The Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path launched its violent campaign against the government in Peru’s Ayacucho region in 1980. When the military and counterinsurgency police forces were dispatched to oppose the insurrection, the violence quickly escalated. The peasant community of Sarhua was at the epicenter of the conflict, and this small village is the focus of Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes. There, nearly a decade after the event, Olga M. González follows the tangled thread of a public secret: the disappearance of Narciso Huicho, the man blamed for plunging Sarhua into a conflict that would sunder the community for years. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a novel use of a cycle of paintings, González examines the relationship between secrecy and memory. Her attention to the gaps and silences within both the Sarhuinos’ oral histories and the paintings reveals the pervasive reality of secrecy for people who have endured episodes of intense violence. González conveys how public secrets turn the process of unmasking into a complex mode of truth telling. Ultimately, public secrecy is an intricate way of “remembering to forget” that establishes a normative truth that makes life livable in the aftermath of a civil war.

When Canadian journalist Stephanie Williams set out to discover her Russian grandmother’ s long-lost history, what she unearthed was this stunning, sprawling portrait of a life lived on the grand stage of the 20th century. Born in remote Siberia in 1900, Olga Yunter was the youngest of five children. As a teenager during the Revolution, she was a courier and arms-runner for the White Russians. After learning of the execution of her brother at the hands of the Red Army, which drew nearer every day, her father sent her to China with rubies and gold sewn into her petticoats. She would never see her family again. The life of a Russian exile in China meant poverty and fear. But Olga was lucky. She met and married Fred Edney, and gave birth to their daughter, Irina, the author’s mother. But the creeping Japanese occupation and invasion of China forced Olga to flee with Irina to Canada, leaving Fred behind to continue working. For five years she heard almost nothing of her husband, save that he was alive in a Japanese prison camp. At the end of the war she returned to China to find him broken by his internment. The family was driven out of the country for good by the Chinese Revolution in 1949. They settled in Oxford, where Olga and Fred lived out the rest of their days. Drawing on letters, diaries, government documents, and interviews, Stephanie Williams brings to life this gripping historical drama, sweeping in scope and illuminated by the intimate details of one woman’s extraordinary life.

Containing the intimate accounts of twenty-eight servicewomen, many of whom risked their lives, this book examines the crucial role these women played in World War II

Olga Yunter was born in July 1900 in a remote frontier post in southern Siberia. A girlhood played out against the backdrop of the China trade changed forever, when, at seventeen, Olga joined her brothers in their fight against the Bolsheviks. Death and retribution followed. Olga was forced to flee to China, rubies sewn into her petticoats. Twice more Olga would be forced to leave everything behind - first to escape Mao's Communists, and again when Japan invaded China during World War II. From the comfort of her family to the terror of revolution, war and exile, Olga's Story is the heartbreaking tale of the author's grandmother.

A poignant story of three young adults trying to make a future for themselves in war-torn Damascus Syria - a country at war. Amal, Hammoudi and Youssef are young and ambitious, the face of modern Syria. But when civil war tears through their homeland, they are left with a horrifying choice: risk death by staying in the country they love, or flee in search of a new life elsewhere? From one of Germany's most talented literary voices comes this intricately woven story of brutality, loss, and how hope can shine through when darkness feels overwhelming.

Some people achieve far more than their time on earth should allow, making a real difference to many, yet unrecognised by most.Olga Baillie-Grohman is one such person. The summary of her life reads as an extraordinary catalogue of events ? born in Austria within hours of Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin, she married a Kenyan soldier-settler and was recruited to British Intelligence work. Her second marriage to a senior Government official enabled her to fulfil many missions in life - elected as the first female member of the Nairobi City Council followed by the Kenyan Legislative Council, Olga used her standing to advance better urban housing for African's, education for the continents women and as a representative to the smaller coffee farmers. Olga?s story is one that should not be forgotten as it is a guiding light for putting the world to rights and an inspiration to others.

In his latest work, Antony Beevor—bestselling author of Stalingrad and The Battle of Arnhem and one of our most respected historians of World War II—brings us the true, little-known story of a family torn apart by revolution and war. Olga Chekhova, a stunning Russian beauty, was the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov and a famous Nazi-era film actress who was closely associated with Hitler. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev to become a Soviet spy—a career she spent her entire postwar life denying. The riveting story of how Olga and her family survived the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and the Second World War becomes, in Beevor’s hands, a breathtaking tale of survival in a merciless age.

divA loving and admiring companion for half a century to literary titan Ezra Pound, concert violinist Olga Rudge was the muse who inspired the poet to complete his epic poem, The Cantos, and the mother of his only daughter, Mary. Strong-minded and defiant of conventions, Rudge knew the best and worst of times with Pound. With him, she coped with the wrenching dislocations brought about by two catastrophic world wars and experienced modernism’s radical transformation of the arts. In this enlightening biography, Anne Conover offers a full portrait of Olga Rudge (1895–1996), drawing for the first time on Rudge’s extensive unpublished personal notebooks and correspondence. Conover explores Rudge’s relationship with Pound, her influence on his life and career, and her perspective on many details of his controversial life, as well as her own musical career as a violinist and musicologist and a key figure in the revival of Vivaldi’s music in the 1930s. In addition to mining documentary sources, the author interviewed Rudge and family members and friends. The result is a vivid account of a highly intelligent and talented woman and the controversial poet whose flame she tended to the end of her long life. The book quotes extensively from the Rudge–Pound letters--an almost daily correspondence that began in the 1920s and continued until Pound’s death in 1972. These letters shed light on many aspects of Pound’s disturbing personality; the complicated and delicate balance he maintained between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife Dorothy, for fifty years; the birth of Olga and Ezra’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz; Pound’s alleged anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies; his wartime broadcasts over Rome radio and indictment for treason; and his twelve-year incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally ill. /DIV

Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. For the first time, this book presents Olga’s account of her experiences in her own words. Based largely on letters home, the text is accompanied by dozens of photographs that shed light on personal experiences of travel and dig life at this extraordinary time. Introductory material by John D.M. Green and Ros Henry provides the social, historical, biographical and archaeological context for the overall narrative. The letters offer new insights into the social and professional networks and history of archaeological research, particularly for Palestine under the British Mandate. They provide insights into the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and inhabitants, and the colonial framework within which they operated during turbulent times. This book will be an important resource for those studying the history of archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly for the sites of Qau el-Kebir, Tell Fara, Tell el-‘Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish). Moreover, Olga’s lively style makes this a fascinating personal account of archaeology and travel in the interwar era.