The Colonel And I
Download The Colonel And I PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get The Colonel And I book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
The Colonel and I
Author: Daad Sharab
language: en
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
Release Date: 2021-12-31
An insider’s view of Libya’s fallen dictator by the woman who served as his longtime troubleshooter and confidante. For almost half of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year reign, Daad Sharab was his trusted confidante—the only outsider to be admitted to his inner circle. Down the years many have written about Gaddafi, but none have been so close. Now, years after the violent death of “the Colonel,” she gives a unique insight into the character of a man of many contradictions: tyrant, hero, terrorist, freedom fighter, womanizer, father figure. Her account is packed with fascinating anecdotes and revelations that show Gaddafi in a surprising new light. Daad witnessed the ruthlessness of a flawed leader who is blamed for ordering the Lockerbie bombing, and she became the go-between for the only man convicted of the atrocity. She does not seek to sugar-coat Gaddafi’s legacy, preferring readers to judge for themselves, but also observed a hidden, more humane side. The leader was a troubled father and compassionate statesman who kept sight of his humble Bedouin roots, and was capable of great acts of generosity. The author also pulls no punches about how Western politicians such as Tony Blair, George Bush, and Hillary Clinton shamelessly wooed his oil-rich regime. Despite her warnings the dictator was ultimately consumed by megalomania, and Daad was caught up in his dramatic fall. Falsely accused by Gaddafi’s notorious secret service of being both the Colonel’s mistress and a spy, she faced betrayal and imprisonment—and, caught up in the Arab Spring uprising, she also faced a fight for her life as bombs rained down on Libya.
The Colonel
Author: Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
language: en
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Release Date: 2015-08-15
On a pitch black, rainy night in a small Iranian town, the colonel paces back and forth inside his house waiting for the inevitable – the knock on the door from the secret police. From there he will be taken to the tortured body of his youngest daughter. The Islamic Revolution, like so many revolutions before it, is devouring its own children. The colonel must bury his daughter before sunrise, alone, without ceremony. So who is to blame? What follows is a shocking diatribe against the failures of the Iranian Left over the last sixty years. Confrontational, angry, sad and lyrical, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi leaves no taboo unbroken as he asks three generations who have suffered under oppressive and brutal regimes, how has it come to this.
The Colonel
Almost the only indisputable fact about Colonel Tom Parker is that he was the manager of the greatest performer in popular music: Elvis Presley. His real name wasn’t Tom Parker †“ indeed, he wasn’t an American at all, but a Dutch immigrant called Andreas van Kujik. And he certainly wasn’t a proper military colonel: he purchased his title from a man in Louisiana. But while the Colonel has long been acknowledged as something of a charlatan, this book is the first to reveal the extraordinary extent of the secrets he concealed, and the consequences for the career, and ultimately the life, of the star he managed. As Alanna Nash’ prodigious research has discovered, the Colonel left Holland most probably because, at the age of twenty, he bludgeoned a woman to death. Entering the US illegally, he then enlisted in the army as ‘Tom Parker’. But, with supreme irony for someone later styling himself as Colonel, Parker’s military career ended in desertion, and discharge after a psychiatrist had certified him as a psychopath. He then became a fairground barker, working sideshows with a zeal for small-scale huckstering and the casual scam that never left him. And by the height of Elvis’s success, Parker had become a pathological gambler who, at the same time as he was taking, amazingly, a full 50% of Presley’s earnings, frittered away all his wealth in the casinos of Las Vegas. As Nash shows, therefore, the often baffling trajectory of Elvis Presley’s career makes perfect sense once the secret imperatives of the Colonel’s life are known. Parker never booked Presley for a tour of Europe because of the dark secret that ensured he himself could never return there. Even at his most famous, Elvis was still being booked to play out-of-the-way towns in North Carolina †“ because the former fairground barker (who shamelessly negotiated as such even with top record company and film executives) knew them from his days on the circus circuit. And Elvis was trapped playing years of arduous seasons in Las Vegas †“ two shows nightly, seven days a week, until boredom and despair brought on the excessive drug use that killed him †“ because for Parker he was “an open chit†? whose huge earnings prevented his manager’s losses at the gambling tables being called in. Alanna Nash knew Parker towards the end of his life, and has now uncovered the whole story, improbable, shocking, and never less than compelling, of how this larger-than-life man made, and then unmade, popular music’s first and greatest superstar.