Books about Desertion from Amazon.com

In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit..
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Several people are waiting to greet Captain Vivian Gembara when she returns home after a year-long tour of duty in Iraq--her grateful fiancS and two officers dispatched from headquarters to retrieve "the file." Certainly not the homecoming she expected, but such is life when you are in the business of soldiers behaving badly.

As a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Vivian counsels them, investigates them, and when necessary, prosecutes them. When an Iraqi teenagers body is found floating in the Tigris River and U.S. soldiers are believed to have been involved, she knows she has a case on her hands. What she doesn't realize is just how much that case will reveal about the Armys conduct at war.

Drowning in the Desert: A JAG's Search for Justice in Iraq is both a legal thriller and a searing account of the savagery that occurs when commanders place "the fight" above all else..
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The bible's teaching on divorce and remarriage has been interpreted in many ways. This poses a problem for the Christian community. When is divorce biblically permissible and when is it forbidden? And is remarriage ever permissible for a divorced Christian? The problem is particularly intense for Christian victims of marital abuse, who often believe they must choose between two unpleasant alternatives: endure abuse, or face condemnation by God and his church for disobeying the bible. Not Under Bondage, written by a survivor of domestic abuse, - explains the scriptural dilemmas of abuse victims - carefully examines the scriptures and scholarly research - shows how the bible sets victims of abuse free from bondage and guilt..
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What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing

In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she says, "and what I could do to make him come back."

What You Have Left is about a father and daughter trying to make their way back to one another across decades of uncertainty and ambivalence -- all the while hoping to discover that what they have left is worth salvaging. It's also the story of a grandfather bent on suicide, a pioneering female NASCAR driver, a heartbroken amnesiac, a video poker junkie, and assorted other liars, cheaters, and lovers who, despite their best intentions, never quite live up to their own expectations.

Are we doomed to repeat our parents' mistakes? Can lies save love instead of destroying it? Is letting go the same as giving up? Shot through with sly humor and a knowing sympathy for human weakness, What You Have Left takes up these and other questions as it examines the weight of history, the nature of loss, and the possibility of forgiveness. Making use of bold shifts in viewpoint and time, Allison proves a brilliant observer of the emotional legacies handed down from parent to child and the ways loss defines us. This stunning debut brims with an affection for humanity exactly as it is -- in all its ignorance and awareness, its swagger and humility, its despair and hope..
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In 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and is rescued by Hassanali, a shopkeeper whose beautiful sister Rehana nurses Pearce back to health. Pearce and Rehana begin a passionate illicit love affair, which resonates fifty years later when the narrator’s brother falls madly in love with Rehana’s granddaughter. In the story of two forbidden love affairs and their effects on the lovers’ families, Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political consequences of colonialism, the vicissitudes of love, and the power of fiction..
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Although North Carolina was a "home front" state rather than a battlefield state for most of the Civil War, it was heavily involved in the Confederate war effort and experienced many conflicts as a result. North Carolinians were divided over the issue of secession, and changes in race and gender relations brought new controversy. Blacks fought for freedom, women sought greater independence, and their aspirations for change stimulated fierce resistance from more privileged groups. Republicans and Democrats fought over power during Reconstruction and for decades thereafter disagreed over the meaning of the war and Reconstruction.

With contributions by well-known historians as well as talented younger scholars, this volume offers new insights into all the key issues of the Civil War era that played out in pronounced ways in the Tar Heel State. In nine essays composed specifically for this volume, contributors address themes such as ambivalent whites, freed blacks, the political establishment, racial hopes and fears, postwar ideology, and North Carolina women. These issues of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras were so powerful that they continue to agitate North Carolinians today.

Contributors include David Brown, Judkin Browning, Laura F. Edwards, Paul D. Escott, John C. Inscoe, Chandra Manning, Barton A. Myers, Steven E. Nash, Paul Yandle, and Karin Zipf. The editor is Paul D. Escott..
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Shedding new light on contemporary campaigns to encourage marriage among welfare recipients and to prosecute "deadbeat dads," Wives without Husbands traces the efforts of Progressive reformers to make "runaway husbands" support their families. Anna R. Igra investigates the interrelated histories of marriage and welfare policy in the early 1900s, revealing how reformers sought to make marriage the solution to women's and children's poverty.

Igra taps a rich trove of case files from the National Desertion Bureau, a Jewish husband-location agency, and follows hundreds of deserted women through the welfare and legal systems of early twentieth-century New York City. She integrates a broad range of topics, including Americanization as a gendered process, breadwinning as a measure of manhood, the relationship between consumer culture and social policy formation, the class dimensions of family law, and the Jewish community as a source of welfare policy innovation. Igra analyzes the history of antidesertion reform from its emergence in social policy debates, through the establishment of domestic relations courts, to Depression relief programs. She shows that early twentieth-century reformers, by attempting to make instrumental use of poor people's intimate relations, anticipated welfare policies in our own time that promote marriage as an answer to poverty..
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Sound Bite:
Military desertion, its reasons and consequences, are not commonly known in America. In most cases, the reasons soldiers desert are inherent in the military system itself. The author investigates those reasons, from the American Revolution to the Iraqi occupation, and describes the government's often-brutal response to deserters.
Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776 2006 is a history and analysis of military desertion from the Revolutionary War to the Iraqi Occupation. The main topics consist of the following:
The political, economic and social conditions of each time period;
The government's continued insistence on linking desertion with cowardice, despite extensive evidence to the contrary, and
The motivations for desertions.
Despite the US government's continued insistence on linking desertion with cowardice, the motivations for desertion are many and complex, and are either rooted in or encouraged by military policy. This book describes the official policies on desertion that were in force during each conflict and how they were generally implemented; problems in the military justice system; and the motivations for desertions. Comprehensive data and interviews with deserters are included.
Deserters from the US military have generally been referred to as cowards and traitors. This is a significant deception and one that has been accepted for generations. If cowardice and betrayal are not, in fact, the motivating factors for the majority of those who illegally depart from the US military, the question must be asked: Why do they desert? Are the issues that caused soldiers to flee to Canada in 2006 the same as those that caused Union soldiers to leave campaigns in Richmond, Virginia and return to their homes in the north? If not, how have the motivations evolved? What, exactly, causes a soldier, sometimes with a history of battle campaigns, to say enough'?
Most of the causes of desertion are inherent in the military system itself, and this is carefully detailed within this book. Through the use of the government's own studies and statistics throughout history, along with information from other sources, the problems of the military system that cause desertion are detailed.
Along with the reasons for desertion, the government's changing response to it is discussed. Various forms of what can only be classified as torture have often been implemented, with either tacit or open approval by the US government. The author suggests that the government's response to desertion is simply a political tool to not only keep soldiers in the ranks, thus helping to further the country's goals (whether honorable or not), but also to keep the average citizen behind those goals. While the tactics of so doing have advanced through the last two centuries, the purposes have changed little..
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