"It began with the unmourned death of Rosen, one of Moscow's new breed of black marketeers; seemingly a clear-cut case of murder. Although Renko has been recently reinstated at the Moscow Prosecutor's office, the case begins to slip from his grasp. But his determination never to let go leads him to Munich and Berlin - back into the life of Irina, a woman he though he had lost forever . . ."--Publisher's website.
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?
El Lissitzky's About 2 Squares is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. The commentary, More About 2 Squares, boxed in the same slipcase, provides a detailed analysis of this seminal work.
This instant #1 New York Times bestseller and “modern techno-thriller” (New York Journal of Books) follows covert operative Mitch Rapp in a terrifying race to stop Russia’s gravely ill leader from starting a full-scale war with NATO. When Russian president Maxim Krupin discovers that he has inoperable brain cancer, he’s determined to cling to power. His first task is to kill or imprison any countrymen threatening him. But when his illness becomes increasingly serious, he decides on a dramatic diversion—war with the West. Upon learning of Krupin’s condition, CIA director Irene Kennedy understands that the US is facing an opponent who has nothing to lose. The only way to avoid a confrontation that could leave millions dead is to send Mitch Rapp to Russia under impossibly dangerous orders. With the Kremlin’s entire security apparatus hunting him, he must find and kill a man many have deemed the most powerful in the world. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance in this “timely, explosive novel that shows yet again why Mitch Rapp is the best hero the thriller genre has to offer” (The Real Book Spy).
Alisa Mizelle's story is one that evokes deep and lasting feelings of sympathy, anger and hope in the face of dysfunction, neglect and betrayal.Life began for Alisa in the Soviet Union in 1965 during the Cold War. Her mother was distant and neglectful and Alisa turned to her grandmother for the little maternal love she was able to give. Sex became a part of her life at an early age and she quickly realized that this was a medium she could use to make some kind of human attachment and in the process maybe find love-an emotion which seemed to elude her at every turn. Alisa's life takes place on two continents and plays like an action movie involving men, sex , kidnapping and even rape. Through it all she is motivated by the need to make a connection with another human being that will help to make her whole.It is this need that drives her into most or all of the situations she finds herself in and the decisions she makes. She makes the ultimate connection with an American Doctor who marries her and brings her back to the States with him.The hope is that life will finally fall into place for her. But too much damage has been done and instead of being the glue that keeps her family together, she becomes the thing that rips it apart. She finally realizes when it is almost too late that sex does not equate love, and that love and respect must be earned and not demanded.
A beginner's guide to the decline and fall of the Soviet Union In 1990, Kim traill set off for the former Soviet Union with a smattering of vocabulary, a lust for wild adventure and a swag of youthful idealism about the great Communist experiment. It would take some time for the scales to fall from her eyes. Over the next 17 years Kim discovered a Russia few tourists see. She ate some of the world's worst food, went to places few of us would venture, made good friends and met a lot of seriously dodgy people. On collective farms and on 40-hour train journeys, at red carpet parties and in marriage agencies, on nuclear bases and in the frozen wastes of Siberia, she navigated the country's changing fortunes, bearing witness to the horrific events of war, nuclear accidents, drug and alcohol addiction and ethnic rivalries. She even tried to make herself into a good Russian woman, abandoning her uniform of jeans, boots and Russian prison coat for heels and a skin-tight dress. RED SQUARE BLUES a full-blooded charge through a crumbling empire as it lurches from dark power to open society and back again. It is an eye-opening portrait of an eternally surprising country, leavened with the kind of bone-dry humour only life in a repressive police state can produce.
