Alex Von Tunzelmann's Books

Fallen Idols

Twelve Statues That Made History

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

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Fallen Idols

Twelve Statues That Made History

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past. In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Belgian King Leopold II was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill’s monument in London was daubed with the word “racist.” As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between statuary—the representation of “virtuous” individuals, usually “Great Men”—and other forms of sculpture, public art, and memorialization. Nobody wants to get rid of all memorials. But Fallen Idols asks: have statues had their day?

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Page Count

282

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0063081695

ISBN 13

9780063081697

Indian Summer

The Secret History of the End of an Empire

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

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Indian Summer

The Secret History of the End of an Empire

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

The stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 liberated 400 million Indians from the British Empire. One of the defining moments of world history had been brought about by a tiny number of people, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery prime minister-to-be; Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation; and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous but unlikely couple who had been dispatched to get Britain out of India without delay. Within hours of the midnight chimes, however, the two new nations of India and Pakistan would descend into anarchy and terror. INDIAN SUMMERdepicts the epic sweep of events that ripped apart the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and reveals the secrets of the most powerful players on the world stage: the Cold War conspiracies, the private deals, and the intense and clandestine love affair between the wife of the last viceroy and the first prime minister of free India. With wit, insight and a sharp eye for detail, Alex von Tunzelmann relates how a handful of people changed the world for ever.

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Page Count

421

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1471114767

ISBN 13

9781471114762

Red Heat

Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

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Red Heat

Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

America's secret war in the Caribbean during the Cold War is revealed as never before in this riveting story of the machinations and blunders of superpowers, and the daring of the mavericks who took them on. During the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, the Caribbean was in crisis, while the United States and the USSR acted out the world's rising tensions in its island nations. Meanwhile the leaders of these nations - the charismatic Fidel Castro, and his mysterious brother Raúl; the ideologue Che Guevara; the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in Vodou, embezzlement and torture - had ambitions of their own. Alex von Tunzelmann's brilliant narrative follows these five rivals and accomplices from the beginning of the Cold War to its end. The superpowers thought they could use these Caribbean leaders as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life. The United States, in its all-consuming fight against communism, stumbled into one disaster after another. First, with the Bay of Pigs, and then with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it helped bring the world as close to catastrophic nuclear war as it has ever been. Red Heatis an authoritative and eye-opening account of a wildly dramatic and dangerous era of international politics that has unmistakable resonance today.

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673

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Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1471114775

ISBN 13

9781471114779

Indian Summer

The Secret History of the End of an Empire

By: Alex Von Tunzelmann

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Indian Summer

The Secret History of the End of an Empire

By: Alex Von Tunzelmann

An extraordinary story of romance, history, and divided loyalties--set against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century--"Indian Summer" reveals how Britain ceased to be a superpower after it lost India as a colony.

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Page Count

516

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312428111

ISBN 13

9780312428112

Red Heat

Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

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Red Heat

Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

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673

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Simon and Schuster

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ISBN 10

1471114775

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9781471114779

Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition

A New Perspective

By: Alex Mercer

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Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition

A New Perspective

By: Alex Mercer

In 1949 the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare (DNHW) commissioned a film, eventually called Challenge. Science Against Cancer, as part of a major effort to recruit young scientists into cancer research. Both organizations feared that poor recruitment would stifle the development of the field at a time when funding for research was growing dramatically. The fear was that there would not be enough new young scientists to meet the demand, and that the shortfall would undermine cancer research and the hopes invested in it. Challenge aimed to persuade young scientists to think of cancer research as a career. This book is the story of that forgotten film and what it tells us about mid-twentieth century American and Canadian cancer research, educational filmmaking, and health education campaigns. It explores why Canadian and American health agencies turned to film to address the problem of scientist recruitment; how filmmakers turned such recruitment concerns into something they thought would work as a film; and how information officers at the NCI and DNHW sought to shape the impact of Challenge by embedding it in a broader educational and propaganda program. It is, in short, an account of the important, but hitherto undocumented, roles of filmmakers and information officers in the promotion of post-Second World War cancer research.

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Page Count

353

Publisher

Boydell & Brewer

Published Date

ISBN 10

1580465080

ISBN 13

9781580465083

We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World

By: Alex Rowell

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We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World

By: Alex Rowell

A searing exploration of authoritarianism in the Middle East through the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s years in power in Cold War–era Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the larger-than-life Egyptian president who ruled for eighteen years between the coup d’état he led in 1952 and his death in 1970, is best known for wresting the Suez Canal from the British and French empires and befriending such iconic revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Yet there is a darker side to Nasser’s regime. He was a brutal authoritarian, whose legacy, Alex Rowell argues, lies at the heart of the violent and repressive order that still prevails throughout the Arab world today. We Are Your Soldiers examines seven countries—Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Libya—weaving the epic tale of Nasser’s dramatic encounters with each to reassess his impact in the Arab sphere. These engagements were often drenched in blood and destruction, leaving deep scars that endure to the present. Rowell shows how the Nasser years were crucial to the formation of regimes as varied as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt. Crushing democracy at home while launching wars and slaying opponents abroad, Nasser ushered in the long political winter from which the region is still yet to emerge. Drawing on a deep reading of Arabic sources, extensive interviews, and material never before published in English, Rowell offers a necessary reexamination of Nasser’s rule and a new understanding of the politics of the Middle East.

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Page Count

317

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

1324021675

ISBN 13

9781324021674

Blood and Sand

Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

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Blood and Sand

Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

By: Alex von Tunzelmann

A revelatory popular history that tells the story of the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and rise of American hegemony under the heroic leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower—which shaped the Middle East and Europe we know today. The year 1956 was a turning point in history. Over sixteen extraordinary days in October and November, the twin crises of Suez and Hungary pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict and what many at the time were calling World War III. Blood and Sand relates this story hour-by-hour, through an international cast of characters: Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, caught in a trap of his own making; Gamal Abdel Nasser, the bold young populist leader of Egypt; David Ben-Gurion, the strong-willed founding prime minister of Israel; Guy Mollet, the bellicose French prime minister; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American president, torn between an old world order and a new one in the very same week that his own fate as president was to be decided by the American people. This is a fresh new account of these dramatic events and people, one that for the first time sets both crises in the context of the global Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the treacherous power politics of imperialism and oil. Blood and Sand resonates strikingly with the problems of oil control, religious fundamentalism, and international unity that face the world today, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of the modern Middle East and Europe.

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Page Count

296

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062249266

ISBN 13

9780062249265

Book's by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Fallen Idols

Fallen Idols

Indian Summer

Indian Summer

Red Heat

Red Heat

Indian Summer

Indian Summer

Red Heat

Red Heat

Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition

Infections, Chronic Disease, and the Epidemiological Transition

We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World

We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World

Blood and Sand

Blood and Sand

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