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  Who Has Buried the Dead? - From...

  KGE Konkel

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  The Second World War was fought not only on the front lines but also in secrets, some of which have never been revealed. One such secret was buried in the deep, dark forest of Katyn, Poland. The other in the pages of a notebook hidden in an otherwise unremarkable café in an ancient Polish city.
  		 
  That notebook, known as the Scottish Book, was an obscure work of intellectual gamesmanship between a specialized group of mathematicians who met at a local pub near the town’s medieval university, where they shared and solved complex mathematical problems in the pages of the book. In 1939, as the Nazis overran the country, the book mysteriously vanished from its hiding place in the café. Some of its contributors avoided certain death by fleeing Poland  for America, where the government recruited them. Ultimately, some of these intellectuals became participants in a deadly undertaking: the Manhattan Project.
  		 
  Who Has Buried the Dead? may be fiction, but it draws on years of research to plausibly answer the real questions surrounding one of the last great secrets of the Second World War. What did the Scottish Book contain that led the NKVD, the Gestapo, and the Allies on a desperate search, using any means to find it? Why has its existence not factored into the telling of Second World War history? What is ultimately revealed within the Scottish Book that brought mortal enemies and their top spy operatives into a deadly contest for its discovery and seizure?

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  Menachem Begin: The Life and...

  Charles River Editors

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  “What you have just heard about the Jewish people's inherent rights to the Land of Israel may seem academic to you, theoretical, even moot. But not to my generation. To my generation of Jews, these eternal bonds are indisputable and incontrovertible truths, as old as recorded time.” – Menachem Begin 
  The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is over 70 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the Middle East peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive concepts like the right of return, contiguous borders, secure borders, demilitarized zones, and security requirements, with players like the Quartet, Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Hamas, the Arab League and Israel. Over time, it has become exceedingly difficult for even sophisticated political pundits and followers to keep track of it all.  
  Israel has rarely reached agreements with its neighbors, and when it did so at the end of the 1970s, it was accomplished by a prime minister who was one of the nation’s most famous military officers. After the Yom Kippur War, President Jimmy Carter’s administration sought to establish a peace process that would settle the conflict in the Middle East, while also reducing Soviet influence in the region. On September 17, 1978, after secret negotiations at the presidential retreat Camp David, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty between the two nations, in which Israel ceded the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a normalization of relations, making Egypt the first Arab adversary to officially recognize Israel. Carter also tried to create a peace process that would settle the rest of the conflict vis-à-vis the Israelis and Palestinians, but it never got off the ground. For the Camp David Accords, Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize.

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  Leo Tolstoy: A short biography -...

  5 Minutes, 5 Minute Biographies,...

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  Leo Tolstoy, Russian nobleman and most famous author: Life and work in a short biography! Everything you need to know, brief and concise. Infotainment, education and entertainment at its best!

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  Allied Invasions of France in...

  Editors Charles River

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  By the end of D-Day, the Allies had managed to successfully land 170,000 men, including over 75,000 on the British and Canadian beaches, 57,000 on the American beaches, and over 24,000 airborne troops. Thanks to Allied deception, the German army had failed to react to prevent the Allies from making the most of their landings. Just one division, the Hitlerjugend, would arrive the following day. Despite a fearsome and bloody day, the majority of the Allied forces had held their nerve, and most importantly, achieved their objectives. This ensured Operation Overlord was ultimately successful, and victory in Europe would be achieved within less than a year. 	Churchill was not overstating the achievements of the invasion when he described the plan “the greatest thing we have ever attempted”. The greatest armada the world had ever seen had landed 170,000 soldiers on the heavily defended beaches of Normandy in just 24 hours. More remarkable was the fact that the operation was a success on every major level. Deception, tactical surprise and overwhelming force had contributed to the establishment of an adequate beachhead. Confusion and dissent had stopped the Germans massing for any great counterattack. The Atlantic Wall which Hitler had placed so much faith in had been breached, and the race to Paris was on. The landings in Normandy and the campaign that followed were successful, but that very success brought its own problems.  
  	While D-Day is one of the most famous events of the war, it is widely overlooked that about two months after the landings in Normandy, there was a second Allied landing in France. On August 15, 1944, a combined US-French force landed in southern France on the beaches of the Côte d'Azur as part of Operation Dragoon. In just over four weeks of fighting, the Allied landing led to the liberation of most of southern France and to one of the most audacious and successful Allied operations of World War II. 

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  Divine Protection - A retelling...

  Krishna Dharma, Chintamani Dhama...

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  A dramatic narration of the great Sanskrit epic in fluid prose that enables those new to the text to easily assimilate its profound messages, while enjoying its vivid stories of gods, saints, sages, and ancient kings. In this volume, we see how Krishna saves his devotee from degradation. Beginning with the famous story of Ajamila, the brahmin who fell from an exalted position to become a ruthless robber and cheat, only to be miraculously redeemed at the very moment of death. Then we hear how Indra, king of the gods, insulted his guru and, as a result, was overpowered by the demonic races, led by Vritra, a supernatural colossus conjured for the god’s destruction. The twist in this tale is that the demon was a great saintly devotee of Krishna. Finally, we hear how Diti, mother of the demons, gains her salvation. Through all these narrations, we see how, no matter how fallen you are, if you have any divine service to your credit, Krishna will find a way to save you.

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  The Plunder of Black America -...

  Calvin Schermerhorn

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  Wealth is central to the American pursuit of happiness and is an overriding measure of well-being. Yet wealth is conspicuously absent from African American households. Why do some 3.5 million Black American families have zero or negative wealth? 
   
   
    
  Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder. 
   
   
    
  From the story of Anthony and Mary Johnson, abducted from Angola and brought to Virginia in 1619, to the enslaved Black workers dispossessed by the Custis-Washington family, to Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro), who purchased his freedom, to three generations of a family enslaved in the South who moved north after Emancipation, to the Tulsa massacre and the subprime lending crisis, Schermerhorn shows that we cannot reckon with today's racial wealth inequality without understanding its unrelenting role in American history.

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