Writing as "Z" in the world-famous article "To the Stalin Mausoleum", Malia predicted the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union. In this brilliant narrative, he evokes both the tragedy and desperate delusion that characterized the 74-year Soviet experiment with socialism to reveal why that system held such appeal for the Russians and why they refused to let go for so long. Previously announced.

In the tradition of John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World, this bestselling account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. "A moving illumination . . . Remnick is the witness for us all.

Juliana (1909-2004) was een door velen geliefde vorstin; niettemin weten we weinig van haar persoonlijk leven. Na een afgeschermde jeugd in de benauwenis van het hof en na haar opbloei tijdens haar verblijf in Canada gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog, waarbij ze zich veel actiever inzette voor de geallieerde zaak dan veelal wordt gedacht, begon Juliana in 1948 vol ambitie aan haar 'zware maar mooie' taak. De competente prinses werd evenwel algauw geconfronteerd met grote persoonlijke en politieke teleurstellingen en haar regeringsperiode werd getekend door een reeks van crises. Juliana's blijvende liefde voor prins Bernhard, die in 1936 als haar bevrijder uit de hemel was gevallen, werd haar achilleshiel. Hij bracht haar bijna ten val. Juliana was grillig en gretig; gelovig en goedgelovig. Gewoon was ze in elk geval niet. Ze moest functioneren in een wereld van zich vaak superieur voelende mannen. En zoals ze zich tegen allerlei andere conventies verzette, verzette Juliana zich van jongs af aan tegen de achterstelling van vrouwen. Niet eerder verscheen een zo uitgebreide, op wetenschappelijk onderzoek gebaseerde biografie van de vorstin die velen beschouwen als 'onze' koningin. Withuis kon haar werk baseren op brieven en ander nooit eerder gepubliceerd privémateriaal. Daarmee schreef ze niet alleen een intieme en indringende levensgeschiedenis, maar ook een portret van een veelbewogen eeuw.

To be modern may mean many different things, but for nineteenth-century Europeans 'modernity' suggested a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values all played key roles. Jerrold Seigel's panoramic new history offers a magisterial and highly original account of the ties between modernity and bourgeois life, arguing that they can be best understood not in terms of the rise and fall of social classes, but as features of their common participation in expanding and thickening networks that linked together distant energies and resources across economic, political and cultural life. Exploring the different configurations of these networks in England, France and Germany, he shows how their patterns gave rise to distinctive forms of modernity in each country and shaped the rhythm and nature of change across spheres as diverse as politics, money and finance, gender relations, morality, and literary, artistic and musical life.

Autobiografie van de Russische schaker (1963- ).

A controversial and devastatingly honest depiction of the demise of Europe.

The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Douglas Murray takes a step back and explores the deeper issues behind the continent's possible demise, from an atmosphere of mass terror attacks and a global refugee crisis to the steady erosion of our freedoms. He addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away.

Declining birth rates, mass immigration, and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive alteration as a society and an eventual end. This sharp and incisive book ends up with two visions for a new Europe--one hopeful, one pessimistic--which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next. But perhaps Spengler was right: "civilizations like humans are born, briefly flourish, decay, and die."

While acknowledging France at the eve of the Revolution as the root of the modern world, Porter also makes a case for considering Britain's importance in catapulting the world into modernity.

Correspondentie tussen de beide Nederlandse schrijvers uit de periode 1947-1959.

Verzameling verhalen van tijdgenoten over gedenkwaardige gebeurtenissen in de 20e eeuw in Nederland.

Analyse van het 'oorlogsritme' in Europa tussen 1480 en 1945, waaruit zou zijn af te leiden dat een volgende wereldoorlog onvermijdelijk is, tenzij we tijdig ingrijpen.

In this book, Victor Turner is concerned with various kinds of social actions and how they relate to, and come to acquire meaning through, metaphors and paradigms in their actors' minds; how in certain circumstances new forms, new metaphors, new paradigms are generated. To describe and clarify these processes, he ranges widely in history and geography: from ancient society through the medieval period to modern revolutions, and over India, Africa, Europe, China, and Meso-America.

