Political Purgatory
Political Purgatory

Author: Brian Rowan

Publisher: Merrion Press

Published: 2021-04

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781785373817

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This is a book about political stasis; the purgatory that Stormont became, and the sins of that long standoff. The story begins in January 2017, with Martin McGuinness's dramatic resignation as Deputy First Minister, and chronicles all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that ultimately resulted in the restoration of the Executive in January 2020, with the 'New Decade New Approach' agreement. Then, that new fight with a fearsome and unknowable foe: Coronavirus. Political Purgatory charts the three years from the collapse and restoration of the northern Executive to Covid-19 in the wider frame of building peace after conflict, and we turn the next corner into the centenary of Northern Ireland and that louder call for Irish unity, since Brexit, like a piece of heavy machinery on fragile ground, has left cracks across the Union. Spanning several decades, some of the biggest names on the inside of Irish and British politics and policing, including Gerry Adams, Peter Robinson, Julian Smith and Simon Coveney, help veteran journalist Brian Rowan turn the pages in what President Clinton has called the 'long war for peace'.

Dante's Political Purgatory
Dante's Political Purgatory

Author: John A. Scott

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 151280679X

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This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Purgatory
Purgatory

Author: Tomás Eloy Martínez

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1608197360

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Purgatorio is Martínez's most moving, most autobiographical novel and yet it is also a ghost story, the ghost story which has been Argentina's history since 1973. It begins, 'Simón Cardoso had been dead for thirty years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday.' Simón, a cartographer like Emilia, had vanished during one of their trips to map an uncharted country road. Later testimonies had confirmed that he had been one of the thousands of victims of the military regime - arrested, tortured and executed for being a "subversive." Yet Emilia had refused to believe this account, and had spent her entire life waiting for him to reappear. Now in her sixties, the Simón she has found is identical to the man she lost three decades ago. While skirting around the mystery, Eloy Martínez masterfully peels away layer upon layer of history -both personal and political. Just as Simón's disappearance comes to represent the thousands of disappearances that became such a common occurrence during the dictatorship, so Emilia's refusal to accept his death mirror's the country's unwillingness to face its reality.

Heaven's Purge
Heaven's Purge

Author: Isabel Moreira

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-10-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199780404

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The doctrine of purgatory - the state after death in which Christians undergo punishment by God for unforgiven sins - raises many questions. What is purgatory like? Who experiences it? Does purgatory purify souls, or punish them, or both? How painful is it? Heaven's Purge explores the first posing of these questions in Christianity's early history, from the first century to the eighth: an era in which the notion that sinful Christians might improve their lot after death was contentious, or even heretical. Isabel Moreira discusses a wide range of influences at play in purgatory's early formation, including ideas about punishment and correction in the Roman world, slavery, the value of medical purges at the shrines of saints, and the authority of visions of the afterlife for informing Christians of the hereafter. She also challenges the deeply ingrained supposition that belief in purgatory was a symptom of barbarized Christianity, and assesses the extent to which Irish and Germanic views of society, and the sources associated with them - penitentials and legal tariffs - played a role in purgatory's formation. Special attention is given to the writings of the last patristic author of antiquity, the Northumbrian monk Bede. Heaven's Purge is the first study to focus on purgatory's history in late antiquity, challenging the conclusions of recent scholarship through an examination of the texts, communities and cultural ideas that informed purgatory's early history.

Seasons of Purgatory
Seasons of Purgatory

Author: Shahriar Mandanipour

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1942658966

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST The first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian), “a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran” (Wall Street Journal) In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

A Perfect War of Politics
A Perfect War of Politics

Author: John M. Sacher

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780807128480

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"From 1824 to 1861, Louisiana moved from a political system based on personality and ethnicity to a distinct two-party system, with Democrats competing first against Whigs and then Know-Nothings. Sacher's narrative describes the ever-changing issues facing the parties - including governmental activism, cultural divisions, and republicanism - and explains how the presence of slavery shaped the state's political landscape.

Agents of Influence
Agents of Influence

Author: Aaron Edwards

Publisher: Merrion Press

Published: 2021-04-09

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1785373439

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Recruited by British Intelligence to infiltrate the IRA and Sinn Féin during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, they were ‘agents of influence’. With codenames like INFLICTION, STAKEKNIFE, 3007 and CAROL, these spies played a pivotal role in the fight against Irish republicanism. Now, for the first time, some of these agents have emerged from the shadows to tell their compelling stories. Agents of Influence takes you behind the scenes of the secret intelligence war which helped bring the IRA’s armed struggle to an end. Historian Aaron Edwards, the critically acclaimed author of UVF: Behind the Mask, explains how the IRA was penetrated by British agents, with explosive new revelations about the hidden agendas of prominent republicans like Martin McGuinness and Freddie Scappaticci and lesser-known ones like Joe Haughey and John Joe Magee. Bringing to light recently declassified TOP SECRET documents and the firsthand testimonies of agents and their handlers, Edwards reveals how British Intelligence gained extraordinary access to the IRA’s inner circle and manipulated them into engaging with the peace process. With new insights into the spy masters behind the scenes, their strategies and tactics, and Britain’s international intelligence network in Northern Ireland, Europe, and beyond, Agents of Influence offers a rare and shocking glimpse into the clandestine world of secret agents, British intelligence strategy and the betrayal at the heart of militant Irish republicanism during the vicious decades of the Troubles.

Arresting Citizenship
Arresting Citizenship

Author: Amy E. Lerman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-06-06

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 022613797X

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The numbers are staggering: One-third of America’s adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more were never convicted, but are nonetheless subject to surveillance by the state. Never before has the American government maintained so vast a network of institutions dedicated solely to the control and confinement of its citizens. A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state for American democracy, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has fundamentally recast the relation between citizen and state, resulting in a sizable—and growing—group of second-class citizens. From police stops to court cases and incarceration, at each stage of the criminal justice system individuals belonging to this disempowered group come to experience a state-within-a-state that reflects few of the country’s core democratic values. Through scores of interviews, along with analyses of survey data, Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver show how this contact with police, courts, and prisons decreases faith in the capacity of American political institutions to respond to citizens’ concerns and diminishes the sense of full and equal citizenship—even for those who have not been found guilty of any crime. The effects of this increasingly frequent contact with the criminal justice system are wide-ranging—and pernicious—and Lerman and Weaver go on to offer concrete proposals for reforms to reincorporate this large group of citizens as active participants in American civic and political life.