Describes how, despite the attempts by authorities to censor their voices, ordinary users and political dissidents in Cuba, China, and Russia have created blogs which expose government abuses and the injustices occurring in everyday life.

In China, university students use the Internet to save the life of an attempted murder victim. In Cuba, authorities unsuccessfully try to silence an online critic by sowing seeds of distrust in her marriage. And in Russia, a lone blogger rises to become one of the most prominent opposition figures since the fall of the Soviet Union. Authoritarian governments try to isolate individuals from one another, but in the age of social media freedom of speech is impossible to contain. Online, people discover that they are not alone. As one blogger put it, "Now I know who my comrades are." In her groundbreaking book, Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, Emily Parker, formerly a State Department policy advisor, writer at The Wall Street Journal and editor at The New York Times, provides on-the-ground accounts of how the Internet is transforming lives in China, Cuba, and Russia. It's a new phenomenon, but one that's already brought about significant political change. In 2011 ordinary Egyptians, many armed with little more than mobile phones, helped topple a thirty-year-old dictatorship. It was an extraordinary moment in modern history—and Now I Know Who My Comrades Are takes us beyond the Middle East to the next major civil rights battles between the Internet and state control.Star dissidents such as Cuba's Yoani Sánchez and China's Ai Weiwei are profiled. Here you'll also find lesser-known bloggers, as well as the back-stories of Internet activism celebrities. Parker charts the rise of Russia's Alexey Navalny from ordinary blogger to one of the greatest threats to Vladimir Putin's regime. This book introduces us to an army of bloggers and tweeters—generals and foot soldiers alike. These activists write in code to outsmart censors and launch online campaigns to get their friends out of jail. They refuse to be intimidated by surveillance cameras or citizen informers. Even as they navigate the risks of authoritarian life, they feel free. Now I Know Who My Comrades Are is their story.

In 1987 Michael Harrold went to North Korea to work as English language adviser on translations of the speeches of the late President Kim Il Sung (the Great Leader) and his son and heir Kim Jong Il (then Dear Leader and now head of state). For seven years he lived in Pyongyang enjoying privileged access to the ruling classes and enjoying the confidence of the country’s young elite. In this fascinating insight into the culture of North Korea he describes the hospitality of his hosts, how they were shaken by the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and many of the fascinating characters he met from South Korean and American GI defectors to his Korean minder and socialite friends. After seven years and having been caught passing South Korean music tapes to friends and going out without his minder to places forbidden to foreigners, he was asked to leave the country.

Beijing Comrades is the story of a torrid love affair set against the socio-political unrest of late-eighties China. Due to its depiction of gay sexuality and its critique of the totalitarian government, it was originally published anonymously on an underground gay website within mainland China. This riveting and heart-breaking novel, circulated throughout China in 1998, quickly developed a cult following and remains a central work of queer literature from the People's Republic. This is the first English-language translation.

Author Al Brown, like a few million others, was a civilian one day and a serviceman the next. In My Comrades and Me: Staff Sergeant Al Brown's WWII Memoirs, he gives readers a glimpse into his life as a soldier and his personal experiences during the Second World War. In My Comrades and Me, Brown takes readers through basic infantry training where they were drilled to follow the do something, even if it is wrong rule, the longest, loneliest night of his life, his first day in combat on a dark moonless morning, January 22, 1944, when he almost drowned, and more. He also shares his comrades' stories. Brown hopes that, with these memoirs, families and descendants of WWII soldiers will find answers to their questions about their soldier's combat experiences, experiences that soldiers never revealed to their families after their return or because they never returned. Rarely did the combat soldier reveal them in letters home. Sergeant Brown notes that all infantry combat experiences are fundamentally the same. Only the dates and settings are different for different soldiers.

Without question, the East German National People’s Army was a profoundly masculine institution that emphasized traditional ideals of stoicism, sacrifice, and physical courage. Nonetheless, as this innovative study demonstrates, depictions of the military in the film and literature of the GDR were far more nuanced and ambivalent. Departing from past studies that have found in such portrayals an unchanging, idealized masculinity, Comrades in Arms shows how cultural works both before and after reunification place violence, physical vulnerability, and military theatricality, as well as conscripts’ powerful emotions and desires, at the center of soldiers’ lives and the military institution itself.

When you hear a riveting story, does it thrill your heart and stir your soul? Do you hunger for truth and goodness? Do you secretly relate to Belle’s delight in the library in Beauty and the Beast? If so, you may be on your way to being a book girl. Books were always Sarah Clarkson’s delight. Raised in the company of the lively Anne of Green Gables, the brave Pevensie children of Narnia, and the wise Austen heroines, she discovered reading early on as a daily gift, a way of encountering the world in all its wonder. But what she came to realize as an adult was just how powerfully books had shaped her as a woman to live a story within that world, to be a lifelong learner, to grasp hope in struggle, and to create and act with courage. She’s convinced that books can do the same for you. Join Sarah in exploring the reading life as a gift and an adventure, one meant to enrich, broaden, and delight you in each season of your life as a woman. In Book Girl, you’ll discover: how reading can strengthen your spiritual life and deepen your faith, why a journey through classic literature might be just what you need (and where to begin), how stories form your sense of identity, how Sarah’s parents raised her to be a reader—and what you can do to cultivate a love of reading in the growing readers around you, and 20+ annotated book lists, including some old favorites and many new discoveries. Whether you’ve long considered yourself a reader or have dreams of becoming one, Book Girl will draw you into the life-giving journey of becoming a woman who reads and lives well.

From the author of Undaunted Courage and D-Day comes this celebration of male friendship, taken both from the pages of history and from Ambrose’s own life. Acclaimed historian Stephen Ambrose begins his examination with a glance inward—he starts this book with his brothers, his first and forever friends, and the shared experiences that join them for a lifetime, overcoming distance and misunderstandings. He writes of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a golden gift for friendship and who shared a perfect trust with his younger brother Milton in spite of their apparently unequal stations. With great feeling, Ambrose brings to life the relationships of the young soldiers of Easy Company who fought and died together from Normandy to Germany, and he describes with admiration three who fought in different armies on different sides in that war and became friends later. He recounts the friendships of Lewis and Clark and of Crazy Horse and He Dog, and he tells the story of the Custer brothers who died together at the Little Big Horn. Comrades concludes with the author’s moving recollection of his own friendship with his father. “He was my first and always most important friend. I didn’t learn that until the end, when he taught me the most important thing, that the love of father-son-father-son is a continuum, just as love and friendship are expansive.”

‘The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with “India’s single biggest internal security challenge”. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them...’ In early 2010, Arundhati Roy travelled into the forests of Central India, homeland to millions of indigenous people, dreamland to some of the world’s biggest mining corporations. The result is this powerful and unprecedented report from the heart of an unfolding revolution.