Download or read book Revolutionary Life written by Asef Bayat and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a leading scholar of the Middle East and North Africa comes a new way of thinking about the Arab Spring and the meaning of revolution. From the standpoint of revolutionary politics, the Arab Spring can seem like a wasted effort. In Tunisia, where the wave of protest began, as well as in Egypt and the Gulf, regime change never fully took hold. Yet if the Arab Spring failed to disrupt the structures of governments, the movement was transformative in farms, families, and factories, souks and schools. Seamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolutionary activity. Women, young adults, the very poor, and members of the underground queer community can credit the Arab Spring with steps toward equality and freedom. There is also potential for further progress, as women’s rights in particular now occupy a firm place in public discourse, preventing retrenchment and ensuring that marginalized voices remain louder than in prerevolutionary days. In addition, the Arab Spring empowered workers: in Egypt alone, more than 700,000 farmers unionized during the years of protest. Labor activism brought about material improvements for a wide range of ordinary people and fostered new cultural and political norms that the forces of reaction cannot simply wish away. In Bayat’s telling, the Arab Spring emerges as a paradigmatic case of “refolution”—revolution that engenders reform rather than radical change. Both a detailed study and a moving appeal, Revolutionary Life identifies the social gains that were won through resistance.
Download or read book Beatriz Allende written by Tanya Harmer and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of Beatriz Allende (1942–1977)—revolutionary doctor and daughter of Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende—portrays what it means to live, love, and fight for change. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Beatriz and her generation drove political campaigns, university reform, public health programs, internationalist guerrilla insurgencies, and government strategies. Centering Beatriz's life within the global contours of the Cold War era, Tanya Harmer exposes the promises and paradoxes of the revolutionary wave that swept through Latin America in the long 1960s. Drawing on exclusive access to Beatriz's private papers, as well as firsthand interviews, Harmer connects the private and political as she reveals the human dimensions of radical upheaval. Exiled to Havana after Chile's right-wing military coup, Beatriz worked tirelessly to oppose dictatorship back home. Harmer's interviews make vivid the terrible consequences of the coup for the Chilean Left, the realities of everyday life in Havana, and the unceasing demands of solidarity work that drained Beatriz and her generation of the dreams they once had. Her story demolishes the myth that women were simply extras in the story of Latin America's Left and brings home the immense cost of a revolutionary moment's demise.
Download or read book Che Guevara written by Allan Todd and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Che Guevara was murdered almost sixty years ago, the famous red-and-black image of him is still widely seen around the world: at leftist political demonstrations and, ironically - given his strong opposition to capitalism - on many commercial products. However, he was a controversial figure during his lifetime - and remains so today. On both the political left and the political right, attitudes to him vary widely: while some see him as a romantic, highly-principled and legendary fighter for the world’s poor and exploited masses, others depict him either as an unrealistic and thus irrelevant adventurer, or even as a ruthless and cold-blooded butcher. Consequently, biographies about him over the decades have ranged from the overly sympathetic, to the extremely hostile. As well as covering aspects of his family life and his loves - and his early, sometimes less-than-revolutionary, attitudes - this biography, as expected, deals with those areas for which Che is best known. These include his adventurous explorations, as a young man on a motorbike, of Latin and Central America; his leadership and bravery during Cuba’s Revolutionary War; his practical and theoretical contributions to the conduct of guerrilla warfare; and his emergence as an international revolutionary legend who inspired radical young people in the 1960s, and who continues to inspire rebellious people around the world today. However, this biography also explores other aspects of Che’s life which are not so well-known. From an early age, he developed a keen love of reading, covering an eclectic mix of adventure stories, poetry, history and philosophy - and, from his teens, he began a lifetime habit of making notes on what he read. He also became a strong chess player, able enough to draw with one of the world’s leading grandmasters. Even during guerrilla campaigns, he managed to maintain those loves. Since his murder, he has emerged as an original contributor to Marxist economics and philosophy. It was his wide-ranging studies that led him to become an outspoken opponent of the ‘orthodox’ communism followed in the Soviet Union - and of its Cold War foreign policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’. His tolerance of, and willingness to work with, those having different views saw him accused of Maoism - and even Trotskyism. More accurately, Che has bequeathed the unique strand of revolutionary socialism known as ‘Guevarism’.
Download or read book Toussaint Louverture written by Philippe Girard and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, leader of the only successful slave revolt in world history
Download or read book Jos Mart written by Alfred J. López and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: José Martí (1853–1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the “Great Liberator” Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Martí was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the “apostle” of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint. In José Martí: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, López traces the full arc of Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Ríos. The first major biography of Martí in over half a century and the first ever in English, José Martí is the most substantial examination of Martí’s life and work ever published.
Download or read book Lenin written by Christopher Read and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a highly distinguished author on the subject, this biography is an excellent scholarly introduction to one of the key figures of the Russian Revolution and post-Tsarist Russia. Not only does it make use of archive material made newly available in the glasnost and post-Soviet eras, it re-examines traditional sources as well, providing an original interpretation of Lenin's life and historical importance. Focal points of this study are: Lenin's revolutionary ascetic personality how he exploited culture, education and propaganda his relationship to Marxism his changing class analysis of Russia his 'populist' instincts. A prominent figure at the forefront of debates on the Russina revolution, Read makes sure that Lenin remains in his place as a highly influential and significant figure of the recent past.
