Originally published in 1980, this is Dirk Bogarde's first novel. In the uneasy aftermath of WWII, a group of ordinary British soldiers and their families find themselves stationed as peacekeepers at an outpost in the Java Sea. Whilst attempting to return the island to Dutch control, they are subject to violent attacks by the locals who want their freedom. As the Empire crumbles, the island is plunged into chaos and violence amidst a nationalist uprising. Selfishness, sex, greed, fear and revenge, all play their part; though so too do the finer instincts of love, loyalty and concern. At times gloriously funny, never sitting in judgement, Dirk Bogarde portrays mankind's fallible, complex humanity as the thin skin of conventional behaviour, tautened in the corrosive atmosphere of Southeast Asia, gradually begins to split.

This is the first work to systematically examine the British occupation of Indonesia after the Second World War. The occupation by British-Indian forces between 1945 and 1946 bridged the gap between the surrender of Japan and the resumption of Dutch rule, and this book is a reappraisal of the conduct on the ground of that British Occupation. Contrary to previous studies, this book demonstrates that occupation was neither exclusively pro-Dutch nor pro-Indonesian; nor was it the orderly affair portrayed in the official histories. Richard McMillan draws upon a wide range of sources previously unavailable to scholars - such as recently declassified government papers and papers in private archives; he has also carried out revealing interviews with key players. Presenting a wealth of new information, this highly original and well-written book, will appeal to scholars of European Imperialism, the Second World War, military history and the history of South and Southeast Asia. It will also be relevant to a wide range of undergraduate courses in History.

A Gentle Occupation analyzes Dutch military operations in the aftermath of the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq. Unlike troops elsewhere, Dutch forces in Al Muthanna province met with little resistance, and the notion of a superior "Dutch approach" is now widespread. Using previously classified documents and archive materials, Arthur ten Cate and Thijs Brocades Zaalberg challenge this idea by detailing tactical operations and contextualizing the Dutch actions within the larger experiences of the coalition forces. Ultimately, the authors argue that the success of Al Muthanna province was due to the overall conditions and not a unique Dutch strategy.

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

From “America’s preeminent spy novelist” (The New York Times) comes a fast-paced, mesmerizing thriller of the French resistance fighters working secretly and bravely to defeat Hitler. Occupied Paris, 1942. Just before he dies, a man being chased by the Gestapo hands off a strange-looking document to the unsuspecting novelist Paul Ricard. It looks like a blueprint of a part for a military weapon, one that might have important information for the Allied forces. Ricard realizes he must try to get the diagram into the hands of members of the resistance network. As Ricard finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into anti-Nazi efforts and increasingly dangerous espionage assignments, he travels to Germany and along the escape routes of underground resistance safe houses to spy on Nazi maneuvers. When he meets the mysterious and beautiful Leila, a professional spy, they begin to work together to get crucial information out of France and into the hands of the Allied forces in London.

Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.