Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking by Michael Fathers and Andrew Higgins

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Reviews from GoodReads

An engaging and short non-fiction account of the Tianenmen, built up with a more introspective look at the political motivations and power play within the communist structure at the time.

*****

Highly interesting account, written soon after the events (dated August 1989, from memory). This gave it an unusual perspective – reaction had set in in China, but the Berlin Wall and the Soviet puppet regimes of Eastern Europe had not yet fallen, making it seem that the Cold War was about to intensify. Fortunately, the Soviet satellite states did not follow the precedent of Tiananmen.

*****

A brilliant journalistic piece that captures the immediacy and horror of the events on Tiananmen Square from April to June 1989. The story of the student protest movement is told as it developed from mourning the death of Hu Yaobang to striking and demanding concessions from Deng Xiaoping’s government, and then the ominous military buildup and crushing of the democracy movement by the “People’s Liberation” Army. It was so sad to read about how little respect for life was shown by the government. Amongst all of the death, another poignant image was the building by students and then crushing by soldiers of the Goddess of Democracy statue, a Statue of Liberty style sculpture that captured the spirit of the protests. I was hoping for more of an aftermath section, but realised that the book was published almost immediately after the events took place. The tragedy of Tiananmen should never be forgotten.

C.I.A. Coup in Iran: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq, November 1952-August 1953 by Donald N. Wilber

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This document is about the C.I.A.’s assistance to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), now called MI-6, in the overthrow of the democratically elected Premier Mossadegh of Iran is based on the earlier work of the National Security Archive at George Washington University and the investigations of the New York Times. See the National Security Archive’s work at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/ and the New York Times’ report at
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html.

According to the National Security Archive, “This extremely important document is one of the last major pieces of the puzzle explaining American and British roles in the August 1953 coup against Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq.  Written in March 1954 by Donald Wilber, one of the operation’s chief planners, the 200-page document is essentially an after-action report, apparently based in part on agency cable traffic and Wilber’s interviews with agents who had been on the ground in Iran as the operation lurched to its conclusion.

 

Addams and Activists on Deck of Ship on the Way to Europe

Peace and Bread in Time of War by Jane Addams

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First published in 1922 during the “Red Scare,” by which time Jane Addams’s pacifist efforts had adversely affected her popularity as an author and social reformer, Peace and Bread in Time of War is Addams’s eighth book and the third to deal with her thoughts on pacifism.

Addams’s unyielding pacifism during the Great War drew criticism from politicians and patriots who deemed her the “most dangerous woman in America.” Even those who had embraced her ideals of social reform condemned her outspoken opposition to U.S. entry into World War I or were ambivalent about her peace platforms. Turning away from the details of the war itself, Addams relies on memory and introspection in this autobiographical portrayal of efforts to secure peace during the Great War. “I found myself so increasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of other people that at length I confined all analysis of motives to my own,” she writes. Using the narrative technique she described in The Long Road of Women’s Memory, an extended musing on the roles of memory and myth in women’s lives, Addams also recalls attacks by the press and defends her political ideals.
Source: Goodreads.

The Curies and Radium by Elizabeth Rubin

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Grade Level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale is 6.4. Download an epub version for your Android tablet or phone:

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PIERRE and MARIE CURIE are perhaps the most remarkable husband-and-wife team in the history of science. Together they set out to isolate the mysterious radioactive substance in the masses of pitchblende ore available to them in the old shed that was their laboratory. It was back-breaking work, but Marie and Pierre kept at it. Finally, they obtained a product whose radiation was four hundred times greater than that of uranium! Marie called the new element Polonium, after her beloved native Poland. Later, they isolated their famous element radium — nine hundred times as active as uranium! Pierre’s brilliant career was cut short by his tragic death in 1906, but Marie went on with their courageous work alone. In 1911, she received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium. True, it was Marie’s long exposure to radium and X-rays that caused her death. But out of her death came life, for radium is one of modern medicine’s greatest life-savers. The basic idealism and determination of the Curies are captured for budding scientists to ponder. Scientific language is suitable for young readers.

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Scene of crowd marching and title of Runaway Russia

Runaway Russia: An American Woman Reports on the Russian Revolution

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A “Gripping Account” —The Wall Street Journal

Florence Harper was the first American female journalist in Petrograd. Sure that trouble was coming, she waited “as I would for a circus parade.” From the women’s bread protests of the heady first days when the mob seemed “good-natured” to the later horror of the “Marseillaise”-singing crowds being mowed down by machine guns, she remained undaunted, repeatedly returning to the streets despite the dangers she courted daily. She searched the morgues so that she could do a story on the victims. ‘‘I did not wait to count the coffins. It was too harrowing,” she reports. She did watch the hated police being thrown off roofs and also ran the gantlet of the mutinous Kronstadt sailors, who she recalls “all looked like cutthroats.” Allied officers at her hotel smashed the contents of its cellars till they were “literally knee deep in everything from champagne to vodka” to prevent the mob from getting at them. The stoicism and sympathy with which she endured it all shine forth from this gripping account.
Helen Rappaport, The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2017

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Armed Soldiers Marching to the Right

Free ebook: Death is Incidental, A Story of Revolution in Mexico by Heath Bowman and Stirling Dickinson

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The writer, Heath Bowman, does not slow down to spell out the details of the two revolutions in this story. His story is not chronological; Bowman begins with the 20th-century revolution and then moves back in time to the earlier battle for freedom from Spain. The instructor may need to review both revolutions depending on grade level. But Bowman is provocative.

People have died to own land for generations around the world, he notes. Then Bowman asks us when these deaths are necessary. Would you join a revolution for more land and more food for your family if it might mean your death or the deaths of your friends and neighbors?

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