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Post by Admin on Dec 14, 2015 7:43:17 GMT
Boris Johnson explores what makes up the 'Churchill Factor' - the singular brilliance of one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century. Taking on the myths and misconceptions along with the outsized reality, he portrays - with characteristic wit and passion-a man of multiple contradictions, contagious bravery, breath-taking eloquence, matchless strategizing, and deep humanity. Fearless on the battlefield, Churchill had to be ordered by the King to stay out of action on D-Day; he embraced large-scale strategic bombing, yet hated the destruction of war and scorned politicians who had not experienced its horrors. He was a celebrated journalist, a great orator and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Post by Admin on Dec 21, 2015 7:31:44 GMT
Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape. In In Order to Live, Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea—and to freedom.
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Post by Admin on Jan 27, 2016 7:21:36 GMT
As Pääbo tells it, sequencing the genome of Neanderthal man seems to have been about equally fascinating and frustrating. Fortunately, fascination predominated, and ultimate success was reported in 2010 and closely followed by the sequencing of another progenitor of modern humans. The frustration that dogged the project arose from the difficulty of finding Neanderthal fossils with enough DNA left in them to reconstruct the genome, and the constant need to expel contamination by modern human DNA, which, since it highly resembles Neanderthal DNA, routinely corrupts sequencing the latter. The tale Pääbo tells is largely one of technological improvement enabling the elimination of contamination and speeding up the sequencing process. Secondarily, it’s about creating scientific foundations and multinational scientific cooperation to pursue the promises of research into ancient DNA, including that of nonhuman species as well as hominins. Although he never mentions it, Pääbo is the acknowledged founder of ancient DNA research. Instead, he sparingly recounts his personal odyssey from homosexuality to marriage and fatherhood, without relating it to his work, which may perplex some readers. --Ray Olson
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2016 1:10:58 GMT
"A superb book.…Mearsheimer has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the behavior of great powers."―Barry R. Posen, The National Interest The updated edition of this classic treatise on the behavior of great powers takes a penetrating look at the question likely to dominate international relations in the twenty-first century: Can China rise peacefully? In clear, eloquent prose, John Mearsheimer explains why the answer is no: a rising China will seek to dominate Asia, while the United States, determined to remain the world's sole regional hegemon, will go to great lengths to prevent that from happening. The tragedy of great power politics is inescapable.
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Post by Admin on Mar 15, 2016 1:55:28 GMT
The 2015 Raleigh Lecture on History chaired by Professor Sir Richard J Evans FBA, University of Cambridge The end of the First World War produced turmoil and upheaval in Europe which culminated in a second conflagration twenty years later. The end of the Second World War – massively more destructive even than the First – led in contrast to unprecedented peace, stability and prosperity in Europe. How is this to be explained? This lecture explored the conditions in Europe between 1945 and 1949 in the attempt to find some answers.
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