This is a unique and invaluable book. It is the only first-person narrative in English of the East Timorese resistance from the 1975 invasion to the 1992 capture of Xanana Gusmão. The cataclysmic events of the Indonesian occupation that have been carefully chronicled before in several third-person accounts are presented here as moments of danger and decision in an individual's life. Pinto, with the editorial help of Jardine, has succeeded in giving the reader a vivid sense of how the East Timorese have struggled and survived through the torrent of violence that has been unleashed upon them. The reader follows Pinto from a worry-free childhood, when he played games such as kalek (which involves knocking fruits out of a certain type of tree), to a danger-filled adolescence and adulthood. At age 13, he fled with his family from his hometown of Remexio (southeast of Dili) while mortar shells and bombs rained down around them. For a year and a half, they lived in a town further south, just out of the Indonesian army's reach. There he learned guerrilla fighting and weekly alternated guard duty on the front line with farm work. Overcoming his initial trepidation and despondency, he gained the resolve to fight until death. When the Indonesian military (ABRI) escalated its counter-insurgency campaign in late 1977, Pinto and his family fled again. The thousands who took refuge in the forested hills became cut off from their food supplies: "sometimes we only had a piece of manioc to eat for the whole day." Each family spent the day hiding from the soldiers and the night searching for food. Pinto, with his parents, siblings and 50 other people, were captured after one year of hardscrabble life in the jungle. ABRI soldiers had forced several recently captured East Timorese to lead them to the others in the forest. His hometown Remexio, where ABRI resettled the captives, was turned into a concentration camp. It was a demoralizing time. He saw his friends, relatives and neighbors die of dysentery and malnutrition. He saw a manacled Xavier do Amaral, the head of the main resistance organization, brought before the townspeople to make a coerced 'apology.' With the help of relatives, Pinto's family soon moved to Dili in late 1978. As many East Timorese were driven out of the forests and into the cities and towns, their terrain of resistance shifted from the liberated zones to the Indonesian-controlled territory. They learned the arts of dissimulation under the harsh conditions of a settler colonialism. Pinto describes how he would appear loyal and submissive before the Indonesians with whom he had to daily interact, while privately dreaming of independence and secretly scheming with friends. Pinto joined an underground movement in Dili in 1983 that worked undetected amidst the occupiers. It was this underground movement, constantly in touch with the guerrillas still in the hills, that was behind the highly visible civil protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pinto, as the head of the underground at that time, reveals the planning behind the actions during the visits of the Pope (October 1989) and the US ambassador John Monjo (January 1990). His eyewitness behind-the-scenes account of the demonstration to the Santa Cruz cemetery on November 12, 1992 and the massacre of 271 people is essential reading on this event. Particularly important is Pinto's narration of how Xanana Gusmao lived underground (literally) in Dili from February 1991 to November 1992. Pinto's unadorned and ordinary prose indicates the mental balance he has been able to maintain through extraordinary experiences, such as his vertiginous mind games with Indonesian intelligence while posing as a double agent and his dangerous overland escape from East Timor. The hyped-up, overcharged spy thrillers of pulp fiction are no match for the terrors of real-life experiences straightforwardly narrated. For those who know little about East Timor, this book makes for an excellent introduction. To complement Pinto's gripping narrative, Jardine has provided background material on Indonesian and US politics in prefatory and concluding essays. Much care has been put into the footnotes, bibliography, and selection of photographs. For those who know much about this tortured half-island, Pinto's inside information reveals much that they would not have known. In sum, this book is a landmark achievement in the literature on East Timor.

Constâncio Pinto's life is an exemple of what it means to live in fear for most of your life and, despite that, maintain a constant sense of justice in a world that's not fair. As a brazilian, I certainly can relate with his testimony - of a catholic, portuguese-speaking man. He describes with incredible simplicity and humanity (and that's why the book is so powerful) all his life as an East Timor resistence member, seeing your friends being killed and being himself brutally tortured and persecuted. East Timor's fight is a methaphor for the most brutal opression vs. the faith in freedom, justice and peace. And with people like Constâncio, we are reminded that peace and justice are always achievable no matter how we suffer and no matter how hard is our struggle.

This is a great book. It has excellent map, diagrams and oral histories.

I have a dear freind who was there during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he give it approval which is saying much.

Walter said tehre are only two errors tha he could find. One was a story about a nurse getting a Purple Heart for working hard (Walter said not true) the second error was the chart on page 113. he said the helena and Ogala was shown too far south on the wharf. Walter said they moved further during the attack and Walter had a hand in moving them. He said the Helena was on the wharf and tied up outside of it was the Ogala. Walter said a torpedo went under the Ogala, and blasted the Helena and the resulting blast tore a huge hole in the Ogala causing it to sink.

