemplary way. But this is a book that through its approach deals with much more than the making of Roman India alone. It is about the nature of Rome as both a successor culture and a world Empire, and as such it deserves to be widely studied and used as a source of inspiration on how to deal with processes of cultural interaction in the Hellenistic and Roman world.

Notes

1. See now the overview provided by R. Tomber, Indo-Roman trade: from Pots to Pepper (Duckworth Debates in Archaeology) (London 2008) with earlier bibliography (BMCR 2009.06.45).

2. ‘Greece’ probably is an exception here; see T. Hölscher, Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg 1987) and a range of recent books like E. Gazda (ed.), The ancient art of Emulation (2002); C.H. Hallett, The Roman nude. Heroic portrait statuary 200 BC-AD 300 (2005); M. Marvin, The language of the Muses: the dialogue between Greek and Roman sculpture (2008). Somewhat more in general on ‘cultural scenarios’ and their functioning, see E.S. Gruen (ed.), Cultural borrowings and ethnic appropriations in Antiquity (Oriens et Occidens 8) (Stuttgart 2005); M.J. Versluys, “Exploring identities in the Phoenician, Hellenistic and Roman East. A review article,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 65 (2008) 342-356.

3. What could have been added, for instance, is discussion of terracotta figurines found in Egypt showing ethnic types, amongst which, it was thought, Indians (most probably not though; see S.-A. Ashton, Foreigners at Memphis? Petrie’s racial types, in: J. Tait (ed.), ‘Never Had the Like Occurred’: Egypt’s view of its past (London 2003) 187-196). What could have been better contextualised, for instance, is the ivory statuette from Pompeii (Fig. 10; Parker mentions the interesting suggestion (without reference) of it having been the leg of a small piece of furniture) for which see also T. Asaka, V. Iorio, …lucroque India admota est. Contatti tra l’India e l’area vesuviana, in: S.T.A.M. Mols, E.M. Moormann, Omni pede stare. Saggi architettonici e circumvesuviani in memoriam Jos de Waele (Studi della Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei 9) (Napoli 2005) 324-330.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China
Raoul McLaughlin

The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes investigates the trade routes between Rome and the powerful empires of inner Asia, including the Parthian regime which ruled ancient Persia (Iran). It explores Roman dealings with the Kushan Empire which seized power in Bactria (Afghanistan) and laid claim to the Indus Kingdoms. Further chapters examine the development of Palmyra as a leading caravan city on the edge of Roman Syria and consider trade ventures through the Tarim territories that led Roman merchants to Han China. The Han Empire of ancient China matched that of Rome in scale and possessed military technology surpassing that of Roman legions. The Han established a system of Central Asian trade routes known as the Silk Road that carried eastern products as far as Persia and the frontiers of the Roman Empire. This is the first book to address these subjects in a single comprehensive study. It explores Rome's impact on the ancient world economy and reveals what the Chinese and Romans knew about their rival Empires.
Good to read as IMEC revive the ancient spice trade route.
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