Two chapters, which illustrate religious paradigms and political action, explore in detail the confrontation between Henry II and Thomas Becket and between Hidalgo, the Mexican liberator, and his former friends. Other essays deal with long-term religious processes, such as the Christian pilgrimage in Europe and the emergence of anti-caste movements in India. Finally, he directs his attention to other social phenomena such as transitional and marginal groups, hippies, and dissident religious sects, showing that in the very process of dying they give rise to new forms of social structure or revitalized versions of the old order.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Victor Turner examines rituals of the Ndembu in Zambia and develops his now-famous concept of "Communitas." He characterizes it as an absolute inter-human relation beyond any form of structure. The Ritual Process has acquired the status of a small classic since these lectures were first published in 1969. Turner demonstrates how the analysis of ritual behavior and symbolism may be used as a key to understanding social structure and processes. He extends Van Gennep's notion of the "liminal phase" of rites of passage to a more general level, and applies it to gain understanding of a wide range of social phenomena. Once thought to be the "vestigial" organs of social conservatism, rituals are now seen as arenas in which social change may emerge and be absorbed into social practice. As Roger Abrahams writes in his foreword to the revised edition: "Turner argued from specific field data. His special eloquence resided in his ability to lay open a sub-Saharan African system of belief and practice in terms that took the reader beyond the exotic features of the group among whom he carried out his fieldwork, translating his experience into the terms of contemporary Western perceptions. Reflecting Turner's range of intellectual interests, the book emerged as exceptional and eccentric in many ways: yet it achieved its place within the intellectual world because it so successfully synthesized continental theory with the practices of ethnographic reports." The American Anthropologist called Turner's book "ingenious and erudite, rich in highly stimulating ideas."

Victor Turner (1920-1983) was a research officer at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Zambia, where he began what was to be a lifelong study of Ndembu village life, ritual, and symbolism. He taught at the University of Manchester from 1955 to 1963, when he moved to the United States. Turner served as professor of anthropology at Cornell University, 1964-1968. From 1968 to 1977, he was professor of anthropology and social thought at the University of Chicago, and then until the time of his death he was William R. Kenan Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia.

Roger Abrahams recently retired as director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hailed by The New York Times for writing “with wonderful clarity about science . . . that effortlessly teaches as it zips along,” nationally bestselling author Robert M. Hazen offers a radical new approach to Earth history in this intertwined tale of the planet’s living and nonliving spheres.

With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s eye, Hazen calls upon twenty-first-century discoveries that have revolutionized geology and enabled scientists to envision Earth’s many iterations in vivid detail—from the mile-high lava tides of its infancy to the early organisms responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties beneath our feet. Lucid, controversial, and on the cutting edge of its field, The Story of Earth is popular science of the highest order.

"A sweeping rip-roaring yarn of immense scope, from the birth of the elements in the stars to meditations on the future habitability of our world." —Science

Renaissance Configurations is a ground-breaking collection of essays on the structures and strategies of Early Modern culture - as embodied in issues of gender, sexuality and politics - by a group of critics from the new generation of Early Modern specialists. The essays focus on the relations of public and private, of verbal and spatial, of textual and material, reading and re-reading texts, both canonical and non-canonical, with a textual and historical rigour often considered lacking in work with theoretical premises. The collection as a whole offers a clear sense of the direction to be taken by Early Modern studies over the next decade.

De surinaamse Anton de Kom (1898-1945) was vrijheidsstrijder, verzetsheld, vakbondsman, activist, schrijver en banneling. In de Amsterdamse Bijlmermeer staat zijn standbeeld, maar over zijn leven is nog steeds weing bekend. Alice Boots en Rob Woortman hebben na uitgebreid onderzoek in archieven en na gesprekken met de nazaten van De Kom zijn levensverhaal gereconstrueerd. In dit boek vertellen zij over zijn jeugd in Paramaribo, zijn vertrek naar Nederland en over het boek dat hij schreef als aanklacht tegen het Nederlandse kolonialisme: 'Wij slaven van Suriname'. Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog belandde De Kom in het verzet en hij zou uiteindelijk overlijden in een Duits concentratiekamp.

Het uitzonderlijke verhaal dat in De last van veel geluk verteld wordt begint in 1555 en eindigt in 1702, als de bloeitijd van de Nederlandse Republiek voorbij is. In deze periode hebben zich vooral de gebeurtenissen afgespeeld die lange tijd tot de vaste vaderlandse overlevering behoorden, maar tegenwoordig in het onderwijs nog maar weinig aandacht krijgen. En daardoor dreigt een wezenlijk element in onze cultuur verloren te gaan, want het verhaal van de opstand tegen de Spanjaarden, de onafhankelijkheid van Nederland en de ongekende bloeiperiode tijdens de Gouden Eeuw geven ons alle reden trots te zijn op ons verleden.  Dit glorieuze tijdvak wordt op superieure wijze tot leven geroepen door A.Th. van Deursen, de grootste kenner van deze periode. Op ingetogen, maar gepassioneerde wijze weet hij als geen ander de lezer mee te trekken in het fascinerende verhaal over deze unieke periode uit onze geschiedenis. 
Prof. dr. A.Th. van Deursen (1931) is emeritus hoogleraar nieuwe geschiedenis aan de Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam. Van hem verschenen eerder onder meer Mensen van klein vermogen, Een dorp in de polder en Maurits van Nassau.

