You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
"This volume of essays is dedicated to George Soros in honor of his seventieth birthday. In their various fields of work the authors, who come from the interconnected worlds of academe, politics, and business, have each made an active contribution to the growth of the huge philanthropic empire built by Soros." "The editors chose the title The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences to encourage contributors to adopt a dialogical approach. The title also refers to the case of Giordano Bruno, itself a telling example of paradox. Burnt at the stake 400 years ago for heresy, Bruno's views were probably far more illiberal and undemocratic than the views of those who condemned him. The editors' aim was to show that any complex social process or political attempt to change people's lives will inevitably have unintended consequences, usually of a paradoxical nature. These consequences should force us to reconsider our original theory."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
'Magnificent. Complex, wise, unsentimental and very moving' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 'Dense, lyrical and deeply unsettling' New York Times 'A fine balance between poetic tenderness and an unflinching account of the brutal realities of the day' Guardian 'Extraordinarily original' Los Angeles Times 'The prose is stunning, thanks to a masterful translation by Klara Glowczewska, and the characters are so fully fleshed that they seem to step off the page' NPR 'Grips the reader with the power of a high-class thriller' Frankfurter Rundschau 'All at once she thought that a life is only that which has passed. There is no life other than memory' In the Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow, possesses two attributes that can spell the difference between life and death: blue eyes and blond hair. Paired with false papers, she passes as the wife of a Polish officer, until one day an informer spots her on the street. At times a dark lament, at others a sly and sardonic thriller, The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is the story of the thirty-six hours that follow Irma's arrest and the events that lead to her dramatic rescue.
Kamil, a Warsaw sociologist, is summoned to Geneva to participate in an oral history project about the collapse of Eastern European communism and resolves to tell his own story through a gallery of portraits of the many women he has loved. These reminiscences emerge against the broader canvas of circumstances and events that have shaped the past sixty years of Poland's turbulent, tragic history. Soon he finds himself inexorably drawn to his interrogator from the "free" world; the chronicler of his life, the keeper of his secrets, and his heart's last hope for redemptive love. Self-Portrait with Woman is at once a haunting and lyrical portrait of a man, of a country, and of the twilight years of an era.
A vibrant Jewish community flourished in Poland from late in the tenth century until it was virtually annihilated in World War II. In this remarkable anthology, the first of its kind, Harold B. Segel offers translations of poems and prose works—mainly fiction—by non-Jewish Polish writers. Taken together, the selections represent the complex perceptions about Jews in the Polish community in the period 1530-1990.
The Handbook of Polish, Czech, and Slovak Holocaust Fiction aims to increase the visibility and show the versatility of works from East-Central European countries. It is the first encyclopedic work to bridge the gap between the literary production of countries that are considered to be main sites of the Holocaust and their recognition in international academic and public discourse. It contains over 100 entries offering not only facts about the content and motifs but also pointing out the characteristic fictional features of each work and its meaning for academic discourse and wider reception in the country of origin and abroad. The publication will appeal to the academic and broader public i...
This volume focuses on the flourishing of irony as a primary characteristic of the great era of European narrative sophistication from the Goethezeit to Modernism. Its eighteenth essays explore varieties of ironic consciousness associated with texts especially of northern Europe, and the ways they established a dialogue with and on literature and culture at large. As the volume shows, this interrogation of Europe's self-awareness of cultural identity bound up in reading and writing habits gained a new post-Cervantine complexity in Romanticism and has been of lasting significance for literary theory down to postmodernism. By its comparativistic framing of the issues raised by ironic consciousness, Narrative Ironies duly serves as a Festschrift honoring Lilian R. Furst. Among major writers treated are Sterne, Goethe, Godwin, Schlegel, Hoffmann, Poe, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, Disraeli, Keller, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, Wilde, Tolstoi, Hofmannsthal, Strindberg, Proust, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Szczypiorski.
Communism in Eastern Europe is in crisis. Its dimensions are social and economic; its manifestation is political. This volume, a collection of essays by leading authorities, describes the symptoms of the crisis, diagnoses the causes of the malady, and offers alternative scenarios for therapy. A unique dimension of this collection is its avoidance of one-dimensional explanations. The contributors approach the subject from very different angles, and start from very distinct sociopolitical premises. The volume includes original accounts of unexplored aspects of East European communism as well as classic interpretations of the economic crisis and social stagnation that characterize the area. Con...