For nearly a century the two most powerful nations on earth, Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia, fought a secret war in the lonely passes and deserts of Central Asia. Those engaged in this shadowy struggle called it 'The Great Game', a phrase immortalized by Kipling. When play first began the two rival empires lay nearly 2,000 miles apart. By the end, some Russian outposts were within 20 miles of India. This classic book tells the story of the Great Game through the exploits of the young officers, both British and Russian, who risked their lives playing it. Disguised as holy men or native horse-traders, they mapped secret passes, gathered intelligence and sought the allegiance of powerful khans. Some never returned. The violent repercussions of the Great Game are still convulsing Central Asia today.
David Van Praagh argues that Hindu nationalists, the country's new paramount political force, are creating a new kind of coalition politics that discourages religious clashes. Led by the Bharatiya Janata Party they are also bringing about needed economic liberalization. Since coming to power in 1998, the Hindu nationalists led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani have brought India out of the nuclear closet with a series of tests confirming its status as a nuclear power. After the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 on America and three months later on the Indian Parliament, the United States and India have quietly become "allies in the cause of democracy," with an eye to containing not only terrorists but China. Van Praagh, a journalist with many years of experience in India and Asia as a correspondent for the Globe and Mail and other Canadian and U.S. newspapers, combines first-hand coverage of events, historical narrative, and timely analysis in this clearly written and provocative book. The Greater Game details India's political evolution and that country's emergence as not only the preeminent power in the Subcontinent but also a major world power.
This fascinating book examines the deadly impact of The Great War on a number of leading professional sportsmen of the age. Their untimely deaths pressed home how even the fittest and most gifted were vulnerable and their loss was felt by far more than their families and friends. Among those featured in this well illustrated book are: Donald Bell - the only professional football player to win the Victoria Cross: Anthony Wilder - the glamorous Wimbledon champion who fell in May 1915; Francois Faber - the Tour de France star: Percy Poulton Palmer - England Rugby Captain; and numerous others. Also covered are those sports-orientated units such as 16 Battalion Royal Scots (formed around Heart of Midlothian FC) and 11 Kings Royal Rifle Corps (professional golfers). We learn of their formation, training and war service. Finally the authors study the effect of the conflict on the world of sport - canceling of fixture, use of facilities etc.
The Greater Game is a major exhibition (December 2014–September 2015) by the National Football Museum exploring the history of English football in the First World War. It brings together previously unseen material from private and public collections to explore the impact of the war on clubs, players and communities. Football's wartime story, both at home and abroad, offers a fascinating and moving insight into the impact of the First World War on our national game. This publication to accompany the exhibition features illustrated highlights together with specially commissioned articles by leading writers and historians.
In the early 1980s, Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation (SRC) in Springfield, Missouri, was a near bankrupt division of International Harvester. Today it's one of the most successful and competitive companies in the United States, with a share price 3000 times what it was thirty years ago. This miracle turnaround is all down to one man, Jack Stack, and his revolutionary system of Open-Book Management, in which every employee understands the company's key figures, can act on them and has a real stake in the business. In Stack's own words: 'When employees think, act and feel like owners ... everybody wins.'As a management strategy, 'the great game of business' is so simple and effective that it's been taken up by companies from Intel to Harley Davidson.
From the 9/11 attacks to waterboarding to drone strikes, relations between the United States and the Middle East seem caught in a downward spiral. And all too often, the Central Intelligence Agency has made the situation worse. But this crisis was not a historical inevitability—far from it. Indeed, the earliest generation of CIA operatives was actually the region’s staunchest western ally. In America’s Great Game, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA’s pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency’s three most influential—and colorful—officers in the Middle East. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the first head of CIA covert action in the region; his cousin, Archie Roosevelt, was a Middle East scholar and chief of the Beirut station. The two Roosevelts joined combined forces with Miles Copeland, a maverick covert operations specialist who had joined the American intelligence establishment during World War II. With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet they were also fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the “Great Game,” the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these “Arabists” propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of U.S.–Middle Eastern relations for decades to come. Based on a vast array of declassified government records, private papers, and personal interviews, America’s Great Game tells the riveting story of the merry band of CIA officers whose spy games forever changed U.S. foreign policy.
The Great Game of Business started a business revolution by introducing the world to open-book management, a new way of running a business that created unprecedented profit and employee engagement. The revised and updated edition of The Great Game of Business lays out an entirely different way of running a company. It wasn't dreamed up in an executive think tank or an Ivy League business school or around the conference table by big-time consultants. It was forged on the factory floors of the heartland by ordinary folks hoping to figure out how to save their jobs when their parent company, International Harvester, went down the tubes. What these workers created was a revolutionary approach to management that has proven itself in every industry around the world for the past thirty years--an approach that is perhaps the last, best hope for reviving the American Dream.
The Great Game in West Asia examines the strategic competition between Iran and Turkey for power and influence in the South Caucasus. These neighbouring Middle East powers have vied for supremacy and influence throughout the region and especially in their immediate vicinity, while both contending with ethnic heterogeneity within their own territories and across their borders. Turkey has long conceived of itself as not just a bridge between Asia and Europe but in more substantive terms as a central player in regional and global affairs. If somewhat more modest in its public statements, Iran's parallel ambitions for strategic centrality and influence have only been masked by its own inarticulate foreign policy agendas and the repeated missteps of its revolutionary leaders. But both have sought to deepen their regional influence and power, and in the South Caucasus each has achieved a modicum of success. In fact, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, as much of the world's attention has been diverted to conflicts and flashpoints near and far, a new great game has been unravelling between Iran and Turkey in the South Caucasus.
For more than a century, no Number 1 and Number 2 high schoolfootball team had ever met -- until October 6, 2001 One Great Game This is the story of two teams -- Concord De La Salle, a private Catholic school in an upscale Northern California suburb, and Long Beach Poly, a proud public institution from a blue-collar SoCal seaport -- striving to achieve the same goal: the all-American dream. In this supercharged account of the first-ever national high-school championship game, acclaimed sports journalist -- and former Poly varsity football player -- Don Wallace goes out onto the field and straight into the heart of each team. One Great Game offers a rare look at the world of young-adult sportsmanship, featuring up-close and personal interviews with the team players and their families, coaches and cheerleaders, rabid fans and sworn enemies. The result is a powerful piece of sports literature in the tradition of the classic Friday Night Lights. More than a book about football, One Great Game is an engaging cultural history about twenty-first-century American life.
