Bøker av Ivan Smith

During that long, hot summer of 1964, Ivan Smith, a mercenary volunteer in the Arme Nationale Congolais, came to witness and understand fear, the law of the jungle and the lust for killing that permeates Africa. A member of 'Mad Mike' Hoare's 5 Commando Group he and his companions were nominally soldiers but there was little in the way of campaigns, tactics and discipline. Of conventional warfare there was none. Loyalty to country or unit did not exist and the fear of death was the only commander. Many more mercenaries died from an accidental discharge, in a drunken shoot-out or from a bullet in the back than were ever killed in action by Simba rebels. Nearly half a century later, Ivan Smith re-lives the nightmare that was the Congo.

Modern approaches to the study of symplectic 4-manifolds and algebraic surfaces combine a wide range of techniques and sources of inspiration. This book presents methods for the study of moduli spaces of complex structures on algebraic surfaces, and for the investigation of symplectic topology in dimension 4 and higher.