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War Hotels is a gripping exploration of hotels in wartime and in other times of crisis, told through the prism of now iconic hotels that were frequented by foreign correspondents, diplomats, aid workers, politicians, paramilitaries and spies in conflicts in Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bosnia & Herzegovina. It focuses on hotels that became closely associated with the brutal conflicts in which they were a part, such as the Europa Hotel in Belfast, the Continental and the Caravelle in Saigon, the Commodore in Beirut, and Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn. Building upon the research undertaken for the Al Jazeera documentary series of the same name, this book tells the stories of these hotels in even more fascinating detail, drawing upon in-depth interviews with those who witnessed the tumultuous events that took place within or in the immediate environs of the buildings. By using war hotels as a locus of memory and a lens through which to convey the human stories and the conflicts, they provide not only viable ‘micro-histories’ but a rich vein of historical narratives and moving personal recollections.
Human Nature is the fuel of violent conflict. The War Hotel looks at how we get aroused and how we get silenced into violent conflict. We are pulled apart in the name of justice and loyalty. Past trauma is triggered into a replay. Out of love and longing to step beyond the ordinary world, we sacrifice ourselves and others. Dehumanizing the enemy, disinformation, torture, stirring fear in order to crack down - these terror tactics, too, are based in psychology. The manipulation of psychological dynamics to create violent conflict is distressing. But, if our emotions and behaviour are the fuel, then our awareness can impact world events. There is something truly hopeful here. Awareness makes a difference. Examples draw particularly from the author's work in the Balkans. Other examples include Nazi Germany, Rwanda, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Communism and its fall in Europe, South Africa, the treatment of Native Americans and African Americans in the USA, Vietnam and the 'war on terror'.
WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism “High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Operation Hotel California is the definitive inside account of the secret CIA mission that paved the way for the Iraq War. Based on exclusive interviews with the team leader, Charles S. Faddis—who retired in 2008 and whose name was publicly revealed in this book for the first time—it is also the most blistering indictment by any U.S. counterterrorism officer of America’s blunders vis-à-vis Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Its lessons are vital as a new administration seeks to withdraw securely from Iraq and fight extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In this volume, whose title refers to the correspondents who covered the Persian Gulf war from posh hotels in Riyadh and Dhahran, Wall Street Journal reporter Fialka ably chronicles the day-to-day difficulties faced by reporters - ranging from sheer incompetence to outright obstruction on the part of the U.S. Army - and demonstrates the woeful inadequacy of the pool system set up by the military and the press. In large part, he lambastes the Army for its refusal to accommodate journalists and its general attitude of hostility toward the press. (In contrast, the Marines' flair for self-promotion resulted in coverage more extensive than their military role in the war warranted.) Fialka attributes a good deal of this attitude to the military's lingering distrust of the media rooted in the Vietnam War experience. While there was little overt censorship, most of the material written and photographed during the Gulf war was never seen by the American public, and, Fialka says, the Army was shortchanged in accounts of its speedy victory. Most important, says Fialka, the acrimonious relationship between the military and the media bodes ill for future collaborations between the two.
Amid the rubble of a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe, the Hotel Florida on Madrid's chic Gran Via has become a haven for foreign journalists and writers. It is here that six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and a new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious young journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic and ground-breaking young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making and are inventing moder photojournalism in the process. And Arturo Barea, chief of the Republican government's foreign press office, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with their loyalty to their sometimes-compromised cause - a struggle that places both of their lives at risk. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples - and a host of supporting characters - living as intensely as they had ever done, against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. It is a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth, finding it, telling it - and living it, whatever the cost.
"Sentimental, heartfelt….the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages...A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews “A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet gives us a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war--not the sweeping damage of the battlefield, but the cold, cruel damage to the hearts and humanity of individual people. Especially relevant in today's world, this is a beautifully written book that will make you think. And, more importantly, it will make you feel." -- Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain “Jamie Ford's first novel explores the age-old conflicts between father and son, the beauty and sadness of what happened to Japanese Americans in the Seattle area during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love. An impressive, bitter, and sweet debut.” -- Lisa See, bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept. Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart. BONUS: This edition contains a Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet discussion guide and an excerpt from Jamie Ford's Love and Other Consolation Prizes.
