Jim Black deftly illustrates ten key problems facing America today and uses striking cross-cultural examples to show that every great civilization--from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Soviet Union--has faced the same problems.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a personal memoir, the author describes her relationships with the two men closest to her--her father and his brother, Joseph, a charismatic pastor with whom she lived after her parents emigrated from Haiti to the United States.
In this book you'll discover:1. Why nations die2. Cynicism as a death threat to any nation3. What poisons a nation4. The role of protests in a modern society 5. When the media kills a nation6. The cankerworm of disillusionment 7. Reasons for national disillusionment 8. Reasons for national corruption 9. How corruption kills nations10. How inequality kills nations11. How apathy kills nations12. The rise, fall and death of nations13. Strengths and weaknesses of nations14. Indicators of a failing state15. Measures to rescue dying nations
Dmitri Alioshin is a young (White Russian)artillery officer in WWI. As the war turns into a revolution and eventually civil was Dmitri finds himself running for his life. Along with five friends hiding by day and running across Russia by night he hopes to find refuge in China.
The third volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature" includes contributions that focus on the interplay between concepts of nation, national languages, and individual as well as collective identities. Because all literary communication happens within different kinds of power structures - linguistic, economic, political -, it often results in fascinating forms of hybridity. In the first of four thematic chapters, the papers investigate some of the ways in which discourses can establish modes of thinking, or how discourses are in turn controlled by active linguistic interventions, whether in the context of the patriarchy, war, colonialism, or political factions. The second thematic block is predominantly concerned with hybridity as an aspect of modern cultural identity, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of domestic life and in society at large. Closely related, a third series of papers focuses on writers and texts analysed from the vantage points of exile and exophony, as well as theoretical contributions to issues of terminology and what it means to talk about transcultural phenomena. Finally, a group of papers sheds light on more overtly violent power structures, mechanisms of exclusion, Totalitarianism, torture, and censorship, but also resistance to these forms of oppression. In addition to these chapters, the volume also collects a number of thematically related group sections from the ICLA congress, preserving their original context.