The Great Rupture

Author: Viktor Shvets
Publisher: Boyle & Dalton
ISBN: 9781633373860
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Do we need to be free to be innovative, prosperous, or even happy? The lessons of the last five centuries were unequivocal--without freedom, there could be no prosperity or happiness. However, does this still hold true in the Information Age? Modern technologies are disrupting our societies, altering every facet of our lives, from the nature of work and what we intrinsically value, to how we are informed, entertained, and educated--it promises to be a far deeper disruption than Industrial Revolutions. Humanity is at a major turning point, and how we respond to the merger of technology and financialization will decide our future. Will it be capitalism or communism, feudalism or despotism? By learning from the past and projecting into the future, global market strategist Viktor Shvets explores the weakening nexus between freedom and prosperity and what that means for the future of humanity. From the birth of our modern world, pivotal events in human history have led to the collapse of non-Western civilizations--Mongol warriors sweeping across Eurasian steppes; the Black Death and a re-awakening of human spirit; Zheng He's voyages and the collapse of Novgorod republic; and finally, the ban on printing in Arabic. What can we learn from these events to better prepare ourselves for the future? As we hurtle toward that uncertain future, we must decide whether our cherished individual freedoms are still necessary for success and prosperity, or if in adapting to new technologies, non-Western civilizations are now better positioned for this new world, creating illiberal orders that might no longer suffer from stagnation of ideas. For the first time in at least five centuries, we have an opportunity and tools to build a different society and economy. Will we embrace the challenge?

Rupture

Author: Paul Eisenstein
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128519
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
In a radical reconsideration of political theory and politics, Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan explore the notion of rupture or radical tearing apart in both history and theory through the sweep of Western philosophy from Plato to Kierkegaard and beyond. The authors use contemporary literature and film to elucidate political theory, examining works by such writers are Dave Eggers, John Irving, and Toni Morrison, as well as films by directors from Sergei Eisenstein to David Fincher. Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan find that a rupture or radical break is repeatedly invoked at the beginning of every philosophical system. In this rupture, many of our most cherished political values—equality, solidarity, and the idea of freedom—emerge. But the lack of a sustained commitment to this radical tearing apart has repeatedly foreshortened, distorted, or perverted those same values. Most political philosophy may have marginalized these radical breaks with the past. But Eisenstein and McGowan demonstrate that Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek have consistently brought rupture to the fore as an organizing principle for political thought. This insight holds great pertinence to our current world situation. Seeing the possibilities for an extended dialogue and sustained political change, Eisenstein and McGowan argue for a more systematic engagement with these theorists.

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Author: Lea Ypi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867749
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.

Rupture

Author: Ragnar Jónasson
Publisher: Orenda Books
ISBN: 1910633577
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
1955. Two young couples move to the uninhabited, isolated fjord of Hedinsfjörður. Their stay ends abruptly when one of the women meets her death in mysterious circumstances. The case is never solved. Fifty years later an old photograph comes to light, and it becomes clear that the couples may not have been alone on the fjord after all... In nearby Siglufjörður, young policeman Ari Thór tries to piece together what really happened that fateful night, in a town where no one wants to know, where secrets are a way of life. He’s assisted by Ísrún, a news reporter in Reykjavik, who is investigating an increasingly chilling case of her own. Things take a sinister turn when a child goes missing in broad daylight. With a stalker on the loose, and the town of Siglufjörður in quarantine, the past might just come back to haunt them. Haunting, frightening and complex, Rupture is a dark and atmospheric thriller from one of Iceland’s foremost crime writers. ‘Traditional and beautifully finessed... morally more equivocal than most traditional whodunnits, and it offers alluring glimpses of darker, and infinitely more threatening horizons’ Independent • ‘Jonasson’s books have breathed new life into Nordic noir’ Sunday Express • ‘Bitingly contemporary in setting and tone’ Express • ‘A modern take on an Agatha Christie-style mystery, as twisty as any slalom...’ Ian Rankin • ‘A classic crime story seen through a uniquely Icelandic lens ... first rate and highly recommended’ Lee Child • ‘Chilling, poetic beauty... a must read!’ Peter James • ‘British aficionados of Nordic Noir are familiar with two excellent Icelandic writers, Arnaldur Indridason and Yrsa Sigurdardottir. Here’s a third: Ragnar Jónasson ... the darkness and cold are palpable’ Marcel Berlins, The Times For fans of Trapped, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Agatha Christie and Ann Cleeves

Uproot

Author: Jace Clayton
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374533423
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Confessions of a DJ -- Auto-tune gives you a better me -- How music travels -- World music 2.0 -- Red Bull gives you wings -- Cut & paste -- Tools -- Loops -- How to hold on? -- Active listening

Last Best Hope

Author: George Packer
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374603677
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021 "[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.

Ferne

Author: Barbara Henning
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781956005318
Category : Detroit
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
"Ferne is a time capsule of mid-century Detroit, a city poised to explode. Its sounds, scents, and sights spill forth, as vividly experienced by a vibrant young woman whose life would end too soon. Ferne joyously curates her own life; that's the heart of this book. But we also encounter her through the fervent eyes of her daughter, poet and novelist Barbara Henning, who lyrically fills in and fleshes out the social contours and details of the ghostly presence that haunts these pages. Through her daughter's skilled hands, Ferne comes to life again on these pages, bringing with her glimpses of the city she loved so deeply"--

Crimes Unspoken

Author: Miriam Gebhardt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509511237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

Rough Day

Author: Ed Skoog
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320320
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
“Ed Skoog’s poetry is so ambitious…it knows how to fishtail with images and turn with ease.” —The Stranger

The Great Rift

Author: James Mann
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1627797564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The Great Rift is a sweeping history of the intertwined careers of Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, whose rivalry and conflicting views of U.S. national security color our political debate to this day. Dick Cheney and Colin Powell emerged on the national scene more than thirty years ago, and it is easy to forget that they were once allies. The two men collaborated closely in the successful American wars in Panama and Iraq during the presidency of George H. W. Bush--but from this pinnacle, conflicts of ideology and sensibility drove them apart. Returning to government service under George W. Bush in 2001, they (and their respective allies within the administration) fell into ever-deepening antagonism over the role America should play in a world marked by terrorism and other nontraditional threats. In a wide-ranging, deeply researched, and dramatic narrative, James Mann explores each man’s biography and philosophical predispositions to show how and why this deep and permanent rupture occurred. Through dozens of original interviews and surprising revelations from presidential archives, he brings to life the very human story of how this influential friendship turned so sour and how the enmity of these two powerful men colored the way America acts in the world.