Bøger af Christopher Hale

"The fascinating account of two former British colonies with a shared past but vastly different identities today! Singapore and Malaysia sit astride the sea lanes linking East with West--vital choke points in the world's commerce. Since ancient times, ports along the Silk Road of the Sea were populated by peoples from around the globe who came here to trade and live, carried by the steady flow of goods and the ever-present monsoon winds. Author Christopher Hale recounts many fascinating histories of this region, including: The ancient international trade in spices and the seven voyages to the southern seas of the Chinese eunuch Admiral Zheng He in the 15th century The rise of Islamic kingdoms along rivers bordering the Straits of Malacca and the conquest of Malacca, one of the world's largest cities, by a few hundred Portuguese marauders in 1511 The saga of Sir Stamford Raffles, credited with founding Singapore, and the development of tin mines and vast rubber and oil palm plantations on the Malay Peninsula The disastrous fall of "Fortress Singapore" to the Japanese in World War II after only three weeks of fighting, the worst British military defeat in history The wildly successful film Crazy Rich Asians, set in Singapore, the highest grossing romantic comedy of the decade A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia tells these and many other compelling stories about the people and events which have shaped these nations as they developed into modern powerhouses of international trade and tourism"--

"As the Indiana Jones films showed, Nazis, new age mumbo-jumbo and exotic locations are a formula that works. Christopher Hale's gripping and well-researched tale of an SS-sponsored scientific mission to Tibet in 1938-39 has the whole shebang: mad occult beliefs, mountains, strange charactors called Bruno or Ernst and stomach-churning concentration camp experiments to round things off."--"The Sunday Times" (London)A scientific expedition or a sinister mission?Why would the leader of the Nazi's dreaded SS, the second-most-powerful man in the Third Reich, send a zoologist, an anthropologist, and several other scientists to Tibet on the eve of war? "Himmler's Crusade" tells the bizarre and chilling story one of history's most perverse, eccentric, and frightening scientific expeditions. Drawing on private journals, new interviews, and original research in German archives as well as in Tibet, author Christopher Hale recreates the events of this sinister expedition, asks penetrating questions about the relationship between science and politics, a nd sheds new light on the occult theories that obsessed Himmler and his fellow Nazis.Combining the highest standards of narrative history with the high adventure and exotic locales of "Raiders of the Lost Ark, Himmler's Crusade" reveals that Himmler had ordered these men to examine Tibetan nobles for signs of Aryan physiology, undermine the British relationship with the ruling class, and sow the seeds of rebellion among the populace. Most strangely, the scientists-all SS officers-were to find scientific proof of a grotesque historical fantasy that was at the center of Himmler's beliefs about race.Set against the exquisite backdrop of the majestic Himalayas, this fast-paced and engaging narrative provides new and troubling insight into one of the strangest episodes in the history of science, politics, and war.

The first book to tell the complete story of Adolf Eichmann's plan to deceive the last Jews of Europe

In 1938, on the eve of war, a Nazi expedition set out through British India on a mission sponsored by Himmler himself. Its aim was to trace the origins of the Aryan race, high in the sacred mountains of Tibet. The expedition was led by two complex individuals - Ernst Schÿfer, a swashbuckling, gun-toting naturalist for whom Nazism promised a short-cut to personal glory, and Bruno Beger, an anthropologist whose racial theories were taken to their logical conclusion in Auschwitz. Schÿfer and Beger soon found themselves battling hostility from the British, being manipulated by the Tibetans and struggling with the primitive conditions in the holy city of Lhasa. Every detail of the expedition was recorded in diaries, letters and secret reports. It was also documented in thousands of extraordinary photographs (some of which are reproduced here for the first time in decades) and on film. Despite this abundant documentation, the full story of Schÿfer's ill-fated expedition has never been told. This encounter between the British and the Nazis so close to the Second World War forms a 'picture in little' of the conflict to come. HIMMLER'S CRUSADE explores the ideological roots of the Nazis' obsession with racial theory and the occult. Using the wealth of primary material as well as his own interviews with Bruno Beger, Christopher Hale has written a fascinating and thought-provoking book that brilliantly evokes this little-known prelude to the unimaginable horror of war.