Books about Nationalist from Amazon.com

Were World Wars I and II—which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction—inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment? In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen—Winston Churchill first among them—the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.

Among the British and Churchillian blunders were:

• The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that muti- lated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo- Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquest
• The 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.

Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned..
Price: $18.33 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This monumental biography of one of the most intriguing figures of the twentieth century, written by his grandson, is the first to give a complete and balanced account of Mahatma Gandhi's remarkable life, the development of his beliefs and his political campaigns, and his complex relations with his family. Written with unprecedented insight and access to family archives, it reveals a life of contrasts and contradictions: the westernized Inner Temple lawyer who wore the clothes of India's poorest and who spun cotton by hand, the apostle of nonviolence who urged Indians to enlist in the First World War, the champion of Indian independence who never hated the British. It tells of Gandhi's campaigns against racial discrimination in South Africa and untouchability in India, tracks the momentous battle for India's freedom, explores the evolution of Gandhi's strategies of non-violent resistance, and examines relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, a question that attracted Gandhi's passionate attention and one that persists around the world today. Published to rave reviews in India in 2007, this riveting book gives North American readers the true Gandhi, the man as well as the legend, for the first time..
Price: $21.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A trenchant analysis of the attempts to mediate the transition from oppression to freedom, and a warning of the potentially disastrous challenges that face burgeoning democracies. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy as they watched democratization sweep through formerly authoritarian countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. Yet the 1990s turned out to be a decade marked by chronic nationalist conflict, and the sense of democratic triumph turned to frustration. In From Voting to Violence, Jack Snyder shows how democratization can actually exacerbate nationalist fervor and ethnic conflict if the conditions permitting a successful transition are not in place. Arguing that international organizations can cause conflict rather than averting it in their rush to establish democratic governments and punish outgoing leaders, he prescribes policies that will make transitions less dangerous and allow fledgling democracies to flourish. In the light of such tragic examples as Weimar Germany and contemporary Bosnia--each drawn into a spiral of ethnic hatred and civil war by political leaders manipulating nationalist sentiments--From Voting to Violence questions the sometimes rash optimism of liberal democracy that would rush to democracy at the cost of freedom..
Price: $18.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Since his death in 1950, Sri Aurobindo Ghose has been known primarily as a yogi and a philosopher of spiritual evolution who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in peace and literature But the years Aurobindo spent in yogic retirement were preceded by nearly four decades of rich public and intellectual work. Biographers usually focus solely on Aurobindo's life as a politician or sage, but he was also a scholar, a revolutionary, a poet, a philosopher, a social and cultural theorist, and the inspiration for an experiment in communal living.

Peter Heehs, one of the founders of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, is the first to relate all the aspects of Aurobindo's life in its entirety. Consulting rare primary sources, Heehs describes the leader's role in the freedom movement and in the framing of modern Indian spirituality. He examines the thinker's literary, cultural, and sociological writings and the Sanskrit, Bengali, English, and French literature that influenced them, and he finds the foundations of Aurobindo's yoga practice in his diaries and unpublished letters. Heehs's biography is a sensitive, honest portrait of a life that also provides surprising insights into twentieth-century Indian history.

.
Price: $36.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $8.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names.

Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.

.
Price: $23.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

With the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, America's relationship with the Middle East exploded to the forefront of our national consciousness. Looking back more than a half-century, Douglas Little offers valuable, historical context for anyone seeking a better understanding of this complicated relationship. He explores the encounters between the United States and the Middle East since 1945, focusing particularly on the complex, sometimes inconsistent attitudes and interests that have shaped U.S. relations in the region.

Little begins by exposing the persistence of "orientalist" stereotypes in American popular culture and then examines U.S. policy toward the Middle East from many angles. Chapters focus on America's increasing dependence on petroleum; U.S.-Israeli relations; the threat of communism; the rise of revolutionary nationalist movements in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Libya; the futility of U.S. military and covert intervention; and the unsuccessful attempt to broker a "peace-for-land" settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The overarching theme of the book is that a combination of American omnipotence and profound cultural misunderstanding ensured that the United States would encounter trouble in the Middle East after 1945 and that those forces continue to bedevil the relationship between these vastly different cultures to the present day..
Price: $20.21 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $3.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]