The New Human Revolution, vol. 14

Author: Daisaku Ikeda
Publisher: Middleway Press
ISBN: 1946635456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Through this novelized history of the Soka Gakkai—one of the most dynamic, diverse, and empowering movements in the world today—readers will discover the organization's goals and achievements even as they find inspiring and practical Buddhist wisdom for living happily and compassionately in today's world. The book recounts the stories of ordinary individuals who faced tremendous odds in transforming their lives through the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and in bringing Buddhism's humanistic teachings to the world. This inspiring narrative provides readers with the principles with which they can positively transform their own lives for the better and realize enduring happiness for themselves and others.

Indigenous Peoples and the Modern State

Author: Duane Champagne
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759107991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Champagne and his coauthors reveal how the structure of a multinational state has the potential to create more equal and just national communities for Native peoples around the globe. In the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala, they show how indigenous people preserve their territory, rights to self-government, and culture. A valuable resource for Native American, Canadian, and Latin American studies; comparative indigenous governments; and international relations.

The Metainterface

Author: Christian Ulrik Andersen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549670
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms—including net art, software art, and electronic literature—seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the “semantic capitalism” of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.

The Great Events of Global History, Vol. 14

Author: Various
Publisher: 北戴河出版
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
History, if we define it as the mere transcription of the written records of former generations, can go no farther back than the time such records were first made, no farther than the art of writing. But now that we have come to recognize the great earth itself as a story-book, as a keeper of records buried one beneath the other, confused and half obliterated, yet not wholly beyond our comprehension, now the historian may fairly be allowed to speak of a far earlier day. For unmeasured and immeasurable centuries man lived on earth a creature so little removed from "the beasts that die," so little superior to them, that he has left no clearer record than they of his presence here. From the dry bones of an extinct mammoth or a plesiosaur, Cuvier reconstructed the entire animal and described its habits and its home. So, too, looking on an ancient, strange, scarce human skull, dug from the deeper strata beneath our feet, anatomists tell us that the owner was a man indeed, but one little better than an ape. A few æons later this creature leaves among his bones chipped flints that narrow to a point; and the archæologist, taking up the tale, explains that man has become tool-using, he has become intelligent beyond all the other animals of earth. Physically he is but a mite amid the beast monsters that surround him, but by value of his brain he conquers them. He has begun his career of mastery.

Tin House: Spring 2013

Author: Win McCormack
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 0985046961
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Tin House is an award-winning literary magazine that publishes new writers as well as more established voices; essays as well as fiction, poetry, and interviews.

The Uprising

Author: Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1584351128
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A manifesto against the concepts of growth and debt, and a call for a reinvestment in the social body. The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today's precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and “rescues” that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it. This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector's two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today's economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon—poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent—it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.

Mao

Author: Jung Chang
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307807134
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 857

Book Description
The most authoritative life of the Chinese leader every written, Mao: The Unknown Story is based on a decade of research, and on interviews with many of Mao’s close circle in China who have never talked before — and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him. It is full of startling revelations, exploding the myth of the Long March, and showing a completely unknown Mao: he was not driven by idealism or ideology; his intimate and intricate relationship with Stalin went back to the 1920s, ultimately bringing him to power; he welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China; and he schemed, poisoned, and blackmailed to get his way. After Mao conquered China in 1949, his secret goal was to dominate the world. In chasing this dream he caused the deaths of 38 million people in the greatest famine in history. In all, well over 70 million Chinese perished under Mao’s rule — in peacetime.

We Wept Without Tears

Author: Gideon Greif
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300131984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Book Description
The "Sonderkommando of "Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted primarily of Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination. Though never involved in the killing itself, they were compelled to be "members of staff" of the Nazi death-factory. This book, translated for the first time into English from its original Hebrew, consists of interviews with the very few surviving men who witnessed at first hand the unparalleled horror of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some of these men had never spoken of their experiences before.

South Korean Democracy

Author: Georgy Katsiaficas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136759220
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
This new book offers a retrospective appraisal of the Gwangju Uprising by academics, activists and artists from Gwangju, Korea. In 1980, South Koreans took to the streets to demand democracy. When the military threatened brutal suppression of the popular movement, only in Gwangju did people refuse to submit. After horrific bloodshed, the citizens of Gwangju drove the military out of the city and held their liberated space for a week. As a "beautiful community" emerged, newspapers were published, hundreds of thousands of people congregated in popular assemblies, and the city’s life gave new meaning to democracy. Although crushed by overwhelming military force, Gwangju’s example inspired the eventual overthrow of the military dictatorship and ushered in a new democratic wave in East Asia. Providing a detailed analysis of the events of the Gwangju uprising, this new volume traces the birth of South Korean democracy in Gwangju’s stubborn refusal to accept life without freedom. The book also focuses on the socio-economic background, the role of women in the uprising, issues of collective identity and the international significance of the revolt. Scholars and researchers of South Asian politics, social movements, history, democracy and development studies will find this volume to be of keen interest.

A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising

Author: Miron Bialoszewski
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
A blow-by-blow, ground-level account of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the 2-month Polish Resistance effort to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation. Poland’s most famous post-war poet offers “the finest book about the insurrection of 1944”—an essential read for fans of WW2 history (John Carpenter). On August 1, 1944, Miron Białoszewski, later to gain renown as one of Poland’s most innovative poets, went out to run an errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against 5 years of Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism. 63 days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis suppressed the insurgents ruthlessly, reducing Warsaw to rubble while slaughtering some 200,000 people, mostly through mass executions. The Red Army simply looked on. First written over 25 years after the uprising, Białoszewski’s account gives readers an unforgettable sense of the chaos and immediacy of the final days of World War II. He tells of slipping back and forth under German fire, dodging sniper bullets, collapsing with exhaustion, rescuing the wounded, and burying the dead. This unusual memoir is a major work of literature and a reflection on memory that resists the terrible destruction it records. Madeline G. Levine has extensively revised her 1977 translation, and passages that were unpublishable in Communist Poland have been restored.