In postwar Europe and the Middle East, Hilton hotels were quite literally "little Americas." For American businessmen and tourists, a Hilton Hotel—with the comfortable familiarity of an English-speaking staff, a restaurant that served cheeseburgers and milkshakes, trans-Atlantic telephone lines, and, most important, air-conditioned modernity—offered a respite from the disturbingly alien. For impoverished local populations, these same features lent the Hilton a utopian aura. The Hilton was a space of luxury and desire, a space that realized, permanently and prominently, the new and powerful presence of the United States. Building the Cold War examines the architectural means by which the Hilton was written into the urban topographies of the major cities of Europe and the Middle East as an effective representation of the United States. Between 1953 and 1966, Hilton International built sixteen luxury hotels abroad. Often the Hilton was the first significant modern structure in the host city, as well as its finest hotel. The Hiltons introduced a striking visual contrast to the traditional architectural forms of such cities as Istanbul, Cairo, Athens, and Jerusalem, where the impact of its new architecture was amplified by the hotel's unprecedented siting and scale. Even in cities familiar with the Modern, the new Hilton often dominated the urban landscape with its height, changing the look of the city. The London Hilton on Park Lane, for example, was the first structure in London that was higher than St. Paul's cathedral. In his autobiography, Conrad N. Hilton claimed that these hotels were constructed for profit and for political impact: "an integral part of my dream was to show the countries most exposed to Communism the other side of the coin—the fruits of the free world." Exploring everything the carefully drafted contracts for the buildings to the remarkable visual and social impact on their host cities, Wharton offers a theoretically sophisticated critique of one of the Cold War's first international businesses and demonstrates that the Hilton's role in the struggle against Communism was, as Conrad Hilton declared, significant, though in ways that he could not have imagined. Many of these postwar Hiltons still flourish. Those who stay in them will learn a great deal about their experience from this new assessment of hotel space.
Desperate to escape the increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, thousands of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe, the majority of them Jews, found refuge in Latin America in the 1930s. Bolivia became a principal recipient of this influx — one of the few remaining places in the entire world to accept Jewish refugees after the German Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Some 20,000 refugees arrived in Bolivia, more than in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa — the leading British Commonwealth countries — combined. In Bolivia, the refugees began to reconstruct a version of the world that they had been forced to abandon. Their own origins and social situations had been diverse in Central Europe, ranging across generational, class, educational, and political differences, and incorporating various professional, craft, and artistic backgrounds. But it was Austro/German Jewish bourgeois society that provided them with a model for emulation and a common locus for identification in their place of refuge. Indeed, at the very time when that dynamic social and cultural amalgam was being ruthlessly and systematically destroyed by the Nazis, the Jewish refugees in Bolivia attempted to recall and revive a version of it in a land thousands of miles from their home: in a country that offered them a haven, but in which many of them felt themselves as mere sojourners. Hotel Bolivia explores an important, but generally neglected, aspect of the experience of group displacement — the relationship between memory and cultural survival during an era of persecution and genocide. Employing oral histories, family photographs, artistic and documentary portrayals, it considers the Third Reich background for the emigration, the refugees’ perceptions of past and future, and the role of images and stereotypes in shaping refugee and Bolivian cross-cultural communication and acceptance. It examines how the immigrants remembered, recalled and reshaped the European world they had been forced to abandon in the institutions, culture, and community they created in Bolivia. In documenting life stories and reclaiming the memories and discourses of ordinary persons who might otherwise remain hidden from history, Hotel Bolivia contributes to a major objective of contemporary historical studies. But it is also directly concerned with theoretical issues, increasingly evident in historical writing, focusing on the contextualization of memory and the interdependence – and tension – between memory and history. In reflecting on remembered experience, over time and between people, the ultimate objective of this book is to contribute to the historical study of memory itself. “A curiously inspiring corner of Holocaust history: the story is of how culture and memory survive, and change, in the shock of new surroundings.” — Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost “A form of doing history that offers fresh intellectual insights while touching the heart.” — Ruth Behar, University of Michigan, author of The Vulnerable Observer andTranslated Women “It is rare that a scholarly book reads like a novel. Leo Spitzer’s compelling Hotel Bolivia not only is beautifully written but changes the way we think about history... This groundbreaking book will become required reading in numerous fields, including Latin American studies, Jewish studies, diaspora studies, immigration studies, and ethnic studies.” — Jeffrey Lesser, Brown University, author of Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question “Evocative, thoughtful, and otherwise impressive... Vividly introduces readers to a little-known aspect of refugee history during the Holocaust.” — Kirkus “A searing account of the Jewish refugees’ checkered experience... Part memoir, part oral history, Spitzer’s eye-opening study uses interviews with surviving refugees (now widely dispersed around the world), plus letters, photographs, family albums and archival documents to explore the trauma of displacement.” — Publishers Weekly
Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn on the Frontline of Politics and War charts the rich history of the city’s famous Holiday Inn hotel. Describing in detail the tumultuous events that took place within its walls and in its immediate environs, this book explores the opening of the building in advance of the 1984 Winter Olympics through the early 1990s when the hotel was utilized by political elites through to the siege of Sarajevo, when the hotel became the main base for foreign correspondents. Kenneth Morrison draws upon a plethora of primary and secondary sources, and includes extensive interviews with many participants in the drama that was played out within the confines of the hotel, contextualizing the case of the Holiday Inn by analyzing how hotels are utilized in times of conflict.