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This volume is about the failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In particular, the research focuses on why the early warnings of an emerging genocide were not translated into early preventative action. The warnings were well documented by the most authoritative source, the Canadian U.N. peace-keeping commander General Romeo Dallaire and sent to the leading political civil servants in New York. The communications and the decisionmaking are scrutinized, i.e., who received what messages at what time, to whom the messages were forwarded and which (non-) decisions were taken in response to the alarming reports of weapon deliveries and atrocities. This book makes clear that this genocide could have been prevented. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.
Published by Knopf in 1946 as an expanded version of a two-part New Yorker article. Joseph Wechsberg and his wife left Czechoslovakia for America in 1938. Sent with the US Army to liberate Europe from the Nazis, Wechsberg returns to Ostrava, the town where he grew up. Searching for his wife's parents, he discovers the devastation of World War II, hears first-hand accounts of its atrocities, witnesses the antics of Red Army soldiers, and remembers his childhood — discovering in the end that home is no longer Ostrava, but California. “[…] a moving, brilliantly written account of [Wechsberg's] return to his home-town, Moravia Ostrava (Maehrisch Ostrau) […]. As in his earlier stories in The New Yorker, almost every ounce of sentiment in Homecoming was set off by an equal measure of irony.” — Richard Plant, The New York Times “A short and very personal book, […] a personal footnote to current European history. […] Affecting and convincing impressions of a shattered world.” — Kirkus Reviews
Laura Marcus is one of the leading literary critics of modernist literature and culture. Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema covers the period from around 1880 to 1930, when modernity as a form of social and cultural life fed into the beginnings of modernism as a cultural form. Railways, cinema, psychoanalysis and the literature of detection - and their impact on modern sensibility - are four of the chief subjects explored. Marcus also stresses the creativity of modernist women writers, including H. D., Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. The overriding themes of this work bear on the understanding of the early twentieth century as a transitional age, thus raising the question of how 'the moderns' understood the conditions of their own modernity.
In this powerful and wide-ranging study, Sander Gilman explores the idea of 'the multicultural' in the contemporary world, a question he frames as the question of the relationship between Jews and Muslims. How do Jews define themselves, and how are they in turn defined, within the global struggles of the moment, struggles that turn in large part around a secularized Christian perspective? Gilman uses his subject to unpack a sequence of important issues: what does it mean to be multicultural? Can the experience of diaspora Judaism serve as a useful model for Islam in today's multicultural Europe? What is a multicultural ethnic? Other chapters look at specific figures in Jewish cultural history – Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Israel Zangwill, Philip Roth, the hermaphrodite N.O. Body (aka Karl Baer, raised as Martha Baer) – to explore issues within Jewish identity. Throughout, Gilman pays keen attention to the ways in which contemporary literature – Chabon, Ozick, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart – taking the idea of Jewishness and multiculturalism into new arenas.
Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography is a highly personal account of his life in the Zionist movement. Book One, completed in 1941, covers the years 1874-1917 and Book Two covers the years 1918-1948. Weizmann describes the Russian shtetl where he was born in 1874, his schooling in Pinsk and his university studies in Berlin, Geneva and Freiburg (Switzerland) where he received his PhD in chemistry in 1899 before moving to Manchester in 1904. He portrays many leading Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Achad Ha-am, Max Nordau, Shmarya Levin, Ussishkin, Jabotinsky, Ruppin. He describes the opposition by assimilationist Jews (like Edwin Montagu) to Zionism, and internal debates within the Zionist movemen...
The untold history of the extraordinary women who drove the modern dance movement and changed cultural narratives about sex, power and women's rights. 'Don't let them tame you!' ISADORA DUNCAN The story of modern dance is a story of subversion - of forms challenged and hierarchies toppled in the pursuit of blazing artistic integrity. In Wild Grace, Sara Veale profiles nine of the pioneering women at the heart of this movement, from Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller's fearless rejection of nineteenth-century paternalism to Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus's battles to recentre marginalised histories in the wake of the Second World War. Each of these dancers redefined the meaning of grace in their art and their lifestyle, conveying vital truths about what it means to walk the world as a woman. Veale brings to life the stories and artistry of these remarkable individuals and reveals how, in their refusal to conform, we can find urgent lessons for today.
This is the absorbing account of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary discoveries — our first encounter with an essential mystery of the universe. Told by an active participant in this discovery, it is the saga of the search for quarks, the elementary particles lurking within the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei, which constitute the fundamental basis of matter. Michael Riordan, physicist and author, was present at the key moments in this story. He brings to life the personalities, triumphs and failures of this true-life scientific detective story, vividly portraying the soaring ambitions and clashing egos of modern physicists at work, vying for the coveted Nobel Prize....
Voice of Israel is a collection of Abba Eban’s speeches before the United Nations’ Security Council and General Assembly, at universities and other venues between 1948 and 1968. Eban addresses Israel’s position on security in the Middle East, the Arab refugee problem, Jerusalem and the Holy Places, freedom of navigation through the Suez Canal and the Straights of Tiran, border clashes, American-Israel relations and the Six-Day War. “The Ambassador sounds a note of fierce and joyous pride in the achievements of Israel... The texts show Mr. Eban’s equal facility with the majestic phrase, the mild word and the blunt rejoinder... It need not be insisted that Mr. Eban is the oratorical ...
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567. Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, Francis. He ascended the French throne as King Francis II in 1559, and Mary briefly became queen consort of France, until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on 19 August 1561. Four years later, she married her first cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Da...
Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898 and emigrated to New York with his family in 1906. Trained as a lithographer, Shahn created social realist paintings of controversial subjects such as Sacco and Vanzetti. He worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, and later created his own public murals in Washington, New York, and New Jersey. In 1935, Walker Evans invited him to join the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. As a photographer, Shahn documented the Depression in the American South with Evans and Dorothea Lange. During the war years, he worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) producing propaganda posters before returning to painting. To...