Tag: Madmen

Free Download Voyage for Madmen By Peter Nichols
2011 | 354 Pages | ISBN: 1846684439 | PDF | 4 MB
Already a classic among sailors, Nichols tell the true story of the inaugural 1968 Golden Globe sailing race: the first single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the world. "One of the most gripping sea stories I have ever read." (Sebastian Junger). It lay like a gauntlet thrown down; to sail around the world alone and non-stop. No one had ever done it, no one knew if it could be done. In 1968, nine men – six Englishmen, two Frenchmen and an Italian – set out to try, a race born of coincidence of their timing. One didn’t even know how to sail. They had more in common with Captain Cook or Ferdinand Magellan than with the high-tech, extreme sailors of today, a mere forty years later. It was not the sea or the weather that determined the nature of their voyages but the men they were, and they were as different from one another as Scott from Amundsen. Only one of the nine crossed the finishing line after ten months at sea. The rest encountered despair, sublimity, madness and even death.

Free Download Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, "Madmen at the Helm: Pathology and Politics in the Arab Spring (Politics Current Affairs: Middle East Studies)"
English | 2013 | ISBN: 1859643353, 086372454X | EPUB | pages: 256 | 0.5 mb
The Arab Spring was a watershed in Arab history, which gave young protesters the impetus to challenge established and entrenched dictatorial regimes for the first time and to demand democracy. This unique book reviews specialist literature and provides a profile of the personality disorder of narcissism displayed by five leaders – Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Qaddafi, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Bashar al-Assad – together with the related syndromes of paranoia, hysteria, and sociopathy. The book argues that the responses of these leaders to the challenges they faced indicate that they were psychologically incapable of facing reality, and indeed displayed pathological symptoms in clinging fanatically to power in the face of revolt. Madmen at the Helm considers each of the five leaders in turn, examining their behavior during the upheavals as expressed in their public statements, speeches, interviews, and courses of action. Thus, the book identifies patterns and similarities of behavior that serve to prove that the five ‘stony-faced old men in power’ displayed specific pathological personality types in their responses to the political and cultural circumstances in which they were operating. A postscript to the book widens this context by identifying two cases of narcissism in contemporary American politics: George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. This highly topical, accessible, and relevant book provides a psycho-historical insight into the actions and responses of the deposed dictators, viewed from a unique clinical psychological perspective.