Download or read book Autopsy of Revolution written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this significant and very timely book, the author of The Technological Society, The Political Illusion, and Propaganda asks a tremendous question and shows that the answer we give it is decisive for the future of our society: Can we learn from history what revolution really is necessary for our survival? That is, can we distinguish between senseless, ineffectual revolt or rebellion and a genuine revolution that can alter fundamentals? In his basic, closely reasoned way, Jacques Ellul examines past and recent history in light of the current overwhelming preoccupation with revolution, which seems to have become the daily bread of Western man's thoughts and actions, the immediate explanation for every historical movement. Ellul insists on examining the possibility that today we are projecting onto past events a fairly recent and distorted image of revolution. The new image was created by Marx in the nineteenth century, and Ellul questions how long we can continue to live on his legacy. More important, he suggests that Marx may have brought about an abrupt deviation of the necessary revolutionary current and given a false meaning to the word revolution. Is all our talk about Marxian revolution talk about reality, or a way of filling a void with words? Finally, among so many social eddies and agitations, are we today caught up in a really revolutionary movement--or are we being led into blind combat by false lights that in reality are reflections in distorting mirrors? Are we capable of discerning the real Revolution, the needed Revolution? Ellul does not map out a route in detail: he clears paths into the future, making it possible for a route to be found. His masterly book should help to change our thinking, and therefore our future.
Download or read book Ideology and Elite Conflicts written by Messay Kebede and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did reasonable demands of Ethiopian masses for change lead not only to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, but also to a radical revolution that caused civil wars, economic decline, secession, and ethnic politics, all in the name of socialist equality and freedom? The answer of the book is that elite conflicts over scarce resources promoted mutually exclusive struggles for power, and so mobilized ideologies suitable for zero sum politics, of which radical revolutions are typical expressions.
Download or read book The Modern Book of the Dead written by Ptolemy Tompkins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern, all-encompassing exploration of what happens after death combines spirituality with philosophy, history, and science, all of which guide readers toward the timeless truth that human consciousness lives on after death.
Download or read book Autopsy of a Deceased Church written by Thom S. Rainer and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2014 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling author of Simple Church and the runaway hit I am a Church Member, Thom Rainer uses his twenty-five years of experience helping churches grow and reverse the trends of decline to expose twelve lessons on how to keep your church alive!
Download or read book Autopsy For An Empire written by Dmitri Volkogonov and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-05-01 with total page 841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Dmitri Volkogonov emerged in the last decade of his life as the preeminent Russian historian of this century. His crowning achievement is the account of the seven General Secretaries of the Soviet Empire in Autopsy for an Empire, a book that tells the entire history of the Soviet failure. Having utilized his still-unequaled access to the Soviet military archives, Communist Party documents, and secret Presidential Archive, Volkogonov sheds new light on some of the major events of twentieth-century history and the men who shaped them. We witness Lenin’s paranoia about foreigners in Russia, and his creation of a privileged system for top Party members; Stalin’s repression of the nationalities and his singular conduct of foreign policy; the origins and conduct of the Korean War; Kruschev’s relationship with the odious secret service chief, Beria, and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Brezhnev’s vanity and stupidity; a new view of Poland and Solidarity; the ossification of Soviet bureaucracy and the cynicism of the Politburo; and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Leninism and his role in history. By profiling the seven successive Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, Volkogonov also depicts in painstaking detail the progressive self-destruction of the Leninist system. In his clear-eyed character assessments and political evaluations, lucidly translated and edited by Harold Shukman, Dmitri Volkogonov has once again performed an invaluable service to twentieth-century history.
Download or read book Detroit written by Charlie LeDuff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An explosive exposé of America’s lost prosperity by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff “One cannot read Mr. LeDuff's amalgam of memoir and reportage and not be shaken by the cold eye he casts on hard truths . . . A little gonzo, a little gumshoe, some gawker, some good-Samaritan—it is hard to ignore reporting like Mr. LeDuff's.” —The Wall Street Journal “Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist LeDuff . . . writes with honesty and compassion about a city that’s destroying itself–and breaking his heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness.” —Kirkus Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches the ruins of Detroit for clues to his family’s troubled past. Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass-production, blue-collar jobs, and automobiles—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, dropouts, and foreclosures. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark, and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Detroit: An American Autopsy is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer.
