Download or read book Around the Bloc written by Stephanie Elizondo Griest and published by Villard. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.” In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who narrowly avoided radiation cleanup duties at Chernobyl, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists, and comes to difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy. is the absorbing story of a young journalist driven by a desire to witness the effects of Communism. Along the way, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner-party vodka (one bottle per guest, plus an extra), stumbles upon Beijing’s underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elián González’s return to Cuba, and gains a new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.
Download or read book Networking the Bloc written by Klara Kemp-Welch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of the Eastern bloc. Originating with a series of creative initiatives by artists, art historians, and critics and centered in places like Budapest, Poznań, and Prague, this experimental dialogue involved Western participation but is today largely forgotten in the West. In Networking the Bloc, Klara Kemp-Welch vividly recaptures this lost chapter of art history, documenting an elaborate web of artistic connectivity that came about through a series of personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Countering the conventional Cold War narrative of Eastern bloc isolation, Kemp-Welch shows how artistic ideas were relayed among like-minded artists across ideological boundaries and national frontiers. Much of the work created was collaborative, and personal encounters were at its heart. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with participants, Kemp-Welch focuses on the exchanges and projects themselves rather than the personalities involved. Each of the projects she examines relied for its realization on a network of contributors. She looks first at the mobilization of the network, from 1964 to 1972, exploring five pioneering cases: a friendship between a Slovak artist and a French critic, an artistic credo, an exhibition, a conceptual proposition, and a book. She then charts a series of way stations for experimental art from the Soviet bloc between 1972 and 1976—points of distribution between studios, private homes, galleries, and certain cities. Finally, she investigates convergences—a succession of shared exhibitions and events in the second half of the 1970s in locations ranging from Prague to Milan to Moscow. Networking the Bloc, Kemp-Welch invites us to rethink the art of the late Cold War period from Eastern European perspectives.
Download or read book Bloc by Bloc written by Steven Weber and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Globalization is taking a step backward. What, then, is the best way to organize a global enterprise? The key, Steven Weber explains, is to prepare for a world increasingly made up of competing regions with distinct rules and standards. This new condition could be more prosperous, but there will also be more friction and therefore more risk.
Download or read book The Green Bloc written by Maja Fowkes and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, this book uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The turbulent legacy of 1968, which saw the confluence of political upheaval, spread of counterculture, rise of ecological consciousness, and emergence of global conceptual art, provides the setting for Maja Fowkes’s innovative reassessment of the environmental practice of the Central European neo-avant-garde. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, 'The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism' brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the Central European artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale.
Download or read book ThaBloc written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry and photography
Download or read book Black Bloc White Riot written by A. K. Thompson and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you taking over, or are you taking orders? Are you going backwards, or are you going forwards? White riot—I wanna riot. White riot—a riot of my own. —The Clash, "White Riot" Ten years after the battle in Seattle sparked an historic struggle against the forces of multinational conglomeration and American imperialism, the anti-globalization generation is ready to reflect on a decade of organizing that changed the face of mass action around the globe. Scholar and activist AK Thompson revisits the struggles against globalization in Canada and the United States at the turn of the century, and he explores the connection between political violence and the white middle class. Equal parts sociological study and activist handbook, Black Bloc, White Riot engages with the key debates that arose in the anti-globalization movement over the course of the past decade: direct or mass action? Summit-hopping or local organizing? Pacifism or diversity of tactics? Drawing on movement literature, contemporary and critical theory, and practical investigations, Thompson outlines the effect of the anti-globalization movement on the white, middle-class kids who were swept up in it, and he considers how and why violence must once again become a central category of activist politics. AK Thompson is a writer and activist living and working in Toronto, Canada. Currently completing his PhD in sociology at York University, Thompson teaches social theory and serves on the editorial committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action. His publications include Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (Fernwood Publishing, 2006).
Download or read book Building the Bloc written by Ruth Bloch Rubin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When will dissident members of a Congress successfully seize power from their party leaders and fellow lawmakers? When they organize.
Download or read book The Soviet Bloc Unity and Conflict written by Zbigniew Brzezinski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of relations among the communist states. The study explores the implications of the status of Yugoslavia and China, the significance of the Hungarian revolution and the position of Poland in the Soviet bloc, and clarifies the Khrushchev-Gomulka clash of 1956 and the complex role of Tito. Zbigniew Brzezinski emphasizes the role of ideology and power in the relations among the communist states, contrasting bloc relations and the unifying role of Soviet power under Stalin with the present situation. He suggests that conflicts of interest among the ruling elites will result either in ideological disputes or in weakening the central core of the ideology, leading to a gradual decline of unity among the Communist states. The author, while on leave from his post as Professor and Director of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs, Columbia University, and serving on the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Council, has revised and updated his important study and added three new chapters on more recent developments. He gives particular attention to the Sino-Soviet dispute.
Download or read book Our Bloc written by James Schneider and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A plan to win for the British left, from the co-founder of Momentum Our Bloc is a blueprint for a new combination of left-wing forces in Britain. James Schneider proposes a movement-party organisation that acts in society and in the Labour Party, through which party members, social movements, trade unions and socialist-inclined MPs could coordinate their political work. He adapts Chantal Mouffe’s theory of left populism to set out how the bloc could popularise socialist ideas and bend the parameters of politics towards its demands. Socialist perspectives are now rarely heard in mainstream public debate, after five years under Jeremy Corbyn when the left had some success in shaping political discourse. There is a large base of potential activists and an even larger section of the population available for mobilisation, but no central force to unite and organise them. Calls to ‘stay and fight’ against Keir Starmer’s failing leadership of the Labour Party are inadequate: socialists need a platform from which to do it. Schneider presents his Left Bloc as a pole of attraction for everyone seeking fundamental economic, social, political and environmental change. In this incisive book he sets out a plan for the next ten years: to build power, weaken our opponents and prepare ourselves for the next surge.
