One Fourteenth Of An Elephant

A memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway.Four and a half days after being transported out of Singapore in a steel goods train in October 1942, prisoner of war Denys Peek found himself in Siam, and a part of the labour force destined for the project that was later to be known as the Thai-Burma death railway.Together with his brother, Ron, and contingents from the Australian and British armies and Volunteer units, among others, Denys spent the duration of the war in over fifteen different work and 'hospital' camps on the railway where over 20,000 prisoners of war and uncounted slave labourers met their deaths. Told in the present tense, One Fourteenth of an Elephant is a haunting, evocative and deeply moving testimony to the suffering and the bravery of those who lived and died on the railway. Against a backdrop of inhumanity and brutality, the greatest examples of humanity and courage are thrown into stark relief, as the author takes us through a daily struggle for survival.Told with clarity, passion and an incredible eye for detail and description, this is an utterly enthralling story and a classic in the making.

“No one who loves elephants or how humans interact with wildlife should pass up Jacob Shell’s remarkable book.” —Dan Flores, author of Coyote America Giants of the Monsoon Forest journeys deep into the mountainous rainforests of Burma and India to explore the world of teak logging elephants and their intriguing alliance with humans. Jacob Shell’s narrative vividly depicts elephants’ extraordinary intelligence, and the complicated bond with individual human riders, a partnership that can last for decades. Giants of the Monsoon Forest reveals an unexpected relationship between evolution in the natural world and political struggles in the human one, while considering how Asia’s secret forest culture might offer a way to help protect the fragile spaces both elephants and humans need to survive.

Elephants have fought in human armies for more than three thousand years. This is the largely forgotten tale of the credit they deserve and the sacrifices they endured.

A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

This study offers a comprehensive look at warfare -- its meaning, culture, technology, tactics, and organization -- in an area of the world previously neglected by military historians.