Download or read book Romantic Autopsy written by Arden Hegele and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts.
Download or read book Autopsy on an Empire written by Jack F. Matlock and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 1995 with total page 874 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matlock, who served in the USSR for most of his career, including as ambassador during the Reagan and Bush administrations, gives this insider's look at the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Download or read book Jacques Ellul written by Jacob E. Van Vleet and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was Professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. A sociologist, historian, and Protestant lay theologian, Ellul is primarily known for his writings on technology, propaganda, and Christian anarchism. He influenced a wide array of thinkers including Ivan Illich, William Stringfellow, Thomas Merton, Paul Virilio, and Neil Postman. In this book, Jacob Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison guide readers through Ellul’s most influential theological and sociological writings. By understanding Ellul’s primary works, readers will be able to clearly grasp his social theory and theological ethics, profiting from his deep insight and prophetic wisdom.
Download or read book Glory and Terror written by Antoine de Baecque and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Glory and Terror is a vivid and often gory history of the darker side of the French Revolution. Through an examination of contemporary visual and literary representations of executions, funerals, processions and ceremonies it brings the often horrific events of the time to life. Honing in on seven real life cases, the author recounts and interprets: * the public autopsy performed on the corpse of Mirabeau * the exhumation and transportation of Voltaire's body to the Pantheon * the public torture, murder and subsequent mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe * the agonizingly slow death of Robespierre. Anyone who enjoys dazzling cultural history in the vein of Robert Darnton, Carlo Ginzburg and Anthony Grafton will revel in this intelligent and original work.
Download or read book Revolution without Revolutionaries written by Asef Bayat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Arab Spring and its aftermath alongside the revolutions of the 1970s. The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact. In this book, noted author Asef Bayat—whose Life as Politics anticipated the Arab Spring—uncovers why this occurred, and what made these uprisings so distinct from those that came before. Revolution without Revolutionaries is both a history of the Arab Spring and a history of revolution writ broadly. Setting the 2011 uprisings side by side with the revolutions of the 1970s, particularly the Iranian Revolution, Bayat reveals a profound global shift in the nature of protest: as acceptance of neoliberal policy has spread, radical revolutionary impulses have diminished. Protestors call for reform rather than fundamental transformation. By tracing the contours and illuminating the meaning of the 2011 uprisings, Bayat gives us the book needed to explain and understand our post–Arab Spring world. Praise for Revolution without Revolutionaries “Bayat is in the vanguard of a subtle and original theorization of social movements and social change in the Middle East. His attention to the lives of the urban poor, his extensive field work in very different countries within the region, and his ability to see over the horizon of current paradigms make his work essential reading.” —Juan Cole, University of Michigan “An astute analyst of the Middle East, Asef Bayat is one of the very few researchers equipped to historicize the region’s contemporary uprisings. In Revolution without Revolutionaries, he deftly and sympathetically employs his own observations of Iran, immediately before and after the 1979 revolution, to reflect on the epochal shifts that have re-worked the political regimes, economic structures, and revolutionary imaginaries across the region today.” —Arang Keshavarzian, New York University “Bayat provocatively questions the Arab Spring’s apparent moderation, tracing its softness to decades of neoliberalism that have undermined the national state and discarded old-fashioned forms of revolutionary violence. This groundbreaking book is not an obituary for the Arab Spring but a hopeful glimpse at its future.” —Olivier Roy, author of The Failure of Political Islam
Download or read book Studies in Forensic Biohistory written by Christopher M. Stojanowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlights the role of anthropologists in revealing the histories and contemporary social facts that are reflected in dead bodies.
