Other books that might interest you

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  WINGS OF VALOUR - True Stories...

  Swapnil Pandey

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  After travelling across various airbases in India and engaging with Air Force personnel-including the first generation of Chinook or Prachand helicopter pilots, Garud Commandos, surface-to-air missile operatives and Kargil heroes-Swapnil Pandey presents a collection of true stories that are more awe-inspiring than fiction.  
  What does it take for an ordinary man to withstand torture for the sake of his nation-and live to tell the tale? What occurred in the last moments of the daring fighter pilots who attained martyrdom even as they paved the way to victory? What goes into the workings of India's finest fighter jets? In these pages, you will find the answers to these questions and more.  
  From the story of the first airman to receive the nation's highest peacetime gallantry award for ground combat to heroic rescue operations and death-defying wartime feats, Wings of Valour brings you exclusive insights and thrilling accounts of bravery from the Indian Air Force.

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  Sacred Drugs - How Psychoactive...

  Gary Laderman

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  Sacred Drugs explores the numerous ways in which psychoactive substances, from alcohol to psilocybin, cannabis to pharmaceuticals, and coffee to tobacco, intersect with religious life. This cutting-edge volume acknowledges the ubiquity of drug use in American society and that, in fact, being drugged with an altered state of consciousness is a common feature of American life today, as it has been throughout human history and across global ancient cultures. Its focus is on the undeniable and pervasive evidence that drugs are often consumed for religious purposes. 
  Sacred Drugs touches on the presence of drugs in a number of religious traditions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. It also delves into the religious textures, sensibilities, and histories of psychoactive agents, sometimes intersecting with these traditions, sometimes with Indigenous cultures around the world, and sometimes not directly related to any particular religion, but instead related to more basic existential religious concerns: a mortal body that suffers, ages, and dies, but also yearns for transcendence, healing, and ecstasy; or the desire to uncover and live true to one's identity, as well as to find energizing communities that bind individuals together; or how to counter chaos, meaninglessness, and disorder. This controversial book will be the go-to volume for readers interested in the complex relationship between religious life and psychoactive substances.

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  The Bond Code - The Dark World...

  Philip Gardiner

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  The Bond Code is the remarkable story of how Fleming's association with the occult world led him to create a masterful series of clever clues, cyphers, and codes within his books. Philip Gardiner finally unravels the secret of James Bond piece by piece from the novels and films used to create his aura of mystique. This book not only introduces new material but also radically reappraises everything we thought we knew about Bond - and his creator.

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  Languages of the Ancient Near...

  Editors Charles River

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  Perhaps not surprisingly given how advanced they were in comparison to contemporaries, the Egyptians invented one of the first writing systems ever, and for centuries, people thought these ancient texts held some sort of secret, be it aliens, advanced technology lost to the world, or mystical cures for all of the world’s ills. Even the ancient Egyptians saw their writing systems as full of mystery and hidden knowledge - according to Egyptian mythology, writing was invented by the ibis-headed god Thoth, the most intellectual of the gods.  
  	Along with Egypt, the cultural and geographic region known as Mesopotamia was home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations and also the first known form of writing, cuneiform. Many different ethnic groups vied for power in ancient Mesopotamia over the course of antiquity, spanning about 3,000 years, and many of them spoke different languages. Despite these differences, the people in Mesopotamia shared many cultural attributes, including similar religious practices, a common art and architecture style, and a shared use of the cuneiform script. The languages spoken by the peoples of Mesopotamia were as diverse as the many ethnic groups, but as those groups asserted their military, economic, and cultural power over the other groups, two languages became dominant in the region: Sumerian and Akkadian.  
  	The greatest irony of the lack of primary source information about the Phoenicians is that their language and writing happened to be the most influential in antiquity, a byproduct of their voyages and colonization, which spread their language across the Mediterranean. It was the forerunner to the Greek alphabet, from which the Latin alphabet was directly derived, and thus most of the written languages of the modern West. 

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  Pakistan - A Very Short...

  Pippa Virdee

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  What is Pakistan? The name refers to a seventy-year-old post-colonial product of the bloodiest partition of territory and population that accompanied the end of British empire in South Asia. But the region of the Indus Valley has a four-thousand-year-old history, and was the site of one of the earliest and greatest riverine civilizations in the world. Although the modern nation of Pakistan as we know it was created as a homeland for the Muslims of British India, it is impossible to understand the complex tapestry of linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities and tensions of the region without tracing its deep past. 
   
   
   
  This Very Short Introduction looks at Pakistan as one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947. Pippa Virdee reaches into the ancient past to demonstrate the influence of trajectories of human settlement and civilization on Pakistan's contemporary political arena, and shows how the longer continuities between the land and its peoples are as important as the short-term changes in the political landscape. She considers Pakistan's religion and society, the state and the military, everyday life, popular culture, languages and literature, as well as Pakistan's relationship with the rest of the world. Virdee also looks to the challenges of the twenty-first century and the future of Pakistan.

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  Pop Masculinities - The Politics...

  Kai Arne Hansen

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  In Pop Masculinities, author Kai Arne Hansen investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early twenty-first century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That. 
   
   
   
  By directing particular attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from these artists' representations of masculinity, Hansen argues that pop performances tend to operate in ways that simultaneously reinforce and challenge gender norms and social inequalities. Providing a rich exploration of these murky waters, Hansen merges the interpretation of recorded song and music video with discourse analysis and media ethnography in order to engage with the full range of pop artists' public identities as they emerge at the intersections between processes of performance, promotion, and reception. In so doing, he advances our understanding of the aesthetic and discursive underpinnings of gender politics in twenty-first century pop culture and encourages listeners to contemplate the sociopolitical implications of their own musical engagements as audiences, critics, musicians, and 
  scholars.

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