Download or read book Bloc Life written by Peter Molloy and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There was life before the fall. 1989 was a year of astonishing and rapid change: the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and an end to an entire way of life for millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. Bloc Life collects first hand testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, and reveals a rich tapestry of experience that goes beyond the headlines of spies and surveillance, secret police and political corruption. In fact, many of the people remember their lives under communism as 'perfectly ordinary' and even hanker for the 'security' that it offered. From political leaders, athletes and pop stars, to cooks, miners and cosmonauts, the stories collected in Bloc Life evoke the moods, preoccupations and experiences of a world that vanished almost overnight.
Download or read book A Bloc of One written by Richard Coke Lower and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study of one of the major political figures of twentieth-century America, Hiram Johnson (1866-1945). Elected governor of California in 1910, reelected in 1914, and elevated to the United States Senate in 1916, he characteristically cut his own political path, bringing an apocalyptic intensety to the many battles he waged. Armed with a sharp wit, a talent for invective, and a capacity for self-righteousness, he invigorated the political order around him with the passion he invested in it. Stubbornly independent, he pursued his goals with a fighter's determination. For Johnson, politics was an art not of compromise but of confrontation. As he himself put it, he preferred to be a "bloc of one." Johnson began his political career as an insurgent, a progressive in the stamp of Robert La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt. As governor he thoroughly revamped California's political and social order, creating a legacy that can still be felt today. He helped shape a progressive movement on the national level as well, and was Theodore Roosevelt's running mate on the Progressive party ticket in 1912. Johnson left the governorship in 1917, midway through his second term, to enter the United States Senate, where he served until his death in 1945. Arriving on the eve of America's entry into World War I, he continued to define himself as a reformer but quickly embraced a second cause as well, becoming one of the nation's most adamant proponents of American isolationism. He opposed American entry into the League of Nations in 1919, fought persistently against U.S. entanglement abroad throughout the inter-war years, and from his deathbed voted in 1945 against American entry into the United Nations. Although today he is best remembered as a fierce and uncompromising isolationist, his accomplishments in the Senate as a progressive - such as his decade-long fight for Hoover Dam - were significant and lasting. Johnson's public career encompasses and illuminates almost all the significant political issues, both domestic and international, in American life during the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book West Bloc Dissident written by William Blum and published by Soft Skull. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s, after four years with IBM and two more with the U.S. State Department, William Blum became a radical dissident. As an insider in two worlds, he is well suited to assess the people, events, and ideology of both the “bourgeois” and “radical” cultures. In West-Bloc Dissident, Blum brings unexpected wit and insight to his portrayals of both sides of the ideological fence. He draws unsparing portraits of his movement comrades Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and others. An anti-war activist, he takes on the CIA, FBI, State Department, and police. Also included are firsthand accounts of everything from the underground press to Salvador Allende’s Chile.
Download or read book The Aggressors written by Martin Scott Catino and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Avant garde in the Bloc written by Gabriela Świtek and published by Jrp Ringier. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Avant-garde in the Bloc" is a publication devoted to an eponymous conference dedicated to the oeuvre and studio of Henryk Stazewski (1894-1988) and Edward Krasinski (1925-2004) and the founding of the Institute of the Avant-garde established in the two artists' studio. The issues related to the studio/apartment of Henryk Stazewski and Edward Krasinski refer to "other spaces" of art and art history in Poland after 1945, which invalidate binary oppositions of private/public, interior/exterior, history/memory. The publication reflects upon the history and the artistic and social phenomenon of the studio, as well as to new research perspectives related to the work of Henryk Stazewski and Edward Krasinski.
Download or read book Rock Around the Bloc written by Timothy W. Ryback and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rock Around the Bloc presents an in-depth history of rock music in communist Europe from the mid-1950s to the present, touching on such highlights as the Elvis craze in the late 1950s, Beatlemania in the 1960s and 1970s, and punk and heavy metal music of the 1980s. The reader comes to realize that in some ways, life in the Soviet bloc was surprisingly similar to life in the West. But there are striking differences as well, most notably, the thirty-year war between rock fans and party officials. Book jacket.
Download or read book Eastern Blocks written by Zupagrafika and published by Brutalist Architecture. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sleeping districts? of Moscow, Plattenbauten of East Berlin, modernist estates of Warsaw, Kyiv's Brezhnevki: although these are home to the vast majority of city dwellers, post-war suburbs of central and eastern Europe have been invisible for decades.00'Eastern Blocks' by Zupagrafika is a photographic journey through the cityscapes the former Eastern Bloc, inviting readers to explore the districts and peripheries that became a playground for mass housing development after WW2, including objects like Soviet?flying saucers?, houses?on chicken legs? or hammer-shaped tower blocks.00Showcasing modernist and brutalist architecture scattered around the cities of Moscow, (East) Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Kyiv and Saint Petersburg, the book contains over 100 photographs taken by Zupagrafika throughout the last decade as a reference archive for their illustrated kits and books, with special contributions by local photographers. Divided into 6 chapters, 'Eastern Blocks' includes a foreword by writer and journalist Christopher Beanland, orientative maps, index of architects and informative texts on the featured cities and constructions.
Download or read book The Bloc written by Cornellier, Manon and published by Lorimer. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Member for Lac-Saint-Jean 2. The Birth of the Bloc 3. Crossing the Desert 4. The End of the Rainbow 5. The 1993 Federal Election Campaign 6. The Official Opposition 7. The Backlash 8. The Bloc's Program 9. Solidarity Among Sovereignists? 10. The Bloc's Future The Text of the Three-Party Agreement Endnotes Bibliography Index
