Bøker av Michael Archer

Recipient of the MARINE CORPS HERITAGE FOUNDATION'S 2019 COLONEL JOSEPH ALEXANDER AWARD for a distinguished book of biographical literature about a Marine "recognizing exemplary work that furthers the understanding of Marine Corps history, traditions, culture and service.IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1968, U.S. forces were tenaciously fighting, often in mortal, hand-to-hand combat in the dead of night, to hold on to Khe Sanh Combat Base, and its scattered outposts, against equally tenacious soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army, who outnumbered the Americans 5 to 1, and were determined to destroy them. With a few grim exceptions, the Americans successfully held their positions. But, what few know, even to this day, is the end result would have been far more disastrous had it not been for as small band of resourceful officers in the Khe Sanh command bunker, responsible for gauging what this overwhelming attack force of North Vietnamese infantry, tanks and artillery was going to do next, then hastily devising imaginative schemes to stop them--with no room for error. Prominent among them was thirty-six-year-old, Marine Corps Captain Mirza Munir Baig, a scholarly, Cambridge-educated, immigrant from India. His unique combination of classical education, years of counterintelligence work in helping develop spy networks deep into North Vietnam, and an incomparable expertise in the use of field artillery, enabled the enigmatic Baig--like a chess grand master--to "get into the heads" of enemy tacticians, including the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, and anticipate their every move. Author Michael Archer worked alongside this remarkable, eccentric officer throughout that bitter ten-week siege, and, with the help of later-declassified American and Vietnamese military records and memoirs, leaves little doubt that Captain Baig's presence at Khe Sanh was critical to saving thousands of his fellow defenders from death or captivity--and averting one of the gravest military defeats in American history. This accomplishment was largely the result of Captain Baig's early recognition that, contrary to what many still believe today, North Vietnamese forces arrayed against Khe Sanh were not an elaborate deception to divert American troops away from fighting elsewhere; rather, the result of a ruinous obsession by leaders in Hanoi, in which they would sacrifice thousands of their finest soldiers, to replicate the stunning victory they had achieved against the French combat base at Dien Bien Phu fourteen years earlier. As he went about his deadly work, Baig also had a personal agenda, driven by his need to erase the only stain on an otherwise celebrated family military tradition dating back centuries to the Mongol conquest of the Western Himalayas. In that sense, Mirza Munir Baig had been rehearsing his entire life to step on to a stage like Khe Sanh and influence the course of history.

The definitive survey of Keith Tyson's thirty-year career. British Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson is known for a distinctive and diverse body of work including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. Showing a wide range of influences, from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, he is interested in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us every day.For over thirty years, Tyson has probed, dissected, explored and questioned reality. Not fixed to one artistic style, Tyson sets out to challenge himself and the audience, whilst working with diverse materials - paint, clay, metal, resin - to question our knowledge of the world we perceive as real, and art's role in representing it.With newly commissioned texts from an internationally diverse array of writers, and including a previously unpublished interview with the artist, this is the definitive survey of one of the most restless and adventurous creators working today.

In the closing hours of the defense of Khe Sanh Combat Base, the longest and bloodiest battle of the Vietnam War, Tom Mahoney inexplicably walked away from his platoon, unarmed, and was shot to death by enemy soldiers hiding nearby. His fellow Marines made several desperate attempts to recover their well-liked comrade, but were finally forced to leave him behind—though never forgotten. In The Long Goodbye , author Michael Archer (a high school friend who joined the Marines together with Tom) chronicles his exhaustive search for answers to his friend's mysterious stroll into oblivion. This quest eventually leads to an improbable series of connections: from Tom's childhood friends, to fellow Marines, past the frustration of numerous ineffective, often inept, attempts by the U.S. government to locate his remains, and eventually teaming up with a Vietnamese psychic intent on communicating with Tom's "wandering soul." Along the way, we discover the unexpected compassion of several former mortal enemies from that battle, now wishing to help honor the memory of a lone American among the tens of thousands on both sides who were sacrificed in the great meat grinder of Khe Sanh. Swept up in this increasingly bizarre pursuit of clues, the author is soon "summoned" back to that infamous battleground and eventually tracks down the last remaining eyewitness to Tom Mahoney's death—one of those who killed him—and experiences an astonishing epiphany.

Presents an overview that helps you make coherent sense of the often-bewildering diversity of styles, forms, media, techniques, and agendas that proliferate in contemporary art. This edition includes a new chapter on developments in contemporary art since 2000. It offers information on the evolution of art over the decades.

A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists Series