Walter took the lead in taking the lines off the Ogala and Helena, and tied the Ogala to the wharf while the Helena slipped to the south. The Ogala later capsized, thus Walter helped save the helena from possibly sinking!

Helena thus moved to the south after the bombing.

I recommend this book highly, thank you Mr Stan Cohen.

This is a superior historical review, in pictorial form, of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The 50th Anniversary edition has been greatly expanded to include diagrams and photographs that were not in the original edition. Although of a pictorial nature, the text is scholarly, extremely well-researched and concise. The maps and previously unpublished photographs place the attack in an accurate historical context. This book is in the "must read" classification and it is another diamond among author Stan Cohen's many diamonds.

This book is for anyone who may be skeptical about eastern medical practices, but who may be longing for a better, more holistic view of medicine than is provided by their own western doctor. The book outlines various common ailments and then describes the treatment diagnoses, first from the view of western MD and then from the view of an eastern doctor, without any bias towards either. You are able to learn the strengths and weakness of each method of healing so you can make up your own mind which is better or more effective. Its also a great, easy to understand primer of all the eastern philosopies and terms you've heard of before but not clearly understood like Qi, maintaining balance (yin/Yang), Accupressure, etc...
A definite must read for anyone dealing with a chronic illness or who feels like they've reached the limit of what their western doctor can do for them.

A terrific, power-packed book of practical information about the Chinese and Western systems of health and healing, and how you can apply them to your life.Valuable healing remedies and insights are on every page. Specific healing remedies for many of the most common diseases and health problems are outlined.

I was going to write a huge review to get you excited to buy this, but I see that there is already an exhaustive review. So I will only say that this book could not be better for anyone interested in eastern orthodx art of the coptic/ethiopian/egyptian sort. It is very very richly illustrated with dozens of full page full color icons. It is fantastic! Enjoy!

You may also enjoy: The Resurrection and the Icon for more material on eastern orthodox iconography/theology

Mahmoud Zibawi, Eastern Christian Worlds, trans: Madeleine Beaumont, The Liturgical Press (Collegeville, Minnesota : 1995), ISBN 0-8146-2375-1, 272 pp., Price: $US99.95

(Review extracted from the Glastonbury Bulletin #100 {the Journal of the British Orthodox Church}. Reprinted by permission of editor.)

We in the West seem to be experiencing a renewed Orientalism, with few more obvious signs than a singular fascination for the eastern iconographic traditions. Where icons were once assumed to inhabit the domain of populist piety or were relegated by many art historians to a developmental phase of religious art (playing, if you like, the Baptist to the messiah of the Italian Renaissance), the Orthodox icon has now come to occupy the long-vacated space of spiritual art in the popular imagination.

As with all rediscoveries, however, the western appetite is highly selective and the palette likely to be attracted to those images for which it has been preconditioned. Such has been the case with both the popular and scholarly approaches to the vast heritage of iconography of the ancient world. Ten years ago, while studying icons intensively for a degree, I noted a eurocentric bias - seasoned with a hearty dose of racism - which underpinned the curriculum; indeed, more often than not the 'naïf' images ('images', we were told, not 'icons') of Ethiopia, when seen at all, were juxtaposed against the glittering domes of Daphni, Hosios Lukas and Nea Moni, to predictable effect. Icons were considered synonymous with Byzantium, not - significantly - with Orthodoxy. Thus those families of Orthodox existing on the geographical periphery of the empire, or whose confessions differed in substance or terminology from the prevailing Constantinopolitan conviction, were marginalised or ignored altogether.

Mahmoud Zibawi's Eastern Christian Worlds succeeds brilliantly in enlivening our knowledge of the Christian religiosity of the East by focusing our attention onto the largest of such groupings, the Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox. Following upon his well-received The Icon: Its Meaning and History (The Liturgical Press, 1993), Zibawi's recent book manages the difficult feat of appearing compendious and yet comprehensive. Zibawi's book must be lauded primarily for its erudition and comprehensivity, but praise must also be accorded the author for his courage in presenting his work from an unabashedly religionist standpoint. By gathering together so many examples from the kaleidoscopic and prodigious output of the Oriental Orthodox, and then conveying the dynamic piety of the images through exuberant, if occasionally breathless, commentary, the author establishes what Olivier Clément coins in the preface as 'the ecumenism of beauty'.