Te veel nationalisme kan doorslaan of ontaarden in imperialisme. Maar te weinig nationalisme is niet minder gevaarlijk. Recente ontwikkelingen - de aanslag in Noorwegen, de rellen in Engeland - laten zien wat er kan gebeuren als een samenleving desintegreert; en de patstelling in de Belgische politiek toont hoe een staat uiteindelijk onbestuurbaar kan worden als een gedeeld natiebesef ontbreekt. In dit boek gaat Baudet terug naar de oorsprong van de moderne staten in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw en volgt hij hun ontwikkeling tot aan het heden. Hij laat zien dat de democratische rechtsstaat voor zijn functioneren afhankelijk is van precies de soevereiniteit en de nationale identiteit die de West-Europese elites de afgelopen decennia juist hebben afgebroken. En hij betoogt dat waar in het verleden een teveel aan nationalisme het gevaar was, de grote bedreiging in de eenentwintigste eeuw interne sociale desintegratie is.

Journalistieke reportage over Edward Snowden (1983), de voormailge CIA-medewerker die als klokkenluider informatie naar buiten bracht over de wereldwijde Amerikaanse spionagepraktijken.

This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion--an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris also draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need. He calls on us to invoke that need in taking a secular humanistic approach to solving the problems of this world.

The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective.

Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate.

Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.
The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.

With My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, the renowned cultural theorist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff inaugurates a trilogy that signals the summation of his scholarly lifework. With this series, Sacred Order/Social Order, to be published in consecutive volumes, Rieff both continues and supersedes the lines of thought that characterize the earlier, influential works upon which his reputation was forged. Readers familiar with Rieff's distinctive oeuvre will recognize central themes and find final recitations on the cultural impact of Freud and his creation "psychological man" or "the therapeutic," which Rieff here renames the "new man." Whether conversant with Rieff's work or new to its unique interpretive power, readers of Sacred Order/Social Order will discover a series of provocative insights, illuminated by Rieff's wide-ranging expositions, theoretical advances, and stylistic innovations.

In this first volume, Rieff articulates a comprehensive, typological theory of Western culture. Using visual illustrations and unique juxtapositions, he displays remarkable erudition in drawing from such disciplines as sociology, history, literature, poetry, music, plastic arts, and film; he contrasts the changing modes of spiritual and social thought that have struggled for dominance throughout Western history. Our modern culture--to Rieff's mind only the "third" type in western history--is the object of his deepest scrutiny, described here as morally ruinous, death-affirming rather than life-affirming, and representing an unprecedented attempt to create a culture completely devoid of any concept of the sacred.

For Rieff, culture represents the "form of fighting before the firing begins" in a literal life-and-death struggle for a particular type of world-creation. Having concluded in this final phase of his career that there is no neutral ground in this struggle, Rieff takes aim at many of the most significant "deathworks" in modern literature, art, and history--from Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Duchamp's Etant donnés to Hitler's death camps--in an attempt to undo them by using them against themselves. In so doing, he seeks to show the reader what really animates, and is ultimately at stake, in the contemporary "culture wars" raging over such issues as euthanasia, education, medical research, sexuality, race, class, and gender.

Lezingen van de Roemeense godsdiensthistoricus en -fenomenoloog over riten en symbolen, waarmee in primitieve culturen bepaalde overgangen (naar volwassenheid, een geheim genootschap) omgeven werden, en die zich in de grote godsdiensten hebben weten te handhaven

Written by the author of the best-selling HyperText & HyperMedia, this book is an excellent guide to the methods of usability engineering. The book provides the tools needed to avoid usability surprises and improve product quality. Step-by-step information on which method to use at various stages during the development lifecycle are included, along with detailed information on how to run a usability test and the unique issues relating to international usability.

* Emphasizes cost-effective methods that developers can implement immediately
* Instructs readers about which methods to use when, throughout the development lifecycle, which ultimately helps in cost-benefit analysis.
* Shows readers how to avoid the four most frequently listed reasons for delay in software projects.
* Includes detailed information on how to run a usability test.
* Covers unique issues of international usability.
* Features an extensive bibliography allowing readers to find additional information.
* Written by an internationally renowned expert in the field and the author of the best-selling HyperText & HyperMedia.