The Fifth Act

Author : Elliot Ackerman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593492056
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Act written by Elliot Ackerman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities for years now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families. The official US government evacuation effort was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. With former colleagues and friends protecting the airport in Kabul, Ackerman joined an impromptu effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's longest war. For Ackerman, it also became a chance to reconcile his past with his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week, the week the war ended. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves a personal history of the war's long progression, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts, the fifth act being the story’s tragic denouement, a prelude to Afghanistan's dark future. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant account here. But The Fifth Act also brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, American and Afghan, who fought the war with courage and dedication, and at great personal cost. Ackerman's story is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.

Author : Elliot Ackerman
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
ISBN 13 : 0008532699
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan written by Elliot Ackerman and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Political Book of the Year 2022 A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy.

Author : Elliot Ackerman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593492048
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Act written by Elliot Ackerman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The American betrayal of Afghanistan took twenty years. Elliot Ackerman, a participant and witness, tells the story with unsparing honesty in this intensely personal chronicle.” —George Packer A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities for years now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families. The official US government evacuation effort was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. With former colleagues and friends protecting the airport in Kabul, Ackerman joined an impromptu effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's longest war. For Ackerman, it also became a chance to reconcile his past with his present. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week, the week the war ended. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves a personal history of the war's long progression, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts, the fifth act being the story’s tragic denouement, a prelude to Afghanistan's dark future. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant account here. But The Fifth Act also brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, American and Afghan, who fought the war with courage and dedication, and at great personal cost. Ackerman's story is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.

Author : Ingmar Bergman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781565846623
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Act written by Ingmar Bergman and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scripts of award-winning film director Ingmar Bergman have been among the most important documents in film history. Though his vision in such films as Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal has shaped our thinking about the cinema, none of his most recent films have been shown in U.S. theaters. This book brings to English readers for the first time some of the finest creations of Bergman's mature years. In these three scenarios of extraordinary frankness, even rawness, Bergman shows his tender yet realistic views on the world of theater, cinema, and acting, culminating with In the Presence of a Clown, where he returns to the character of his Uncle Carl, an irrepressible inventor who comes up with an early version of the talking film. These most recent scripts, in effect Bergman's own fifth act, add an important and moving chapter to his life work. A preface contextualizing the scripts within Bergman's oeuvre has been added by Lasse Bergstrom, a noted Swedish film critic as well as the publisher of Bergman's work in Sweden.

Author : Maxine Hong Kingston
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307428575
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Book of Peace written by Maxine Hong Kingston and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a Fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned--in the catastrophic Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work, Kingston completes her interrupted labor, weaving fiction and memoir into a luminous meditation on war and peace, devastation and renewal.

Author : Henning Mankell
Publisher : New Press/ORIM
ISBN 13 : 1595586121
Total Pages : 555 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Woman written by Henning Mankell and published by New Press/ORIM. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 international-bestselling master of Scandinavian noir: a “marvelously told mystery” of murder in Sweden and corruption in Africa (Austin American-Statesman). In an African convent, four nuns and an unidentified fifth woman are found with their throats slit. The local police do little to investigate . . . and cover up the unknown woman’s death. A year later in Sweden, Holger Eriksson, a retired car dealer and birdwatcher, is skewered to death after falling into a pit of carefully sharpened bamboo poles. Soon after, the body of a missing florist is discovered strangled and tied to a tree. Baffled and appalled by the crimes, the only clues Inspector Kurt Wallander has to go on are a skull, a diary, and a photo of three men. What ensues is a complex, meticulously plotted investigation that will push the detective to his limits. The key is the unsolved killing of the fifth woman in Africa—who was she, and what did she have to do with the brutal deaths of two seemingly innocent men? Are more victims in danger? The answers will lead Wallander to question everything he thought he knew about the psychology of murder. An international bestseller, this “scary and cunning tale” (Rocky Mountain News) “achieves the satisfying density of plot and characterization” that established Henning Mankell as one of the twentieth-century’s finest crime writers. His Kurt Wallander mysteries are now the basis for the hit TV show Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh (The Baltimore Sun).

Author : Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 33 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fifth Act of the Cenci written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Elliot Ackerman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0525559973
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Places and Names written by Elliot Ackerman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of NPR's Best Books of 2019 “Lyrical . . . A thoughtful perspective on America’s role overseas.” —Washington Post From a decorated Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist, an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. “War hath determined us.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost Toward the beginning of Places and Names, Elliot Ackerman sits in a refugee camp in southern Turkey, across the table from a man named Abu Hassar, who fought for al-Qaeda in Iraq and whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after establishing a rapport with Abu Hassar, he takes a risk by revealing to him that in fact he was a Marine special operation officer. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary quickly joins him in the game of filling in the map with the names and dates of places where they saw fighting during the war. They had shadowed each other for some time, it turned out, a realization that brought them to a strange kind of intimacy. The rest of Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir is in a way an answer to the question of why he came to that refugee camp, and what he hoped to find there. By moving back and forth between his recent experiences on the ground as a journalist in Syria and its environs and his deeper past in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of remarkable atmospheric pressurization. Ackerman shares vivid and powerful stories of his own experiences in combat, culminating in the events of the Second Battle of Fallujah, the most intense urban combat for the Marines since Hue in Vietnam, where Ackerman's actions leading a rifle platoon saw him awarded the Silver Star. He weaves these stories into the latticework of a masterful larger reckoning with contemporary geopolitics through his vantage as a journalist in Istanbul and with the human extremes of both bravery and horror. At once an intensely personal story about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region, and the world, Places and Names bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

Author : Elliot Ackerman
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1101971568
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Waiting for Eden written by Elliot Ackerman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Patiently, and unflinchingly, Ackerman is becoming one of the great poet laureates of America’s tragic adventurism across the globe.” —Pico Iyer Eden lies in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his room. We see them through the eyes of Eden’s best friend, a fellow Marine who didn’t make it back home—and who must relive the secrets held between all three of them as he waits for Eden to finally, mercifully die and join him in whatever comes after. A breathtakingly spare and shattering novel that explores the unseen aftereffects—and unacknowledged casualties—of war, Waiting for Eden is a piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty, friendship, betrayal, and love. “The Tim O’Brien of our era.” —Vogue “Devastating.” —The Wall Street Journal “Haunting. . . . Daring.” —The Boston Globe “Heart-wrenching.” —NPR

Author : Elliot Ackerman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476778566
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Green on Blue written by Elliot Ackerman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "debut novel about a young Afghan orphan and the harrowing, intractable nature of war"--Amazon.com.