Zibawi begins his analysis with a welcome historical introduction to the genesis of the Oriental churches. Starting, appropriately enough, with the Great Commission and Pentecost, Zibawi documents the growth of levantine Christianity (with the aid of useful maps) up to the time of the Arab conquest and Islamic hegemony. For those of us who have searched for a concise overview of the historical circumstances which conspired to effect a break in communion between the Orthodox, look no further; in the space of a dozen pages the author presents a clear synopsis which will prove of interest to historian and general reader alike. It was with relief that I noted Zibawi is not one of those who concentrate on the discordant, but rather on the unitive: "Crucible of schisms, the Christian East is also the world in the middle, the place of exchanges, and the heart of communions. (p.19)"

The second and third chapters illustrate the extraordinary cultural and artistic conversations between Oriental Christianity and Islam. Thankfully the author, though obviously a devoted Christian, is possessed of a mature and sympathetic attitude towards the Islamic faith and is thus more interested in documenting the interchange between the two than in sponsoring some sort of aesthetics-based polemics: "In contradistinction to the doctrinal objections and violent aversions attested by history, Islam often appears tolerant, transparent, and prone to sympathy. (p.21)" One suspects that Zibawi, Lebanese by birth and resident in Paris, and a painter himself, is in an ideal position to analyse this extraordinary encounter between faiths; one iconic, the other aniconic. For all of the evident differences, Eastern Christianity and Islam share a conviction that that which is properly Beautiful is inseparable from that which is Good, and that contemplation of the invisible encourages the eye to strain towards the transfigured visible. The recognition of this empathy allowed for an ongoing artistic partnership that enriched the output of both communities. Zibawi's enlightened analysis of these shared influences puts paid to the strangely pervasive notion that the arts of the Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox were somehow hermetically sealed before the Arab invasion and remain unaltered to this day. The fact remains that Oriental Christians were, and are, heavily influenced by Islam, just as both were inheritors of hellenism: Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Platonism and Neoplatonism entered both Christianity and Islam, were sacralised, and then refracted endlessly from one to the other, and to the benefit of both.

Chapters four through seven examine the arts of the Syrians, the Armenians, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians, respectively. I confess to be almost wholly ignorant of the artistic heritage of Armenia, but felt overcome by its achievements, particularly in the fields of manuscript illumination and the relief carvings of the church of the Holy Cross in Aghthamar, built a thousand years ago by Gagik I. It seems to me that a good percentage of the literature on the Armenian Apostolic Church seeks either to disavow or to exaggerate Western influence: here the Seljuk, Mongol and Frankish influences upon the Armenian religious arts are all given their proper place. (Indeed Zibawi's thesis, in this as in other chapters, seems to be that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - a welcome lack of reductionism for an art historian!) Nevertheless the author doesn't shirk from deeming unsuccessful those Armenian artists who, from the seventeenth century, begin to emulate Renaissance and Baroque models. It seems that Dürer doesn't cross the Black Sea entirely successfully.

The chapter on Syria emphasises, rightly in my opinion, the pivotal place of the Rabbula Gospels of 586 in the subsequent development of Byzantine iconographic types. The plasticity of the forms (indeed the most arresting image of the Virgin extant, if you ask me), the unfolding of space, the immediacy of emotional force, and the employment of formal devices to exaggerate a theological program all coalesce in such a fashion that much subsequent Byzantine iconography often appears little more than a footnote. Zibawi then traces the cross-fertilisation between Byzantine-oriented Syria and Persian-oriented Mesopotamia - indeed the Abbasid Caliphate appears to have sponsored something of a mediaeval iconographic renaissance. Unfortunately the latter part of the subsequent Ottoman dominance ushers in a period of stylistic confusion, inaugurated in major part by the intrusion of Catholic missionaries and the installation of Eastern Catholic rites. The later Aleppo icons are all rather stolid affairs, not quite icons and not quite Western devotional imagery. The presence of rosaries and the preponderance of such types as the Immaculate Conception all speak to an art bereft of identity.

