Yu-Gi-Oh! - Tập 4 EPub tải xuống miễn phí

Burçak Kızılkaya burcakkzlkyad44a — read for fun

Nicole Monrroy nisko_o7465 — Antony Beevor is probably best-known today for his lengthy histories of the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin, but this earlier narrative history of the Spanish Civil War matches both of these later works for grim and gripping detail. One might expect a historian of the Second World War to treat the Spanish conflict as a prologue to that larger and deadlier global struggle, but Beevor sees that the civil war had great significance in its own right. It was a struggle between ideologies, in which both the left-wing Spanish government and the right-wing insurgents committed atrocities on behalf of their opposing visions; a struggle between politicos and propagandists abroad, who invested the civil war with ideological meaning and cast it as (alternatively) a last-ditch defense of Christian civilization or a first stand against Fascism; and finally a bloody struggle between armies and civilians, which killed 600,000 people and ravaged Spain's landscape and economy. Foreign ideologues of the left and right still argue about the meaning of the Spanish Civil War, but Spaniards themselves have only just begun to confront its bitterly-divisive history. Beevor, to his credit, provides a balanced account of the conflict, which damns both sides for their excesses while carefully chronicling the enormous costs of Francisco Franco's victory. After briefly chronicling the fall of Spain's reactionary monarchy and the turbulent, anarchic history of its Second Republic, Beevor turns to the Army's attempted coup of July 1936, a right-wing response to the election of a socialist-communist government earlier that year. While the plotters succeeded in capturing western Andalusia and driving north to the suburbs of Madrid, the Spanish government retained the loyalty of its navy, which made it difficult for Franco and his colleagues to bring in their troops from North Africa. Spanish workers and anarchists also quickly organized pro-government militias, which allowed the loyalists to retain control of the capital and most of Spain's outlying provinces. By the end of 1936 the country had settled into a civil war between Franco's Nationalists and the Republicans. The term “civil war” is something of a misnomer, since the conflict served as a proxy war and military proving-ground for several of Europe's totalitarian dictatorships: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union. The first two of these provided substantial assistance to the Nationalists. Germany airlifted Franco's troops from Africa to Spain in 1936, and later provided the insurgents with combat aircraft, artillery, and light tanks. Italy provided additional planes, pilots, and about 80,000 soldiers. The Nationalists' air superiority ultimately proved decisive: it helped them capture the Basque region in 1937 (after a campaign in which German planes fire-bombed Guernica, killing 1,600 people), overrun Aragon by mid-1938, and crush a Republican army at the Battle of the Ebro in August 1938. Surprisingly, the Nationalists also enjoyed ample support from Anglo-American politicians and businessmen, who were opposed to the Spanish Republic's left-wing government and alarmed by Spanish anarchists' collectivization of farms and factories. Britain's press generally supported Franco, and its government tried to prevent British ships from delivering aid to the Republicans. American businesses like Texaco and Dupont, meanwhile, supplied the Nationalists with 12,000 trucks, 3.5 million tons of oil, and 40,000 bombs. George Orwell, who fought for the Republic, characterized Franco's victory as one he shared with big business. He wasn't entirely wrong. The Republic, for its part, received a small amount of aid from Mexico, and about 35,000 foreign volunteers for its International Brigades. Most of its foreign support, however, came from the Soviet Union, and came with a great deal of political baggage. Both Soviet advisers and Spanish communists pressured the government to suppress its own left-wing allies, which the Republic, dependent on the Soviet Union for tanks and aircraft, duly did in 1937. The Republicans disbanded the left-wing POUM militia, arrested thousands of anarchists, and with Soviet aid set up their own secret police, torture centers, and labor camps (“re-education centers”). They may have made their government and its armed forces more united and efficient, but they also cost themselves the support of those who wanted to fight a revolutionary war, and whose high morale would have been invaluable. Orwell argued that the communist counter-revolution essentially turned the civil war into a conventional war, which the more poorly-supplied Republic could not win. The Spanish Civil War still inspires considerable passion because of the popular foreign support that both sides garnered, and the volume of propaganda that they put out. Foreign artists and writers like Picasso, Orwell, and Hemingway lent their talents to the Republican cause, and tens of thousands of leftists came to Spain to fight Franco. The Nationalists, for their part, enjoyed the support of the Western European establishment, including much of the intelligentsia – as late as the 1960s, some British dons still publicly celebrated Franco's birthday – and of conservative Catholics, who recoiled from some Republicans' sacking of churches and killing of priests. Both sides accused one another of lurid atrocities, and it is clear that by 1937 both the government and the Nationalists had adopted policies of political terror, including mass arrests and large-scale executions of their political opponents. Beevor notes, however, that the Nationalists adopted a systematic terror policy from the very beginning of the war, and that they enjoyed far more success at liquidating their opponents, of whom they executed 100-200,000 during the war and another 200,000 between the fall of Madrid and 1943. At least one Nationalist boasted that his side killed ten leftists for every Nationalist killed by the Republicans (p. 74), and the author believes this is a fair estimate. While I think Beevor would like to say “a plague on both your houses” to the Republicans and Nationalists, one must instead conclude from his narrative of the Spanish war, as Timothy Snyder concluded in his study of Eastern Europe in the 1930s and '40s, “Better Stalin than Hitler.” What a terrible century it was, though, to have presented so many people with that choice!

Alyona Gevorgyan alyonayona — Wouldn't have read this but for book club. I don't like cats nearly enough to enjoy this book.

Eugenia Cui applefavou2d50 — The contributors ranged from young to old, mothers to daughters to sisters. I especially appreciated those who had a terrible or disappointing "first period" experience with their parents and vowed to change that with their own daughters. I really enjoyed the older stories where "belted" pads were still in vogue - I had never heard of those before (and sadly, I have not read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret). Or that French women cannot make good mayonnaise while they have their periods. I really loved Gloria Steinem's essay "If Men Could Menstruate" - the updated version in my little red book truly kicked ass! And I swear this entire book was chock full of really awesome quotables :) Complete review on my blog

Asmaa Alomair _sma_mair — Tystnaden=The Silence, Ingmar Bergman (1918 – 2007) عنوان: سکوت؛ نویسنده: اینگمار برگمن؛ مترجم: پرویز تاییدی؛ مشخصات نشر: تهران، پرچم، 1349، در 99 ص، شابک: 9647115008؛ موضوع: فیلمنامه ها برای نخستین بار در سال 1963 میلادی به روی پرده رفت. فیلم و فیلمنامه، از سیاه‌ترین آثار برگمن هستند. رابطه ی دو خواهر «آنا» و «استر»، که پر است از جلوه‌های دیگرآزاری و خودویرانگری زنانی در دو قطب حسی متضاد