Alia Trabucco Zerán0.0 Winner of the 2022 British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Novelist Alia Trabucco Zerán has long been fascinated not only with the root causes of violence against women, but by those women who have violently rejected the domestic and passive roles they were meant by their culture to inhabit.
Choosing as her subject four iconic homicides perpetrated by Chilean women in the twentieth century, she spent years researching this brilliant work of narrative nonfiction detailing not only the troubling tales of the murders themselves, but the story of how society, the media and men in power reacted to these killings, painting their perpetrators as witches, hysterics, or femmes fatales . . . That is, either evil or out of control.
Corina Rojas, Rosa Faúndez, Carolina Geel and Teresa Alfaro all committed murder. Their crimes not only led to substantial court decisions, but gave rise to multiple novels, poems, short stories, paintings, plays, songs and films, produced and reproduced throughout the last century. In When Women Kill, we are provided with timelines of events leading up to and following their killings, their apprehension by the authorities, their trials and their representation in the media throughout and following the judicial process. Running in parallel with this often horrifying testimony are the diaries kept by Trabucco Zerán while she worked on her research, addressing the obstacles and dilemmas she encountered as she tackled this discomfiting yet necessary project.
Sujit Sivasundaram0.0 A sweeping history and major reassessment of how Britain came to rule the waves – told from the forgotten quarter of the world.
It is difficult now to imagine a time when Britain stood as the world’s supreme power, much less to imagine how that came to be. It was certainly not the product of calculated planning or superlative naval power, as often as that story is told. Turning this story inside out, Cambridge historian Sujit Sivasundaram places what he terms ‘the forgotten quarter’ – the peoples and places of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to give a bold reinterpretation of how the British Empire was formed – and how it couldn’t have happened without a backdrop of global turmoil.
The decades from 1780 to 1830 were tumultuous, including for the British. America had recently made its break for independence, and following the French, a wave of revolution was coursing south across the globe. In countries around the Pacific and Indian oceans, the seeds of rebellion grew fast, becoming local and then national revolution. From Oman to Tonga, Mauritius to Sri Lanka, The Forgotten Quarter gives voice to the many countries which were following and fighting over their own visions of modernity. Venerable Eurasian empires – Ottoman, Mughal and Qing – were transformed at their maritime frontiers. New political forces, including monarchies, inaugurated in the Pacific. The Forgotten Quarter gives those communities centre stage to tell the story of the British Empire from their neglected perspectives, and to show how in many places this moment of opportunity was seized to contemplate selves and futures in radically new ways.
Bringing unparalleled expertise and global thinking to bear, Sujit Sivasundaram delivers a ground-breaking account of a world in flux that will transform how we think of Britain’s colonial rule. Naval war, strategy and imperial trade had their parts to play, but so did hope, false promise, rebellion, and the pursuit of modernity.
Hazel Carby0.0 A haunting, evocative history of British Empire, told through one woman’s family story
“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-war London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home, her neighborhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt.
Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the “white Carbys” and the “black Carbys,” including Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.
Moving between Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.
Тоби Грин0.0 Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019
'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph
A groundbreaking history that will transform our view of West Africa
By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in t
Капка Кассабова4.5 In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime.
Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off.
Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.
Тимоти Гартон-Эш0.0 Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida and UN officials die in Afghanistan.Drawing on a lifetime of writing
Carole Hillenbrand0.0 Carole Hillenbrand's book offers a profound understanding of the history of Muslims and their faith, from the life of Muhammad to the religion practised by 1.6 billion people around the world today.
Each of the eleven chapters explains a core aspect of the faith in historical perspective, allowing readers to gain a sensitive understanding of the essential tenets of the religion and of the many ways in which the present is shaped by the past. It is an ideal introductory text for courses in Middle Eastern studies, in religious studies, or on Islam and its history.
Jonathan Jansen0.0 This book tells the story of white South African students—how they remember and enact an Apartheid past they were never part of. How is it that young Afrikaners, born at the time of Mandela's release from prison, hold firm views about a past they never lived, rigid ideas about black people, and fatalistic thoughts about the future? Jonathan Jansen, the first black dean of education at the historically white University of Pretoria, was dogged by this question during his tenure, and Knowledge in the Blood seeks to answer it.
Jansen offers an intimate look at the effects of social and political change after Apartheid as white students first experience learning and living alongside black students. He reveals the novel role pedagogical interventions played in confronting the past, as well as critical theory's limits in dealing with conflict in a world where formerly clear-cut notions of victims and perpetrators are blurred.
While Jansen originally set out simply to convey a story of how white students changed under the leadership of a diverse group of senior academics, Knowledge in the Blood ultimately became an unexpected account of how these students in turn changed him. The impact of this book's unique, wide-ranging insights in dealing with racial and ethnic divisions will be felt far beyond the borders of South Africa.