Download or read book The Anatomy of Revolution written by Crane Brinton and published by . This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2021 Reprint of the 1938 First Editon. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The Anatomy of Revolution outlines the "uniformities" of four major political revolutions: the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Brinton notes how the revolutions followed a life cycle from the Old Order to a moderate regime to a radical regime, to Thermidorian reaction. The book has been described as a "classic," "famous" and a "watershed in the study of revolution." It has been influential enough to have inspired advice given to US President Jimmy Carter by his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Iranian Revolution. Revised editions of Brinton's book were published in 1952 and 1965, and it remains in print. Our edition reprints the classic account first published in 1938 Brinton summarizes the revolutionary process as moving from "financial breakdown, [to] organization of the discontented to remedy this breakdown ... revolutionary demands on the part of these organized discontented, demands which if granted would mean the virtual abdication of those governing, attempted use of force by the government, its failure, and the attainment of power by the revolutionists. These revolutionists have hitherto been acting as an organized and nearly unanimous group, but with the attainment of power it is clear that they are not united. The group which dominates these first stages we call the moderates .... power passes by violent ... methods from Right to Left". Contents: Old regimes -- First stages of revolution -- Types of revolutionists -- Rule of the moderates -- Accession of the extremists -- Reigns of terror and virtue -- Thermidor -- Summary of the work of revolutions.
Download or read book A History of Fascism 1914 1945 written by Stanley G. Payne and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996-07-15 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A History of Fascism is an invaluable sourcebook, offering a rare combination of detailed information and thoughtful analysis. It is a masterpiece of comparative history, for the comparisons enhance our understanding of each part of the whole. The term ‘fascist,’ used so freely these days as a pejorative epithet that has nearly lost its meaning, is precisely defined, carefully applied and skillfully explained. The analysis effectively restores the dimension of evil.”—Susan Zuccotti, The Nation “A magisterial, wholly accessible, engaging study. . . . Payne defines fascism as a form of ultranationalism espousing a myth of national rebirth and marked by extreme elitism, mobilization of the masses, exaltation of hierarchy and subordination, oppression of women and an embrace of violence and war as virtues.”—Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Humiliation of the Word written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Western people no longer hear; everything is grasped by sight. They no longer speak; they show.” -- Jacques Ellul Well-known for his many books on sociology and theology, Jacques Ellul creatively braids these two strands together in this provocative examination of how reality (which is visual) has superseded truth (which is verbal) in modern times. Ellul explores biblical texts for distinguishing visual cultural forms from the communicative (divine and human) Word, then examines how this distinction plays out with the rise of audiovisual media in the 20th-century West. Even in human speech, visual forms dominate contemporary life and devalue the word; this insight informs discussion of the image/word clash in religion, politics, and art. After a scathing critique of present-day idolatry, Ellul places his hope for nonviolent community in the fragile spoken word. Ultimately, Ellul sees the Bible as presenting a hopeful vision of reconciliation—between visual reality and spoken truth. A new afterword by Jacob Marques Rollison contextualizes Ellul’s stance within French postmodern thought, illuminating Humiliation of the Word as an outspokenly “Protestant communication ethic” in contemporary philosophical and theological discussions of language.
Download or read book The Kennedy Autopsy written by Jacob G Hornberger and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For half a century, people have debated the Kennedy assassination. Some claim that the Warren Commission got it right - that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-nut assassin. Others contend that Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. It is not the purpose of this book to engage in that debate. The purpose of this book is simply to focus on what happened at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963. What happened that night is so unusual that it cries out for truthful explanation even after all these years. In this book, you will learn that 1. Kennedy's body was actually delivered to the Bethesda morgue twice, at separate times and in separate caskets. 2. Some photographs and x-rays from the autopsy went missing from the record, and other photographs in the record were forged or otherwise fraudulent. 3. The president's body was altered by tampering with the wounds before the autopsy took place. And much more.
Download or read book Jesus and Marx written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At what point does a theology become an ideology? How can a Christian distinguish the two? Jacques Ellul has always taken pains to differentiate them, but in this book he provides both a theoretical framework and important examples. Some popular theologies, particularly those that attempt to intertwine biblical theology with Marxist thought, fall into the trap of reaching "theological" conclusions by other means, Ellul believes, so that we cannot consider them as true theologies. From both a biblical-theological and sociopolitical perspective Ellul examines the attempt to relate Christianity to Marxist thought. By reviewing in detail several key Marxist-Christian books, Ellul exposes the weaknesses of so-called Marxist Christianity (which he says is neither Marxist nor Christian), and argues that the biblical perspective takes exception to all political power, leaving Christian anarchism as the realistic revolutionary option. The preface by translator Joyce Main Hanks provides an excellent introduction to the book, showing how it fits into Ellul's thought and how it relates to Ellul's previous work.
