Our Oldest Enemy

Download or read book Our Oldest Enemy written by John J. Miller and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liberté? Egalité? Fraternité? Or just plain gall? In this provocative and brilliantly researched history of how the French have dealt with the United States, John J. Miller and Mark Molesky demonstrate that the cherished idea of French friendship has little basis in reality. Despite the myth of the “sister republics,” the French have always been our rivals, and have harmed and obstructed our interests more often than not. This history of French hostility goes back to 1704, when a group of French and Indians massacred American settlers in Deerfield, Massachusetts. The authors also debunk the myth of French aid during the Revolution: contrary to popular notions, the French did not enter the war until very late and were mainly interested in hurting their rivals, the British. After the war, the French continued to see themselves as major players in the Western hemisphere and shaped their policies to limit the growth and power of the new nation. The notorious XYZ affair, involving French efforts to undermine the government of George Washington, led to an undeclared naval war with France in 1798. During the Civil War, the French supported the Confederacy and installed a puppet emperor in Mexico. In the twentieth century, Americans clashed with the French repreatedly. The French victory over President Wilson at Versailles imposed a short-sighted and punitive settlement on Germany that paved the way for the rise of fascism in the 1930s. During World War II, Vichy French troops killed hundreds of American soldiers in North Africa, and diehard French fascist units fought against the Allies in the rubble of Berlin. During the Cold War, Charles DeGaulle yanked France out of NATO and obstructed our efforts to roll back Soviet expansion. The legacy of French imperial power has been no less disastrous. The French left Haiti in a shambles, got us into Vietnam, and educated many of the world’s worst tyrants at their elite universities, including Pol Pot, the genocidal Cambodian dictator. The fascist Baath regimes in Iraq and Syria are another legacy of failed French colonialism. Americans have been particularly irritated by French cultural arrogance—their crusades against American movies, McDonalds, Disney, and the exclusion of American words from their language have always rubbed us the wrong way. This irritation has now blossomed into outrage. Our Oldest Enemy shows why that outrage is justified.

Download or read book Your Worst Poker Enemy: Master The Mental Game written by Alan N. Schoonmaker and published by Kensington Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AT THE TABLE, YOU'RE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY. --Stu Ungar, the world's greatest poker player Do you play hands you should fold? Do you sometimes go too far with hands, hoping to get lucky while knowing that the pot odds don't justify calling? Ever kept playing even when you knew you were off your game because you were losing and wanted to get even? Have you let anger or destructive urges affect the way you play even though you know better? Don't despair! Now, in Your Worst Poker Enemy, psychologist Dr. Alan Schoonmaker shows you how to reap the full benefits of the poker knowledge you already have by helping you to identify and stop psychologically based mistakes. This must-have book also features detailed sections that examine crucial points far beyond the scope of most other poker strategy guides, including: • Using Intuition vs. Logic • Evaluating Yourself and the Opposition • Understanding Unconscious and Emotional Factors • Adjusting to Changes • Handling stress Dr. Schoonmaker will help you to recognize and defeat the often crippling psychological factors that distort your perceptions about yourself, other players, and the game itself and send you on your way to becoming the best poker player you can be! Alan N. Schoonmaker, Ph.D, is the author of the top-selling The Psychology of Poker and is a columnist for Card Player magazine. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Berkeley and has conducted research and taught at UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, and Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain. He lives in Las Vegas.

Download or read book Natural Enemies written by John Kryk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called the "definitive history of the rivalry" by the Chicago Tribune, this updated history of the classic tilt is much more than just the recounting of old games. The fates of Michigan and Notre Dame have been intertwined since that cold November day in 1877 when the Wolverines literally taught the game of football to an eager group of Notre Dame students. Richly illustrated and now including games through the 2006 season, Natural Enemies weaves these two chronologies together to produce a college rivalry book like no other.

Download or read book Reading the Enemy's Mind written by Paul H. Smith and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2005-12-27 with total page 779 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you thought The Manchurian Candidate was fiction or John Farris's The Fury, which featured a CIA mind-control program run amok, was the stuff of an overheated imagination, you were sorely mistaken. From behind the cloak of U.S. military secrecy comes the story of Star Gate, the project that for nearly a quarter of a century trained soldiers and civilian spies in extra-sensory perception (ESP). Their objective: To search out the secrets of America's cold war enemies using a skill called "remote viewing." Paul H. Smith, a U.S. Army Major, was one of these viewers. Assigned to the remote viewing unit in 1983 at a pivotal time in its history, Smith served for the rest of the decade, witnessing and taking part in many of the seminal national-security crises of the twentieth century. With the Star Gate secrets declassified and the program mothballed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the story can now be told of the ordinary soldiers drafted onto the battlefield of human consciousness. Using hundreds of interviews with the key players in the Star Gate program, and gathering thousands of pages of documents, Smith opens the records on this remarkable chapter in American military, scientific, and cultural history. He reveals many secrets about how remote viewing works and how it was used against enemy targets. Among these stories are the search for hostages in Lebanon; spying on Soviet directed energy weapons; investigating the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; tracking foreign testing of weapons of mass destruction; combating narco-trafficking off America's coasts; aiding in the Iranian hostage situation; finding KGB moles in the CIA; pursuing Middle East terrorists; and more. Between the lines in the official records are revelations about unrelenting attempts from within and without to destroy the remote viewing program, and the efforts that kept Star Gate going for more than two decades in spite of its enemies. This is a story for the believer and the skeptic---a rare look at the innards of a top secret program and an eye-opening treatise on the power of the human mind to transcend the limitations of space and time. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 written by Alan Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize "Impressively researched and beautifully crafted…a brilliant account of slavery in Virginia during and after the Revolution." —Mark M. Smith, Wall Street Journal Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation’s course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.

Download or read book My Mortal Enemy written by Willa Cather and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1926, this book is Willa Cather's sparest and most dramatic novel, a dark and prescient portrait of a marriage that subverts our oldest notions about the nature of domestic happiness. As a young woman, Myra Henshawe gave up a fortune to marry for love--a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love. In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherwordly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

Download or read book The Brotherhood written by Erick Stakelbeck and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Brotherhoods is the chilling chronicle of the alleged crimes and betrayals of NYPD Detectives Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito, notorious rogue cops who stand charged with the ultimate form of police corruption-shielding their crimes behind their badges while they worked for the mob. These crimes included murder, kidnapping, torture, and the betrayal of an entire generation of New York City detectives and federal agents. This gripping real-life detective story reveals two brotherhoods, both with hierarchies, rituals, and codes of conduct. Chased for seven years by William Oldham, the brilliant and determined detective who didn't let the case die, Detectives Caracappa and Eppolito are at the centre of an investigation that moves from the mobbed-up streets of Brooklyn to Hollywood sets and the Las Vegas strip. Co-written with prize-winning investigative journalist Guy Lawson, the story spans three decades and showcases a cast of characters that runs the gamut from capo psychopaths to grieving mothers to a group of retired detectives and investigators working to see that justice is done.This quintessential American mob tale, both bizarre and compelling, ranks with such modern crime classics as Serpico, Donnie Brasco, and Wiseguy.