Garry Wills's Venice: Lion City is a tour de force -- a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembled in its combination of art and sea empire. Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city's history. It is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city whose allure remains undiminished after centuries. Like Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches, on the Dutch culture in the Golden Age, Venice: Lion City will take its place as a classic work of history and criticism.

--Co-Winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2020 (English, Fiction)-- --Winner of the 2019 Singapore Book Awards Best Literary Work-- A man learns that all the animals at the Zoo are robots. A secret terminal in Changi Airport caters to the gods. A prince falls in love with a crocodile. A concubine is lost in time. The island of Singapore disappears. These are the exquisitely strange tales of Lion City, the first collection of short fiction by award-winning poet and playwright Ng Yi-Sheng. Infused with myth, magical realism and contemporary sci-fi, each of these tales invites the reader to see this city-state in a new and darkly fabulous light.

Three Canadians – Lewis MacKenzie, Romeo Dallaire and Louise Arbour – were at the centre of the two greatest tragedies of the 1990s. Two of them could have stopped the killing. One was asked to bring the perpetrators to justice. In this riveting, original and explosive book, Carol Off explores the failure of peacekeeping missions in Sarajevo and Rwanda, and the international community’s attempt to redeem itself by prosecuting the people responsible for the genocides. Events turned on the action of two Canadian generals: the fox of the title, Lewis MacKenzie, who commanded the UN forces in Bosnia for the first crucial months of the conflict; and the lion, Romeo Dallaire, who developed an interventionary plan that he believed would have prevented the Rwandan genocide but was forced by the UN to stand by while 800,000 people were slaughtered. The eagle is Louise Arbour, a Canadian judge who became Chief Prosecutor for War Crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

This book tells the story of a young boy, Eagle who climbs a rock, looks at a beautiful view and discovers that because the view is so big he must be a part of it. He realizes that looking at things that seem ordinary to some can be quite extraordinary depending on the point of view. The principles of health and respect for our environment are integrated into the story as Eagle becomes a leader of his people. Children and adults will love this beautifully illustrated book because it helps them to understand that taking a risk can lead to great adventure and their effort can reward them with the discovery of their purpose in life.

A vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II that captures the dramatic backstories of its passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans' global connections. On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper's passengers--among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export salesman, a Broadway star, a swashbuckling pilot, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy--upend conventional American narratives about World War II. As their travels take them from Ukraine, France, Spain, Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines to Java, India, Australia, Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Belgian Congo, among other hot spots, their movements defy simple boundaries between home front and war front. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of US history and global connections during the "American Century."

Shadows of War tells the story of World War II as few Americans know it. In the mid-1930s a high school history teacher inspires a student to look beyond his small hometown. He becomes a Foreign Service officer, and they then anchor a World War II story that provides perspectives little known to Americans. A Romanian princess cares for more than 3,000 orphans and rescues more than 1,000 downed American flyers - and tussles with the SS to keep the POWs from their control at considerable risk to herself. On air raids over Romania, American crews must fly 1,200 miles - on creatively named planes such as Wingo-Wango and Jersey Bounce - at just 50 feet off the "deck" to launch attacks on the stoutly defended oil refineries at Ploesti. In Singapore and Malaysia a mild-mannered father of seven becomes a resistance leader after the Japanese invasion, and four gutsy nuns who serve as nurses try to stay a step ahead of the brutal conquerors.

At the height of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, the foreign relations between the United States and Singapore demonstrated the interplay between America’s strategy of containment and Singapore’s efforts at a non-aligned foreign policy. But there is a deeper story. American involvement in the Vietnam War not only held back the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, but also catalysed economic and strategic cooperation between the United States and Singapore. The author argues that Singapore might not have achieved its success so rapidly without the support of the US. As the war in Vietnam raged on, Singapore became a critical refueling point, also providing ship and aircraft repair for the US military. Commercial and strategic support from the United States lifted Singapore out of the economic doom predicted for the city-state after secession from Malaysia, cessation of Indonesian trade during Konfrontasi and Britain’s military withdrawal. By considering the importance of the US’s role in Singapore’s nation-building, this book provides an important supplement to the well-trodden narrative that attributes Singapore’s success to good governance.

Through an examination of Methodist mission to Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, this broad-ranging book unites the history of globalization with the history of Christian mission and the history of Southeast Asia. The book explores the international connections forged by the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Malaysia Mission between 1885 and 1915, putting them in the context of a wave of globalization that was sweeping the world at that time, including significant developments in Southeast Asia. To establish intellectual connections between the study of globalization and this historical setting, the book suggests six metaphors for understanding the mission. Each metaphor is based on some aspect of secular globalization: the Methodist connection as a migratory network, mission agencies as multinational corporations, the Malaysia Mission as a franchise system, the Methodist Episcopal Church as a media conglomerate, mission institutions as civil society organizations, and Methodist mission as a global vision. In chapters exploring each metaphor separately, the book reviews how each form of secular globalization functions to create transnational connections before examining the details of how the Malaysia Mission functioned in a similar fashion. Along the way, the book investigates the lives of all involved in the mission: missionaries, church members of the mission, and mission supporters. Although Southeast Asia (including the Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States, Sarawak, and Netherlands Indies) and the United States are important geographic foci for the book, India, China, Britain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Canada all have parts to play. In exploring these metaphors, the book draws on several scholarly fields including migration studies, business history, media studies, political theory, and cultural history, blending them together into a social history of the mission. By so doing, it identifies both ways in which the effects of Christian mission paralleled other globalizing forces and unique contributions Christian mission made to turn-of-the-twentieth-century globalization.

The Indian Ocean region has rapidly emerged as a hinge point in the changing global balance of power and the geographic nexus of economic and security issues with vital global consequences. The security of energy supplies, persistent poverty and its contribution to political extremism, piracy, and related threats to seaborne trade, competing nuclear powers, and possibly the scene of future clashes between rising great powers India and China—all are dangers in the waters or in the littoral states of the Indian Ocean region. This volume, one of the first attempts to treat the Indian Ocean Region in a coherent fashion, captures the spectrum of cooperation and competition in the Indian Ocean Region. Contributors discuss points of cooperation and competition in a region that stretches from East Africa, to Singapore, to Australia, and assess the regional interests of China, India, Pakistan, and the United States. Chapters review possible “red lines” for Chinese security in the region, India’s naval ambitions, Pakistan’s maritime security, and threats from non-state actors—terrorists, pirates, and criminal groups—who challenge security on the ocean for all states. This volume will interest academics, professionals, and researchers with interests in international relations, Asian security, and maritime studies.