Journalist Blaine Harden reveals the darker, unsightly picture of Africa which is beginning to emerge in the media. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a single country and a single story, using examples and anecdotes to give context and comprehensibility to problems usually clouded by sociological jargon. He has two principal themes: the battle between modernity, with its double-edged benefits, and the tribal way of life; and the way that Western governments seek to appease their sense of duty, or salve their imperial consciences by providing "aid" which in fact often makes problems worse than they were before. Harden was once thrown out of Kenya for his attack on the corruption endemic even in that romanticized country. This book is controversial, and provokes thought about where Africa is going and what it is becoming.

Africa - Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

Politics & Social Sciences

Harden, Blaine

Politics & Government

HarperCollins, Publishers

A remarkable and controversial book about the reality of modern Africa by distinguished American reporter, Blaine Harden. This remarkable book is the first to get behind the picture post-card presentation of modern Africa. harden reveals the true and often unsightly picture of this vast continent. The issues he addresses - the incompetent intervention of Western governments and the battle between the tribal way of life and modernity - are presented through lucid and gripping stories about individual people and incidents Harden has known. He himself was once thrown out of Kenya for the strength and accuracy of his reporting; this book will cause and equal stir in the debate about where Africa is going and what itis becoming.

Africa : Despatches from a Fragile Continent

History

Africa

Fontana Harpercollins

Blaine Harden, New York Times–bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, tells the riveting story of Kim Il Sung’s rise to power and the young North Korean fighter pilot who dared to defy him. In the aftermath of World War II, Kim Il Sung plunged North Korea into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force was playing a high-risk game of deception—and escape. As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok pretended to love his Great Leader. That is, until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today). The theft—just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953—electrified the world and incited Kim’s bloody vengeance. During the Korean War the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the fact-based narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans. Drawing on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the roles of Mao and Stalin in Kim’s shadowy rise, as well as from never-before-released U.S. intelligence and interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding adventure and an entirely new way to understand the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian state.

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: A True Story About the Birth of Tyranny in North Korea

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Penguin??Books

With a New Foreword The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped. North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk.
In Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden unlocks the secrets of the world’s most repressive totalitarian state through the story of Shin’s shocking imprisonment and his astounding getaway. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence—he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother.
The late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was recognized throughout the world, but his country remains sealed as his third son and chosen heir, Kim Jong Eun, consolidates power. Few foreigners are allowed in, and few North Koreans are able to leave. North Korea is hungry, bankrupt, and armed with nuclear weapons. It is also a human rights catastrophe. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people work as slaves in its political prison camps. These camps are clearly visible in satellite photographs, yet North Korea’s government denies they exist.
Harden’s harrowing narrative exposes this hidden dystopia, focusing on an extraordinary young man who came of age inside the highest security prison in the highest security state. Escape from Camp 14 offers an unequalled inside account of one of the world’s darkest nations. It is a tale of endurance and courage, survival and hope.

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

The New York Times bestselling author of Escape from Camp 14 returns with the untold story of one of the most powerful spies in American history, shedding new light on the U.S. role in the Korean War, and its legacy In 1946, master sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army's Counter Intelligence Corps. After just three months' training, he was sent to Korea, then a backwater beneath the radar of MacArthur's Pacific Command. Though he lacked the pedigree of most U.S. spies—Nichols was a 7th grade dropout—he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon. He insinuated himself into the affections of America’s chosen puppet in South Korea, President Syngman Rhee, and became a pivotal player in the Korean War, warning months in advance about the North Korean invasion, breaking enemy codes, and identifying most of the targets destroyed by American bombs in North Korea. But Nichols's triumphs had a dark side. Immersed in a world of torture and beheadings, he became a spymaster with his own secret base, his own covert army, and his own rules. He recruited agents from refugee camps and prisons, sending many to their deaths on reckless missions. His closeness to Rhee meant that he witnessed—and did nothing to stop or even report—the slaughter of tens of thousands of South Korean civilians in anticommunist purges. Nichols’s clandestine reign lasted for an astounding eleven years. In this riveting book, Blaine Harden traces Nichols's unlikely rise and tragic ruin, from his birth in an operatically dysfunctional family in New Jersey to his sordid postwar decline, which began when the U.S. military sacked him in Korea, sent him to an air force psych ward in Florida, and subjected him—against his will—to months of electroshock therapy. But King of Spies is not just the story of one American spy. It is a groundbreaking work of narrative history that—at a time when North Korea is threatening the United States with long-range nuclear missiles—explains the origins of an intractable foreign policy mess.

King of Spies: The Dark Reign of an American Spymaster

Leaders & Notable People

Title: Escape from Camp 14( One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West) Binding: Hardcover Author: BlaineHarden Publisher: VikingBooks

Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Narratives explore tribal ties, demands of family, disease, the need for leaders, and the lack of national identity through its people in Africa

Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

The author of Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent offers his observations on the exploitation of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, assessing the effects of dams, irrigation, and flood control on the people and environment of the region. Tour.

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

Business & Money

Economics

"A River Lost is superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill."―Washington Post Book World After a two-decade absence, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West's most thoroughly conquered river. Harden's hometown, Moses Lake, Washington, could not have existed without massive irrigation schemes. His father, a Depression migrant trained as a welder, helped build dams and later worked at the secret Hanford plutonium plant. Now he and his neighbors, once considered patriots, stand accused of killing the river. As Blaine Harden traveled the Columbia-by barge, car, and sometimes on foot-his past seemed both foreign and familiar. A personal narrative of rediscovery joined a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river now tamed to puddled remains. Part history, part memoir, part lament, "this is a brave and precise book," according to the New York Times Book Review. "It must not have been easy for Blaine Harden to find himself turning his journalistic weapons against his own heritage, but he has done the conscience of his homeland a great service."

W.W.Norton&Company

"Superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill." ―Washington Post Book World After two decades, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West’s most thoroughly conquered river. To explore the Columbia River and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, he traveled on a monstrous freight barge sailing west from Idaho to the Grand Coulee Dam, the site of the river’s harnessing for the sake of jobs, electricity, and irrigation. A River Lost is a searing personal narrative of rediscovery joined with a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river. Updated throughout, this edition features a new foreword and afterword. 7 maps

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Books by Harden, Blaine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Harden, Blaine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Africa - Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

Africa : Despatches from a Fragile Continent

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: A True Story About the Birth of Tyranny in North Korea

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

King of Spies: The Dark Reign of an American Spymaster

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia

A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia