The War Is In The Mountains

Mountainous regions are home to only ten percent of the world's population yet host a strikingly disproportionate share of the world's conflicts. Mountains provide a natural refuge for those who want to elude authority, and their remoteness has allowed archaic practices to persist well into our globalized era. As Judith Matloff shows, the result is a combustible mix we in the lowlands cannot afford to ignore. Traveling to conflict zones across the world, she introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds; Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers; and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades. At every stop, Matloff reminds us that the drugs, terrorism, and instability cascading down the mountainside affect us all. A work of political travel writing in the vein of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Robert Kaplan, The War is in the Mountains is an indelible portrait of the conflicts that have unexpectedly shaped our world.

“Beautifully wrought and impossible to put down, Daniel Sharfstein’s Thunder in the Mountains chronicles with compassion and grace that resonant past we should never forget.”—Brenda Wineapple, author of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848–1877 After the Civil War and Reconstruction, a new struggle raged in the Northern Rockies. In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life.

During the War Between the States, the mountains of North Carolina were a hotbed of internecine strife where the phrase "brother against brother" truly applied. By late 1863, the Confederate government took measures to tighten control of the region, establishing the Western District of North Carolina under command of General Robert Vance, covering the area from the Blue Ridge Mountains westward to the borders of adjacent states. In less than four months, in the largest military operation conducted by the fledging department, General Vance was defeated and captured during an incursion into East Tennessee. Colonel John B. Palmer, Vance's replacement, had barely taken command at Asheville before Confederate General James Longstreet pulled his army from East Tennessee, leaving the Western District exposed and threatened by the growing Union presence at Knoxville. Palmer travelled to Richmond to plead for more troops, especially an artillery battery, to counter recent Federal raids where he was outgunned by Yankees armed with cannons. The Confederate high command found the Macbeth Light Artillery at Charleston, ordering the unit to Asheville where they arrived late May 1864. Hardened veterans of Second Manassas and Antietam, the Macbeth would see a different face of war in the mountains, fighting a different kind of enemy, often not in any uniform, native Southerners disloyal to the Confederate cause, conscript evaders, deserters, disparagingly called "Tories" and "Homegrown Yankees." This book is a panorama of the mountain war in Western North Carolina and Upper East Tennessee, of raids, skirmishes, and battles where rebel commander John B. Palmer defended the Western District against the likes of the notorious Yankee Colonel, George W. Kirk, and his raiders. The Macbeth Light Artillery is covered in a first book length account within the context of a comprehensive study of military operations during 1864 and 1865 in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee.

The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.The origins of this civil war were in the Draconian rule of the coal companies over the fiercely proud miners of Appalachia. It began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. During a street battle, Mayor Testerman, seven Baldwin-Felts agents, and two miners were shot to death.Hatfield became a folk hero to Appalachia. But he, like Testerman, was to be a martyr. The next summer, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated him and his best friend, Ed Chambers, as their wives watched, on the steps of the courthouse in Welch, accelerating the miners' rebellion into open warfare.Much neglected in historical accounts, Thunder in the Mountains is the only available book-length account of the crisis in American industrial relations and governance that occured during the West Virginia mine war of 1920-21.

The role of the peasantry during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) has long been neglected by historians, in part because they have been viewed as a 'primitive' mass devoid of political consciousness. War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918-1958 challenges this conventional understanding by tracing the ability of the peasant community to sustain an autonomous political culture through family, clan, and village assemblies. The long-established system of indirect rule by which the colonial state controlled and policed the vast mountainous interior of Algeria began to break down after the 1920s. War in the Mountains explains how competing guerrilla forces and the French military sought to harness djemâas as part of a hearts-and-minds strategy. Djemâas formed a pole of opposition to the patron-client relations of the rural élites, with clandestine urban-rural networks emerging that prepared the way for armed resistance and a system of rebel governance. Contrary to accepted historical analysis suggesting that rural society was massively uprooted and dislocated, War in the Mountains demonstrates that the peasantry demonstrated a high level of social cohesion and resistance based on powerful family and kin networks.

A leading expert on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism offers a comprehensive theory of "competitive control" that will apply to the future of conflict in a world of explosive population growth, increased urbanization, the movement of population centers to the coasts, and global connective networks.

The International Bestseller New York Times Editors’ Choice SelectionWinner of the 2020 Lannan Literary Awards Fellowship "[An] absorbing, stirring novel . . . that, in more than one sense, remedies history." —The New York Times Book Review “A triumph, a novelistic rendition of one of the most difficult times in Vietnamese history . . . Vast in scope and intimate in its telling . . . Moving and riveting.” —VIET THANH NGUYEN, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family. Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope. The Mountains Sing is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel in English.

A journalist examines the war in Kosovo.PW Best Book of the Year - Nonfiction, 2002

After surviving the blitzkrieg of World War II and escaping from two Nazi prison camps, Soviet soldier Azamat Altay was banished as a traitor from his native home land. Chinghiz Aitmatov became a hero of Kyrgyzstan, writing novels about the lives of everyday Soviet citizens but mourning a mystery that might never be solved. While both came from small villages in the beautiful mountainous countryside, they found themselves caught on opposite sides of the Cold War struggle between world superpowers. Altay became the voice of democracy on Radio Liberty, while Aitmatov rose through the ranks of Soviet politics. Yet just as they seemed to be pulled apart in the political turmoil, they found their lives intersecting in moving and surprising ways. Have the Mountains Fallen? traces the lives of these two men as they confronted the full threat and legacy of the Soviet empire. Through personal and intersecting narratives of loss, love, and longing for a homeland forever changed, a clearer picture emerges of the experience of the Cold War from the other side.

Tragic Mountains tells the story of the Hmong's struggle for freedom and survival in Laos from 1942 through 1992. During those years, most Hmong sided with the French against the Japanese and Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh, and then with the Americans against the North Viemamese.