I am a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California, reporting news from Asia since 1978 and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondent's Award. My work, including this book, has taken me to Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, New York, and elsewhere. Fragments of people and their distant voices are the behavior and quotes that inspire. Slices, starting at random moments and ending in bleak locations, fascinate and hypnotize. And transcribing handwritten notes, impressions, and exclusive interviews, create my RocknRolla lyrics.
I wrote...
Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. -- Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York
My exclusive interviews, first-hand descriptions, and news reports, including a Tibetan Sky Funeral of human corpses eaten by vultures. The Dalai Lama hunting for Mao's reincarnation. A Potala Palace monk kills Chinese as a horse-riding insurgent. A Calcutta Dom caste undertaker suffers discrimination. India's "Bandit Queen" Phoolan Devi justifies her revenge killings.
The CIA's Tony "Poe" demands human ears and heads during the war in Laos. James "Mule" Parker, the last CIA officer to evacuate from Vietnam, reveals the CIA paid and quoted non-existent spies. "Bikini Killer" Charles Sobhraj and his girlfriends are also interviewed. American "Jack" Idema in Kabul is convicted of torturing Afghans to "confess" they knew Osama bin Laden's location. Warfare in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka also appear. Michelle describes her and her colleagues exposing themselves in Peepland on 42nd Street.
Being a foreign correspondent in the so-called "developing world" is complicated in a myriad of ways, and journalists often become so deep into the story that their needs become strangely surgical, legal, and surreal.
Need some specific quotes to describe what is happening amid a bloodbath? Want to profile victims of torture and slaughter? Behr's book brings you into his experience as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek in Africa and other media work in a way few other reporters would like to admit -- except to each other.
This foreign correspondent's book gives an account of the author's time in China and South-East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s when he was South-East Asian Bureau Chief for "Newsweek".
The basic rule of writing a news story? Declarative sentences. These are easily understood and avoid confusing readers who want factual information first, with less of an emphasis on literary style. But all that changed when Herr wrote this book which turns words into weapons as you'll read in his lyrical and chilling reports during the U.S.-Vietnam War.
A groundbreaking piece of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but…
If you haven't read this famous book, and didn't consider it as reporting about war, then take another look because this is Thompson's personal and public battle with America's mainstream culture.
Brutal. Takes no prisoners. No surrender.
Find out who are the winners and losers, and why these people and their beliefs are shaping today's world and the cultural revolution in the American homeland.
'We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ..."'
Hunter S. Thompson is roaring down the desert highway to Las Vegas with his attorney, the Samoan, to find the dark side of the American Dream. Armed with a drug arsenal of stupendous proportions, the duo engage in a surreal succession of chemically enhanced confrontations with casino operators, police officers and assorted Middle Americans.
This stylish reissue of Hunter S. Thompson's iconic masterpiece, a controversial bestseller when…
The fiercely independent spirit of surrealists and other people trying to survive during World War 2 permeates this opulent novel with ghostly quotes and rebellious beliefs.
Laced with angels, forests, dreams, and women, this diary becomes increasingly fraught with questions of obedience, patriotism, dictatorship, and freedom.
Will your own perceptions be radicalized or soothed by this war story?
Inspired by one of the finest lyrics in the English language, the anonymous, pre-Shakespearean "Tom o'Bedlam" ("By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end / Methinks it is no journey..."), Kenneth Patchen sets off on an allegorical journey to the furthest limits of love and murder, madness and sex. While on this disordered pilgrimage to H. Roivas (Heavenly Savior), various characters offer deranged responses, conveying an otherworldly, imaginative madness. A chronicle of violent fury and compassion, written when Surrealism was still vigorous and doing battle with psychotic…
If all war is class war, then this urban battlefield is where society breaks down.
The movie was excellent. But the book is so much deeper with its own Russian-derived, invented slang in the mouths of British louts feeding on the terrible taste of "ultra-violence".
It doesn't matter which side you are on because everyone loses in their attempts to break through or control -- two directions that ultimately lead to our current real-life dystopia.
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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