Download or read book The Flight of the Intellectuals written by Paul Berman and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an elegantly written consideration of American attitudes towards Islamic thinkers, Paul Berman, one of America's leading intellectuals and champion for progressive thought, conducts a searing examination of the West's fumbling efforts to establish a healthy discourse with what is coined 'moderate Islam'. Berman engages with many of today's most important issues - contemporary anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and the presence of home grown fundamentalists - to present a stunning commentary on the media's inability to detect dangerous ideas in contemporary society.
Download or read book The Flight of the Intellectuals written by Paul Berman and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”—an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued critics of Islamist extremism, especially critics from Muslim backgrounds, who survive only because of pseudonyms and police protection. And yet, instead of being applauded, the Rushdies of today (people like Ayan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq) often find themselves dismissed as “strident” or as no better than fundamentalist themselves, and contrasted unfavorably with representatives of the Islamist movement who falsely claim to be “moderates.” How did this happen? In THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS, Berman—“one of America’s leading public intellectuals” (Foreign Affairs)—conducts a searing examination into the intellectual atmosphere of the moment and shows how some of the West’s best thinkers and journalists have fumbled badly in their efforts to grapple with Islamist ideas and violence. Berman’s investigation of the history and nature of the Islamist movement includes some surprising revelations. In examining Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he shows the rise of an immense and often violent worldview, elements of which survives today in the brigades of al-Qaeda and Hamas. Berman also unearths the shocking story of al-Banna’s associate, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated personally with Adolf Hitler to incite Arab support of the Nazis’ North African campaign. Echoes of the Grand Mufti’s Nazified Islam can be heard among the followers of al-Banna even today. In a gripping and stylish narrative Berman also shows the legacy of these political traditions, most importantly by focusing on a single philosopher, who happens to be Hassan al-Banna’s grandson, Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan—a figure widely celebrated in the West as a “moderate” despite his troubling ties to the Islamist movement. Looking closely into what Ramadan has actually written and said, Berman contrasts the reality of Ramadan with his image in the press. In doing so, THE FLIGHT OF THE INTELLECTUALS sheds light on a number of modern issues—on the massively reinvigorated anti-Semitism of our own time, on a newly fashionable turn against women’s rights, and on the difficulties we have in discussing terrorism—and presents a stunning commentary about the modern media’s peculiar inability to detect and analyze some of the most dangerous ideas in contemporary society.
Download or read book Blue Collar Intellectuals written by Daniel J. Flynn and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation. It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone—intellectual and everyman alike—has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.
Download or read book Tale Of Two Utopias written by Paul Berman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political journalist Paul Berman recounts four episodes in the history of a generation: student radicalism of the years around 1968; the birth of gay liberation and modern identity politics; the anti-Communist trajectory in the Eastern bloc; and the ideals and self-criticism of thinkers in America and in France, who debated the meaning of these events. A "New York Times" Notable Book.
Download or read book Terror and Liberalism written by Paul Berman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-05-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He calls for a "new radicalism" and a "liberal American interventionism" to promote democratic values throughout the world - a vigorous new politics of American liberalism."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Public Intellectuals written by Richard A. Posner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey. With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse. Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today. This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.
Download or read book Intellectuals written by Paul Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
Download or read book No Respect written by Andrew Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.
Download or read book Modernist Travel Writing written by David G. Farley and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the study of travel writing has grown in recent years, scholars have largely ignored the literature of modernist writers. Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, by David Farley, addresses this gap by examining the ways in which a number of writers employed the techniques and stylistic innovations of modernism in their travel narratives to variously engage the political, social, and cultural milieu of the years between the world wars. Modernist Travel Writing argues that the travel book is a crucial genre for understanding the development of modernism in the years between the wars, despite the established view that travel writing during the interwar period was largely an escapist genre—one in which writers hearkened back to the realism of nineteenth-century literature in order to avoid interwar anxiety. Farley analyzes works that exist on the margins of modernism, generically and geographically, works that have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve, partly due to their classification as travel narratives and partly because of their complex modernist styles. The book begins by examining the ways that travel and the emergent travel regulations in the wake of the First World War helped shape Ezra Pound’s Cantos. From there, it goes on to examine E. E. Cummings’s frustrated attempts to navigate the “unworld” of Soviet Russia in his book Eimi,Wyndham Lewis’s satiric journey through colonial Morocco in Filibusters in Barbary,and Rebecca West’s urgent efforts to make sense of the fractious Balkan states in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These modernist writers traveled to countries that experienced most directly the tumult of revolution, the effects of empire, and the upheaval of war during the years between World War I and World War II. Farley’s study focuses on the question of what constitutes “evidence” for Pound, Lewis, Cummings, and West as they establish their authority as eyewitnesses, translate what they see for an audience back home, and attempt to make sense of a transformed and transforming modern world. Modernist Travel Writing makes an original contribution to the study of literary modernism while taking a distinctive look at a unique subset within the growing field of travel writing studies. David Farley’s work will be of interest to students and teachers in both of these fields as well as to early-twentieth-century literary historians and general enthusiasts of modernist studies.
