War, Evil, and the End of History

War, Evil, and the End of History PDF Author: Bernard Henri Lévy
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Bernhard explores the story of those who decided to convert to Islam in response to the horrific September 11 attacks. Interviewing converts - a handsome, blue-eyed Californian, a middle-aged Jewish professor and a trendy 20-something in Tribeca - as well as charismatic imams and security experts, Bernhard investigates this unexpected subculture and asks what its repercussions might be.

War, Evil, and the End of History

War, Evil, and the End of History PDF Author: Bernard Henri Lévy
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book

Book Description
Bernhard explores the story of those who decided to convert to Islam in response to the horrific September 11 attacks. Interviewing converts - a handsome, blue-eyed Californian, a middle-aged Jewish professor and a trendy 20-something in Tribeca - as well as charismatic imams and security experts, Bernhard investigates this unexpected subculture and asks what its repercussions might be.

The Cruel Radiance

The Cruel Radiance PDF Author: Susie Linfield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226482521
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look.

Truth and Irony

Truth and Irony PDF Author: Terence J. Martin
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813228093
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Tapping into selected works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, this book offers a series of philosophical meditations designed to retrieve and deploy a distinctively Erasmian manner of thinking - one that is capacious in its perception, agile in its judgments, and unsettling in its irony. In purpose, it takes a philosophical route, addressing perennial questions of self-knowledge - what we can know and how best to communicate what we take to be true, what we ought to do or how we should live, and what we might hope for or what would offer us fulfilment. In method, however, this work taps into the various strategies of irony at play in the works of Erasmus, looking for guidance in handling these age-old questions. What readers will find in Erasmus is a knack for playfully reversing appearances and realities, a penchant for pushing disturbing questions relentlessly to the limit, and a skill for juxtaposing oddly matched opposites. Again and again, Erasmus presses readers to rethink these fundamental questions with dexterity and nuance, ever ready to appreciate the surprising and unsettling upshot of ironic insight.

Literatures of War

Literatures of War PDF Author: Eve Patten
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527561836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
“The most terrible disaster that one group of human beings can inflict on another is war. Wars cause misery on an indescribable scale. Yet we go on doing it to one another, generation after generation. Why? Warfare is a recurrent and universal characteristic of human existence. The mythologies of practically all peoples abound in wars and the superhuman deeds of warriors, and pre-literate communities apparently delighted in the recital of stories about battles. Since our species became literate a mere 5,000 years ago, written history has mostly been the history of wars. Thousands who knew war evidently sickened of it and dreamt of lasting peace, expressing their vision in literature and art, in philosophy and religion. They imagined Utopias freed of martial ambition and bloodshed which harked back to the Golden Age of classical antiquity, to the Christian vision of a paradise lost, and to the Arcadia of Greek and Latin poetry, so richly celebrated in the canvases of Claude and Poussin. All these things bear eloquent testimony to the human longing for peace, but they have not triumphed over our dreadfully powerful propensity to war.” —from the Introduction by Anthony Stevens In this multi-disciplinary collection of essays on the manifestations of war in poetry, fiction, drama, music and documentaries, scholars and practitioners from an international context describe the transformation of the war experience into chronicles of hope and despair, from Herodotus up to the present day.

Rethinking Marxism

Rethinking Marxism PDF Author: Jolyon Agar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000154920
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This book presents a final symposium, of the program for Rethinking Marxism 2006, comprising a set of commentaries on the categories and critical modes of analysis elaborated in Transition and Development in India by Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg.

Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion

Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion PDF Author: James W. Watts
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111973035X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE AS A SCRIPTURE IN HISTORY, CULTURE, AND RELIGION The Bible is a popular subject of study and research, yet biblical studies gives little attention to the reason for its popularity: its religious role as a scripture. Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion integrates the history of the religious interpretation and ritual uses of biblical books into a survey of their rhetoric, composition, and theology in their ancient contexts. Emphasizing insights from comparative studies of different religious scriptures, it combines discussion of the Bible’s origins with its cultural history into a coherent understanding of its past and present function as a scripture. A prominent expert on biblical rhetoric and the ritualization of books, James W. Watts describes how Jews and Christians ritualize the Bible by interpreting it, by expressing it in recitations, music, art, and film, and by venerating the physical scroll and book. The first two sections of the book are organized around the Torah and the Gospels—which have been the focus of Jewish and Christian ritualization of scriptures from ancient to modern times—and treat the history of other biblical books in relation to these two central blocks of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. In addition to analyzing the semantic contents of all the Bible’s books as persuasive rhetoric, Watts describes their ritualization in the iconic and expressive dimensions in the centuries since they began to function as a scripture, as well as in their origins in ancient Judaism and Christianity. The third section on the cultural history and scriptural function of modern bibles concludes by discussing their influence today and the controversies they have fueled about history, science, race, and gender. Innovative and insightful, Understanding the Bible as a Scripture in History, Culture, and Religion is a groundbreaking introduction to the study of the Bible as a scripture, and an ideal textbook for courses in biblical studies and comparative scripture studies.

The End of History and the Last Man

The End of History and the Last Man PDF Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141927763
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
THE GLOBAL BESTSELLER. STILL AS RELEVANT TODAY. 20th anniversary edition of The End of History and the Last Man, a landmark of political philosophy by Francis Fukuyama, author of The Origins of Political Order 'A fascinating historical and philosophical setting for the twenty-first century' - Tom Wolfe 'Was Francis Fukuyama the first man to see Trump coming?' - Paul Sagar With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 the threat of the Cold War which had dominated the second half of the twentieth century vanished. And with it the West looked to the future with optimism but renewed uncertainty. The End of History and the Last Man was the first book to offer a picture of what the new century would look like. Boldly outlining the challenges and problems to face modern liberal democracies, Frances Fukuyama examined what had just happened and then speculated what was going to come next. Tackling religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes and war, The End of History and the Last Man remains a compelling work to this day, provoking argument and debate among its readers. 'Awesome . . . a landmark . . . profoundly realistic and important . . . supremely timely and cogent . . . the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world' - George Gilder, The Washington Post 'A basic rule of intellectual life is that celebrity destroys quality ... Francis Fukuyama is a glorious exception to this rule' - The Economist Francis Fukuyama was born in Chicago in 1952. His work includes America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy and After the Neo Cons: Where the Right went Wrong. He now lives in Washington D.C. with his wife and children, where he also works as a part time photographer.

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror PDF Author: Oliver Villar
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583673075
Category : Cocaine industry
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

After the End of History

After the End of History PDF Author: Samuel Cohen
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Roth's American Pastoral, Morrison's Paradise, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, Eugenides's Middlesex, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation’s past, After the End of History challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature. At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political “end of history” claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, After the End of History offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.

Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authenticity

Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authenticity PDF Author: Heather Bailey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527561127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Ernest Renan was one of the most renowned European intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, the impact of his most popular work, Life of Jesus, has been underestimated when not altogether ignored. While commonplace now, the idea that Jesus was merely human was at one time a novelty, with significant socio-political, cultural, and religious implications. A case study in the Russian encounter with modernity, Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authenticity: The Reception of Ernest Renan’s “Life of Jesus” in Russia demonstrates that Renan’s book has had long-lasting and broad appeal in Russia because it presents an alternative to a strictly materialist worldview on the one hand, and an Orthodox worldview on the other. Renan offered his readers the possibility to accept the tenets of modernity while still retaining both an admiration for the importance of religion in history and a sense of religious feeling or even belief in a higher religious ideal. Assessments of Renan’s alternative belief system, whether positive, negative, or mixed, were often simultaneously evaluations of the moral, socio-political, and spiritual condition of European society in general and Russian society in particular. The interpretive history of Renan’s Life of Jesus in Russia reveals a persistent disillusionment with a strictly materialist interpretation of history and of life.