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

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History PDF Author: Lea Ypi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867749
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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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.

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

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History PDF Author: Lea Ypi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393867749
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

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.

The End of the End of History

The End of the End of History PDF Author: Alex Hochuli
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178904524X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The “End of History” is over. The idea that Western liberal democracy was the “final form of human government” has been exposed as bluster: the old order is crumbling before our eyes. Angry anti-politics have arisen to threaten political establishments across the world. Elites have fallen into hysteria, blaming voters, “populism”, Putin, Facebook… anyone but themselves. They are suffering from Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. Emerging from four years of interviews and debates on the popular global politics podcast Aufhebunga Bunga, The End of the End of History examines how the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis have come home to roost. If Trump and Brexit shattered the liberal-democratic consensus in 2016, then the global pandemic of 2020 put a final end to the “End of History”. Politics is back, but it’s stranger than ever.

Uncertain Allies

Uncertain Allies PDF Author: Klaus Larres
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300173199
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Introduction -- 1. Golden age : years of reconstruction -- 2. Thinking of Europe and beyond : Nixon and Kissinger's priorities -- 3. Special relationships : a journey to a continent in transition -- 4. Living with deficits : economic predicaments -- 5. Downward spiral : monetary turmoil and the end of the old order -- 6 Turning point : the United States and the end of "benign hegemony" -- Conclusion.

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me PDF Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0679645985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

The Songs of St Petersburg

The Songs of St Petersburg PDF Author: Amor Towles
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0091944244
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility. 'A comic masterpiece.' The Times 'Winning . . . gorgeous . . . satisfying . . . Towles is a craftsman.' New York Times Book Review 'A work of great charm, intelligence and insight.' Sunday Times 'Everything a novel should be: charming, witty, poetic and generous. An absolute delight.' Mail on Sunday 'If we do a better book than this one on the book club this year we will be very very lucky.' Matt Williams, Radio 2 Book Club 'Abundant in humour, history and humanity' Sunday Telegraph 'Wistful, whimsical and wry.' Sunday Express On 21 June 1922 Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. But instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.

These Truths: A History of the United States

These Truths: A History of the United States PDF Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 773

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Book Description
“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing

Fifty Sounds: A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing PDF Author: Polly Barton
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1324091320
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
For anyone who has ever yearned to master a new language, Fifty Sounds is a visionary personal account and an indispensable resource for learning to think beyond your mother tongue. “The language learning I want to talk about is sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover,” writes Polly Barton in her eloquent treatise on this profoundly humbling and gratifying act. Shortly before graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Barton on a whim accepted an English-teaching position in Japan. With the characteristic ambivalence of a twenty-one-year-old whose summer—and life—stretched out almost infinitely before her, she moved to a remote island in the Sea of Japan, unaware that this journey would come to define not only her career but her very understanding of her own identity. Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, Fifty Sounds recounts Barton’s path to becoming a literary translator fluent in an incredibly difficult vernacular. From “min-min,” the sound of air screaming, to “jin-jin,” the sound of being touched for the first time, Barton analyzes these and countless other foreign sounds and phrases as a means of reflecting on various cultural attitudes, including the nuances of conformity and the challenges of being an outsider in what many consider a hermetically sealed society. In a tour-de-force of lyrical, playful prose, Barton recalls the stifling humidity that first greeted her on the island along with the incessant hum of peculiar new noises. As Barton taught English to inquisitive middle school children, she studied the basics of Japanese in an inverse way, beginning with simple nouns and phrases, such as “cat,” “dog,” and “Hello, my name is.” But when it came to surrounding herself in the culture, simply mastering the basics wasn’t enough. Japanese, Barton learned, has three scripts: the phonetic katakana and hiragana (collectively known as kana) and kanji (characters of Chinese origin). Despite her months-long immersion in the language, a word would occasionally produce a sinking feeling and send her sifting through her dictionaries to find the exact meaning. But this is precisely how Barton has come to define language learning: “It is the always-bruised but ever-renewing desire to draw close: to a person, a territory, a culture, an idea, an indefinable feeling.” Engaging and penetrating, Fifty Sounds chronicles everything from Barton’s most hilarious misinterpretations to her new friends and lovers in Tokyo —and even the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s transformative philosophy. A classic in the making in the tradition of Anne Carson and Rachel Cusk, Fifty Sounds is a celebration of the empowering act of learning to communicate in any new language.

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism PDF Author: Stéphane Courtois
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674076082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 920

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Book Description
This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

End of History and the Last Man

End of History and the Last Man PDF Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416531785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me PDF Author: James W. Loewen
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595583262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
Criticizes the way history is presented in current textbooks, and suggests a more accurate approach to teaching American history.