Nowhere is the magnificent imagination of the religious artist more obvious than in the land of Cush. Ethiopian icons, until very recently all-too-often regarded as animism with an overlay of Gospel, are incontrovertibly confronting to the Western eye, conditioned as it is by Masaccio's one-point perspective and Michelangelo's (deceptive un-) naturalism. The assault of colour, the confidence of execution, the rejection of tonality and the sheer modernity of the images all conspire to elevate Ethiopian icons from any historical context and place them squarely in the realm of the eternal moment. One cannot but feel the image occupies some sort of dreamscape otherwise only accessible to the saint or ascetic. This said, I can only be thankful that Zibawi didn't fall prey to the common temptation to reduce his discussion of the Ethiopian icon to its 'painterly qualities' or to its (groan) 'child-like innocence and naïveté'. If anything his examination of the rigorous theological underpinnings of such works is more sustained here than anywhere else in the book, thus providing a welcome relief from the rash of recent studies which concentrate solely on formalist and stylistic traits to the expense of the mature theological dimensions of the works. One suspects that however well-intentioned the desire of the recent generation of art historians to reclaim Ethiopian religious imagery for the dubious honour of proto-abstractionism, there is still an unacknowledged debasement of Ethiopian Christianity at its c

This is a very easy to read and understand travel guide. The author goes into the historical information about each site. The information given for the handicapped also is good for those who are elderly or ill. The pictures are excellent. This is a great book!

Easy Walks In Israel-Sights and Stories is very historical, interesting, colorful, and educational. It goes past the usual travel books available and gives you a true feeling of Israel and its beautiful sites and wonderful people. It lists all the information that handicapped travelers need to be able to travel in comfort. The stories about each site are very enjoyable and the photography is excellent.

"Efronia" provides an extraordinary and very sentimental account of the unwarranted suffering of the Armenian people through political oppression and religious discrimination, which was not averted, although it was permanently visible to the international community. The specific case of Efronia clearly illustrates the way this segregation could affect the individual's life and her state of mind. An excellent book for anyone who wants a real person's perspective on a subject generally known only from the dry and fact-based point of view of history books and wishes to become acquainted with the historical and cultural background of the Armenian people.

This is one of the most heart-wrenching and heart-warming books that I have ever read. I could not put it down.

Not since the famous Baedeker guide of 1929 has someone written such a comprehensive and lucid book about Egypt. Michael Haag writes with reassuring authority -- clearly he knows and loves the country well -- and with an eye for revealing detail and with a narrative ability that makes this book as enjoyable to read and as unputdownable as a good novel. This is the book to take with you to Egypt, and to read before you go and after you have returned. You could have no better companion.

The only way to really know the value of a guide book is to use it, and that is what I most thoroughly did during my five weeks of travel through Egypt. A marvellous book! A comprehensive, assured and thoroughly readable historical and cultural account of five thousand years of civilization, as well as being entirely practical for the traveler in every respect, so that whether concerning accommodations or ways of moving about the country or where to eat or to shop, I came to trust Mr Haag entirely. A trip to Egypt is the journey of a lifetime and you owe it to yourself to have with you this incomparable companion.

Egypt in Africa is a great book based on a great museum exhibit and it's good to see it available through amazon.com. The book avoids the two popular extremes of denying all of the African roots and setting of Egyptian civilization and of claiming that anything and everything worthwhile in western civilization was African in origin. (This book makes it clear that Africa contributed so much that it's foolish to discredit its valid claims by exaggeration.) Instead the book is a calm, objective, and persuasive as well as readible and clear look at Egypt in its African context. If you want to understand the "big picture" when it comes to ancient Egypt, you really need this book. A professor of art history.

This is a timely and unique voice of sanity in the wake of the (shrill) debates still stirring over Black Athena. It is an attractively illustrated and informative volume on its own. As a bonus, it is a great bridge to further inquiry. It should be in EVERY high school and university library.

This book is for the person just beginning to read about Ancient Egypt, as well as the more advanced reader. It's scholarly, well-organized, and up-to-date, but this narrative of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, and people who lived in those times, is also vivid and moving. Day-to-day life of those long gone becomes real, for Guillemette Andreu has given the Ancient Egyptians the immortality they yearned for. I haven't seen the book in its original French, but the translation by David Lorton must be excellent, it reads so well.

An extremely well-written thoroughly-explained book, it provides an expressive picture of everyday life of the Ancient Egyptians and the pharaohs of the time. In the first chapter, the history of the dynastic era (2700-1750 B.C.E.) is briefly summarized. Throughout the remainder of the book, the author attempts to recreate the daily lives, labours and religious beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians, with the aid of letters, artifacts, hieroglyphic inscriptions and tomb scenes. Highly recommended for all and particularly for those whose primary interest lies in the Age of the Pyramids.

A great book . Needeing to know anything about Eygpt well I think you just found your book .

This is a wonderful book . I gave copies to all my friends interested in Ancient Egypt. It's well written and beautifully illustrated. It gives you all the excitement of what is happening in archaeology in Egypt today without having to go there.