Mahmoud Dowlatabadi0.0 A pitch black, rainy night in a small Iranian town. Inside his house the Colonel is immersed in thought. Memories are storming in. Memories of his wife. Memories of the great patriots of the past, all of them assassinated or executed. Memories of his children, who had joined the different factions of the 1979 revolution. There is a knock on the door. Two young policemen have come to summon the Colonel to collect the tortured body of his youngest daughter and bury her before sunrise. The Islamic Revolution, like every other revolution in history, is devouring its own children. And whose fault is that? This shocking diatribe against the failures of the Iranian left over the last fifty years does not leave one taboo unbroken.
Серж Грузински0.0 In this important new book the renowned historian Serge Gruzinski returns to two episodes in the sixteenth century which mark a decisive stage in global history and show how China and Mexico experienced the expansion of Europe.
In the early 1520s, Magellan set sail for Asia by the Western route, Cortes seized Mexico and some Portuguese based in Malacca dreamed of colonizing China. The Aztec Eagle was destroyed but the Chinese Dragon held strong and repelled the invaders - after first seizing their cannon. For the first time, people from three continents encountered one other, confronted one other and their lives became entangled. These events were of great interest to contemporaries and many people at the time grasped the magnitude of what was going on around them. The Iberians succeeded in America and failed in China. The New World became inseparable from the Europeans who were to conquer it, while the Celestial Empire became, for a long time to come, an unattainable goal.
Gruzinski explores this encounter between civilizations that were different from one another but that already fascinated contemporaries, and he shows that our world today bears the mark of this distant age. For it was in the sixteenth century that human history began to be played out on a global stage. It was then that connections between different parts of the world began to accelerate, not only between Europe and the Americas but also between Europe and China. This is what is revealed by a global history of the sixteenth century, conceived as another way of reading the Renaissance, less Eurocentric and more in tune with our age.
Стив Сем-Сандберг3.9 В этой книге рассказывается о еврейском гетто, созданном нацистами в польском городе Лодзи, о Мордехае Хаиме Румковском, который возглавлял юденрат, орган еврейского якобы самоуправления гетто, и о повседневной жизни в гетто. Румковский был крайне противоречивой фигурой - Отец гетто, сначала отвечавший за все, потом лишившийся всякой возможности влиять на события, казнивший и миловавший, строивший школы и приюты и подавлявший забастовки, которого многие считают предателем и слепым орудием в руках немцев, но который разделил с жителями гетто их судьбу до конца, был депортирован в Освенцим и погиб со всей семьей. Это роман о жизни в обнесенных колючей проволокой районах на глазах у всего города, о предписанной немцами мертвящей дисциплине, об уносящем жизни рабском труде, холоде, голодных смертях - и о сытой, полной светских развлечений жизни элиты гетто. О депортациях, когда из семей вырывают детей, стариков, больных и отправляют на смерть, и о том, как постепенно из гетто отправляют в лагеря смерти все 250 тысяч жителей. Лишь 10 тысяч из чудом выжили. Но в первую очередь это книга о том, как люди остаются людьми, заботятся о других, о чужих, о том, как они всем миром создают уникальную ""Хронику гетто"" - газету, служившую автору главным источником, о том, как они учат детей, хранят веру, влюбляются, спасают любимых. Своим романом Стив Сэм-Сандберг дает незабываемое, не имеющее прецедентов в мировой литературе, представление о реальности Холокоста. Книга переведена на двадцать языков, удостоена высшей шведской литературной награды - ""Приза Августа"". Эта книга, которую теперь уже нельзя ни прочитать.
Robert Macfarlane4.8 In The Old Ways Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers. Above all this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.
Told in Macfarlane's distinctive and celebrated voice, the book folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His tracks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird-islands of the Scottish northwest, and from the disputed territories of Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he walks stride for stride with a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, follows the 'deadliest path in Britain', sails an open boat out into the Atlantic at night, and crosses paths with walkers of many kinds - wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers and devouts.
He discovers that paths offer not just means of traversing space, but also of feeling, knowing and thinking. The old ways lead us unexpectedly to the new, and the voyage out is always a voyage inwards.
Удай Пракаш0.0 A sweeper discovers a cache of black money and escapes to see the Taj Mahal with his underage mistress. An untouchable races to reclaim his life stolen by an upper-caste identity thief. A slum baby's head gets bigger and bigger as he gets smarter and smarter, while his family tries to find a cure. In The Walls of Delhi, gifted storyteller Uday Prakash tells three stinging and comic tales of living and surviving in today's globalized India. Prakash is one of India's most original and audacious writers, and the India that he presents in his fiction is much different from what one generally finds in English-language writing by South Asian writers. Prakash portrays the realities about caste and class, and there is a charming and compelling authenticity in his stories that is sometimes absent from other fiction about South Asia. This writing sits at the center of a modernist aesthetic, as well as being highly political without a bit of didacticism or other heavy-handedness. These stories are tremendously popular in India, having been translated into several Indian languages.
Януш Гловацкий3.8 Известному польскому писателю Янушу Гловацкому заказан сценарий о польско-американском писателе Ежи (Джези) Косинском - в свое время прогремевшем авторе написанных по-английски книг. Личность трагическая и загадочная, обманщик и мистификатор, Косинский ребенком пережил Холокост. И вот спустя годы после самоубийства он не дается в руки своему биографу. В процессе работы Гловацкого над сценарием из разбросанных во времени и пространстве фрагментов создается книга, в которой соседствуют правда и вымысел, комизм и ирония, трагедия и гротеск, Польша, Москва и Нью-Йорк, придуманные и реальные персонажи, в числе которых сам автор. Книга яркая и неожиданная, печальная и смешная. Она читается залпом и, оставляя большую часть загадок неразгаданными, о многом заставляет задуматься
Chan Koonchung1.0 Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one can care less. Except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that has possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn - not only about their leaders, but also about their own people - stuns them to the core. It is a message that will rock the world…
Чару Ниведита0.0 Fiction. South Asia Studies. Translated from the Tamil by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna. With its mad patchwork of phone sex conversations, nightmarish torture scenes, tender love poems, numerology, mythology, and compulsive name-dropping of Latin American intellectuals, Charu Nivedita's novel ZERO DEGREE stands out as a groundbreaking work of Tamil transgressive fiction that unflinchingly probes the deepest psychic wounds of humanity. "Hide it in the deep recesses of your clothes cupboard or in the general chaos of your office desk, if you must, but read it"--Asha S. Menon, New Sunday Express.
Тифан Самоо0.0 De la bête de cirque, elle offre le spectacle et elle ressent la honte qui est au fond des yeux : spectacle de ses engagements frénétiques, de son agitation vaine et de ses expériences ratées qui font d’elle un objet de suspicion, de curiosité ou de rejet ; honte d’appartenir à une génération qui n’est entrée dans l’histoire que par effraction, sans jamais parvenir à trouver sa place.
Le récit commence en 1995 dans Sarajevo assiégée. En décembre 2010, après quinze ans d’absence, la narratrice revient pour la première fois dans la capitale bosniaque. Ce retour est l’occasion pour elle de réfléchir aux raisons de son implication dans cette guerre, à celles de son absence, à ses élans et ses retraits.