Download or read book Angel Patriots written by Alexander T. Riley and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When United Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the gash it left in the ground became a national site of mourning. The flight’s 40 passengers became a media obsession, and countless books, movies, and articles told the tale of their heroic fight to band together and sacrifice their lives to stop Flight 93 from becoming a weapon of terror. In Angel Patriots, Alexander Riley argues that by memorializing these individuals as patriots, we have woven them into much larger story of our nation—an existing web of narratives, values, dramatic frameworks, and cultural characters about what it means to be truly American. Riley examines the symbolic impact and role of the Flight 93 disaster in the nation’s collective consciousness, delving into the spontaneous memorial efforts that blossomed in Shanksville immediately after the news of the crash spread; the ad-hoc sites honoring the victims that in time emerged, such as a Parks Department-maintained memorial close to the crash site and a Flight 93 Chapel created by a local Catholic priest; and finally, the creation of an official, permanent crash monument in Shanksville like those built for past American wars. Riley also analyzes the cultural narratives that evolved in films and in books around the events on the day of the crash and the lives and deaths of its “angel patriot” passengers, uncovering how these representations of the event reflect the myth of the authentic American nation—one that Americans believed was gravely threatened in the September 11 attacks. A profound and thought-provoking study, Angel Patriots unveils how, in the wake of 9/11, America mourned much more than the loss of life.
Download or read book The Flight Portfolio written by Julie Orringer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Invisible Bridge comes a gripping tale of forbidden love, high-stakes adventure, and unimaginable courage filled with "suspense and tragedy, unexpected twists and deliverance” (The Seattle Times). • THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX SERIES TRANSATLANTIC MARSEILLE, 1940. Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist and editor, arrives in France. Recognizing the darkness descending over Europe, he and a group of like-minded New Yorkers formed the Emergency Rescue Committee, helping artists and writers escape from the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. Amid the chaos of World War II, and in defiance of restrictive U.S. immigration policies, Fry must procure false passports, secure visas, seek out escape routes through the Pyrenees and by sea, and make impossible decisions about who should be saved, all while under profound pressure—and in a state of irrevocable personal change. In this dazzling work of historical fiction—one that illuminates previously unexplored elements of Fry’s story, and has, since its publication, brought us new insight into his life.
Download or read book Intellectuals and Race written by Thomas Sowell and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light. The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a whole have tended to cluster. Indeed, these views have clustered at one end of the spectrum in the early twentieth century and then clustered at the opposite end of the spectrum in the late twentieth century. Moreover, these radically different views of race in these two eras were held by intellectuals whose views on other issues were very similar in both eras. Intellectuals and Race is not, however, a book about history, even though it has much historical evidence, as well as demographic, geographic, economic and statistical evidence-- all of it directed toward testing the underlying assumptions about race that have prevailed at times among intellectuals in general, and especially intellectuals at the highest levels. Nor is this simply a theoretical exercise. The impact of intellectuals' ideas and crusades on the larger society, both past and present, is the ultimate concern. These ideas and crusades have ranged widely from racial theories of intelligence to eugenics to "social justice" and multiculturalism. In addition to in-depth examinations of these and other issues, Intellectuals and Race explores the incentives, the visions and the rationales that drive intellectuals at the highest levels to conclusions that have often turned out to be counterproductive and even disastrous, not only for particular racial or ethnic groups, but for societies as a whole.
Download or read book Lost in Thought written by Zena Hitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.
Download or read book After the Flight 93 Election written by Michael Anton and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 2016, the provocative essay “The Flight 93 Election” galvanized many voters by spotlighting the stakes ahead in November and reproaching complacent elements of the Right. It also drew disparagement from many who judged it too apocalyptic in its assessment of the options facing the electorate. Its author, Michael Anton—writing as “Publius Decius Mus”—addressed the main criticisms of his argument soon afterward in a “Restatement on Flight 93.” A new criticism emerged later on: that he had painted a dire scenario to be averted, but no positive vision. Here, Anton presents the positive ideal that inspired him—a distillation of his thinking on Americanism and the West, refined over decades. He lays out the foundational principles of the American and Western traditions, examines the biggest threats to their survival, and underscores the necessity of continuing to defend them.
Download or read book Think Tanks in America written by Thomas Medvetz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of “research” do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become? In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.
Download or read book Power and the Idealists Or the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath written by Paul Berman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-04-17 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the best-selling Terror and Liberalism on the rise to power of the generation of 1968. The student uprisings of 1968 erupted not only in America but also across Europe, expressing a distinct generational attitude about politics, the corrupt nature of democratic capitalism, and the evil of military interventions. Yet, decades later, many in that radical generation had come into conventional positions of power: among them Bill Clinton (who reportedly stayed up all night reading this book) and Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany. During a 1970s street protest, Fischer was photographed beating a cop to the ground; during the 1990s, he was supporting Clinton in a NATO-led military intervention in the Balkans. Here Paul Berman, "one of America's best exponents of recent intellectual history" (The Economist), masterfully traces the intellectual and moral evolution of an impassioned generation—and gives an acute analysis of what it means to go to war in the name of democracy and human rights.
Download or read book The Black Intellectual Tradition written by Derrick P. Alridge and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation. Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life. Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor
