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The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
by Saul Friedlander
With The Years of Extermination, Saul Friedländer completes his major historical work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book describes and interprets the persecution and murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The enactment of German extermination policies and measures depended on the cooperation of local authorities, the assistance of police forces, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. This implementation depended as well on the victims' readiness to submit to orders, often with the hope of attenuating them or of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. This multifaceted study—at all levels and in different places —enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity, and interrelatedness of the many components of this history. Based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices—mainly from diaries, letters, and memoirs—Saul Friedländer avoids domesticating the memory of these unprecedented and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives a unique quality to The Years of Extermination. In this work, the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation. |
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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
by Tim Weiner
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, "a legacy of ashes." Now Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. Legacy of Ashes is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll. Tim Weiner's past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as "impressively reported" and "immensely entertainin" in The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal called it "truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage." Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. |
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Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism
by Eric Hobsbawm
In this collection of illuminating, incisive and thought-provoking essays, Eric Hobsbawm examines every aspect of the issues that have inspired the greatest debate - not only among politicians, academics and commentators but among all of us - in recent years: that is, the effects of globalisation, the plight of democracy and the threat of terrorism. As we are only too aware, all of these have the power to affect our daily lives, from the state of our economies to the fear of murderous bomb attacks in our cities. Hobsbawm discusses war and peace in our lifetime, problems of public order, anarchy and terrorism, nationalism and the changing nature of the nation-state, and the future prospects for democracy, setting out the historical background and the lessons it can offer us. Above all, he turns his piercing gaze to the Middle East and Western imperialism. Engaging, erudite and demonstrating his characteristically firm grasp of the facts and statistics, Hobsbawm's essays are indispensable to our understanding of the world we live in. |
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Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation
by Eyal Weizman
Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare. In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape itself into a tool of total domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation. |
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Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
by John Berger
John Berger occupies a unique position in the international cultural landscape: artist, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, novelist, essayist, he is also a deeply thoughtful political activist. In Hold Everything Dear, he artistry and activism mesh in an attempt to make sense of the world as we have come to know it during the past six years. Berger analyzes the nature of terrorism and the profound despair that gives rise to it. He writes about the homelessness of millions across the globe who have been forced by poverty and war into lives as refugees. He discusses Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Serbia, Bosnia, China, Indonesia--anyplace the power of corporations, the military, or paramilitary elements is being exercised, depriving ordinary citizens of autonomy or livelihoods or the most basic of freedoms. Singularly lucid and bold, Hold Everything Dear fully acknowledges the depth of suffering occurring around the world and suggests ideas and action that might finally help bring it to an end. From one of the most widely admired, articulate, and impassioned writers of our time, this is a powerful collections of essays that holds a starkly reflective mirror up to post-9/11 realities. |
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Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes and Politics
by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation out of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium--not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view. Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison. These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout, Storming the Gates of Paradise represents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations. |
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Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours
by Noga Arikha
The humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler—were substances thought to circulate within the body and determine a person's health, mood, and character. For example, an excess of black bile was considered a cause of melancholy. The theory of humours remained an inexact but powerful tool for centuries, surviving scientific changes and offering clarity to physicians. This one-of-a-kind book follows the fate of these variable and invisible fluids from their Western origin in ancient Greece to their present-day versions. It traces their persistence from medical guidebooks of the past to current health fads, from the testimonies of medical doctors to the theories of scientists, physicians, and philosophers. By intertwining the histories of medicine, science, psychology, and philosophy, Noga Arikha revisits and revises how we think about all aspects of our physical, mental, and emotional selves. |
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Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939
by Katie Roiphe
Katie Roiphe's stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven "marriages à la mode" —each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a "semidetached" marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her. Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved...or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, "the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage." The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships. |
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Lost Son, A Novel of Rilke
by M. Allen Cunningham
n 1902, twenty-six-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke arrives in Paris to write a study of the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin, having left his wife and newborn daughter at home in the rural north of Germany. The bustling metropolis overwhelms the young poet, and the squalor of the Latin Quarter where he resides touches off a deep personal crisis. Not since Rilke's disastrous childhood has his world seemed so menacing and strange. Sorely disquieted by poverty, loneliness, quailing health, and fleets of dark memories, Rilke finds himself caught up in a powerful reckoning with his "unfinished childhood" and the tangled relationships that came from it—his wife and daughter clearly included. Spanning Western Europe from 1875 to 1917, Lost Son brings a brooding atmosphere and human complexity to an intimate, imaginative portrait of one of the most sensitive artists of his time. Rilke's odd childhood and difficult early life may have created the uncompromising determination that infuses his art. But was the moral cost too great? In this gorgeous new novel, M. Allen Cunningham brings alive the intellectual and artistic movements that shaped the 20th century and the personalities that made this history their own—from Rilke himself to the great master Rodin to the fascinating Lou Salome, mistress or confidant to Rilke, Freud and Nietzsche. The result is an exploration of the forever imperfect loyalties we face in life and the seemingly immeasurable distances that can separate life and art. |
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The Shadow Catcher
by Marianne Wiggins
Wiggins is a writer who paints elegant pictures with words. So who better to tell the story of Edward Sheriff Curtis, the enigmatic photographer of the American West, protege of J. P. Morgan, and friend of Theodore Roosevelt? She chooses to tell the story from her own point of view, through a fictionalized version of herself, called by her own name. Summoned to Hollywood to discuss turning her book about Curtis into a movie, Wiggins makes it plain to the director, who wants to make him a romantic hero, that he was anything but. He paid the Bureau of Indian Affairs a fee to photograph inside the reservations that he drove to in his car, abandoning his wife and four children and spending all their money to follow his obsession. At the same time she is pitching the movie, her personal life gets a bit hectic, and the links between Curtis' past and her present intertwine, if a little too coincidentally, at least very interestingly. The book slips from Wiggins' point of view to that of Curtis' long-suffering wife, Clara. The pages are liberally sprinkled with photographs, insights, realistic pathos, and human situations. This creative novel will not disappoint. (Booklist review) |
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Crossing the Sierra de Gredos
by Peter Handke
On the outskirts of a northwestern European riverport city lives a powerful woman banker, a public figure admired and hated in equal measure, who has decided to turn from the worlds of high finance and modern life to embark on a quest. Having commissioned a famous writer to undertake her "authentic" biography, she journeys through the Spanish Sierra de Gredos and the region of La Mancha to meet him. As she travels by allterrain vehicle, bus, and finally on foot, the nameless protagonist encounters five way stations that become the stuff of her biography and the biography of the modern world, a world in which genuine images and unmediated experiences have been exploited and falsified by commercialization and by the voracious mass media. In this visionary novel, Peter Handke offers descriptions of objects, relationships, and events that teach readers a renewed way of seeing; he creates a wealth of images to replace those lost to convention and conformity. Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is also a very human book of yearning and the ancient quest for love, peopled with memorable characters (from multiple historical periods) and imbued with Handke's inimitable ability to portray universal, inner-worldly adventures that blend past, future, present, and dreamtime. |
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Lost Paradise
by Cees Noteboom
Almut and Alma, two young Brazilian women, set out from Sao Paulo and wind up in Australia. Alma is recovering from a traumatic attack. She has always loved the art of the Renaissance. Specifically, she is captivated by angels - the way they fly, their stillness, what they might sound like, how they are represented. But what the women share is a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. Here, Alma begins an affair with an Aboriginal man, an artist, though he tells her that it can only last a week. He must shortly return to his people. The women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to track down. The angels must remain still and silent, whatever response they provoke in the viewer. In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel. Lost Paradise is a tale of great charm and brilliance from one of Europe's greatest writers. |
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Divisadero
by Michael Ondaatje
The spellbinding new novel from Michael Ondaatje—his first in six years. It begins in the 1970s in Northern California. A man and his teenage daughters—Anna and Claire—work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence-of both hand and heart-that "sets fire to the rest of their lives." Anna will come to rest amid the sensuous and calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies-a story that circles around the "raw truth" of her own life, the one she's left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna's story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Divisadero is a novel about possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the breathtaking prose for which his fiction is celebrated, it gives us Michael Ondaatje at the height of his artistic powers. |
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon rocked readers across the world with the imaginative acrobatics of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Now, four years later, he follows up that triumph with an even more audacious invention -- a psychological thriller that is also a monumental novel of love and faith , boasting the same compassion, wit, and warmth that have garnered him such passionate fans. It is the year 2000, but the world is not as we now know it. Israel does not exist, and Alaska is not—quite—Alaska; a ravelled strip of it serves instead of the former Palestine as the comically unlikely new homeland for Jews following the ravages of WWII. Orthodox sects clad in breeches, stockings, and furred hats battle it out on the snowbound streets of frontier towns for control of a brisk black market trade in drugs and guns. Amidst the madness, the perennially world-weary and cynical Meyer -- once an upstanding member of the Yiddish Policeman's Union, now more the slouching, shambling, half-drunk variety -- attempts to puzzle his way through a murky mystery set off by the discovery of a skull that purports to be Native American. In fact, it appears to be Tlingit, the very tribe pitted against the Jews in an eternal struggle for territorial rights. His ridiculous plight is made worse by the fact that his ex-wife, the flame-haired and fiery-tempered Bina (with whom he is, of course, still in love), has been rotated from her uttermost northerly posting to resume her job as Chief Medical Examiner. She whisks the skull from his hands quicker than he can say "divorce decree." Shemets, his half-Tlingit/half-Jewish partner, a walrus-like figure clad in impeccable Italian suiting, is the only presence who can maintain a semblance of calm as Meyer and the skeptical Bina find an eerie threat circling ever closer to what he calls home. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon offers a loving tribute to the hard-boiled world of Hollywood noir—from The Big Sleep to Chinatown—even as he engages with vital questions of identity, faith, and the simple but profound subject of love. It is a masterful work that will continue to broaden his enormous readership.
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