Download or read book Leon Trotsky written by Joshua Rubenstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of the Bolshevik revolution on the meager foundation of a Europe-wide Communist upheaval. He was a master politician who played his cards badly in the momentous struggle for power against Stalin in the 1920s. And he was an assimilated, indifferent Jew who was among the first to foresee that Hitler's triumph would mean disaster for his fellow European Jews, and that Stalin would attempt to forge an alliance with Hitler if Soviet overtures to the Western democracies failed. Here, Trotsky emerges as a brilliant and brilliantly flawed man. Rubenstein offers us a Trotsky who is mentally acute and impatient with others, one of the finest students of contemporary politics who refused to engage in the nitty-gritty of party organization in the 1920s, when Stalin was maneuvering, inexorably, toward Trotsky's own political oblivion. As Joshua Rubenstein writes in his preface, "Leon Trotsky haunts our historical memory. A preeminent revolutionary figure and a masterful writer, Trotsky led an upheaval that helped to define the contours of twentieth-century politics." In this lucid and judicious evocation of Trotsky's life, Joshua Rubenstein gives us an interpretation for the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Robespierre written by Peter McPhee and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds. For many others, he was the first modern dictator, a fanatic who instigated the murderous Reign of Terror in 1793–94. This masterful biography combines new research into Robespierre's dramatic life with a deep understanding of society and the politics of the French Revolution to arrive at a fresh understanding of the man, his passions, and his tragic shortcomings. Peter McPhee gives special attention to Robespierre's formative years and the development of an iron will in a frail boy conceived outside wedlock and on the margins of polite provincial society. Exploring how these experiences formed the young lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789, the author discovers not the cold, obsessive Robespierre of legend, but a man of passion with close but platonic friendships with women. Soon immersed in revolutionary conflict, he suffered increasingly lengthy periods of nervous collapse correlating with moments of political crisis, yet Robespierre was tragically unable to step away from the crushing burdens of leadership. Did his ruthless, uncompromising exercise of power reflect a descent into madness in his final year of life? McPhee reevaluates the ideology and reality of "the Terror," what Robespierre intended, and whether it represented an abandonment or a reversal of his early liberalism and sense of justice.
Download or read book A Revolutionary Life written by Lakshmī Sahagala and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It Is Lakshmi Sahgal`S Autobiography In Original And Is One Of The Few First Person Accounts Of The Time, A Document Of Immense Political And Historical Value. Offers A Unique Perspective On Women In Armed Struggle And The Freedom Movement.
Download or read book Pauli Murray s Revolutionary Life written by Simki Kuznick and published by . This book was released on 2022-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Well researched with careful detail; beautifully and thoughtfully written."-Carol Carter, actor and playwright
Download or read book Yeltsin written by Leon Rabinovich Aron and published by St Martins Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 934 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrates the life and work of the first democratically elected leader in 1,000 years of Russian history, who presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Empire and the move to a free-market economy.
Download or read book Che Guevara written by Jon Lee Anderson and published by Black Swan. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He became a myth in his own lifetime and an international martyr-figure upon his death; he was a revolutionary fighter, a military strategist, a social philosopher, an economist, a medical doctor, and a friend and confidant of Fidel Castro. Che Guevara's dream was an epic one - to unite Latin America and the rest of the developing world through armed revolution, and to end once and for all the poverty, injustice and petty nationalisms that had bled it for centuries. In the end Che failed in his quest but he is recognized as that one-in-a-million personality who just might have pulled it off. Jon Lee Anderson has been given unprecedented access to the Cuban Government's archives and has had total co-operation from Che's widow, Aleida March, who has never previously spoken for publication about her late husband. He has obtained hitherto unpublished documents, including several of Che's personal diaries and, in the course of his research, broke open a twenty-eight-year-old mystery - the whereabouts of Che's body in Bolivia. There is no doubt that this monumental work will stand as the definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating, yet largely unexplored, historical figures.
Download or read book Che written by Jon Lee Anderson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable accomplishment, one that belongs next to such works of graphical history as the March series and Shigeru Mizuki's Showa books. By foregrounding the tension between myth and truth, Che illuminates the present state of our politics as well as the past.” —NPR The graphic adaptation of the groundbreaking and definitive biography of Che Guevara Che Guevara's legend is unmatched in the modern world. Since his assassination in 1967 at the age of thirty-nine, the Argentine revolutionary has become an internationally recognized icon, as revered as he is controversial. As a Marxist ideologue who sought to end global inequality by bringing down the American capitalist empire through armed guerrilla warfare, Che has few rivals in the Cold War era as an apostle of revolutionary change. In Che: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson and José Hernández present the man behind the myth, creating a complex and human portrait of this passionate idealist. Adapted from Jon Lee Anderson's definitive masterwork, Che vividly transports us from young Ernesto's medical school days as a sensitive asthmatic to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from his place of power alongside Castro, to his disastrous sojourn in the Congo, and his violent end in Bolivia. Through renowned Mexican artist José Hernández's drawings we feel the bullets wing past the head of the young rebel in Cuba, we smell the thick smoke of his and Castro's cigars, and scrutinize his proud face as he's called "Comandante" for the first time. With astonishing precision, color, and drama, Anderson and Hernández's Che makes us a witness to the revolutionary life and times of Che Guevara.
Download or read book The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi written by Vicki Mackenzie and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating biography of Freda Bedi, an English woman who broke all the rules of gender, race, and religious background to become both a revolutionary in the fight for Indian independence and then a Buddhist icon. She was the first Western woman to become a Tibetan Buddhist nun—but that pioneering ordination was really just one in a life full of revolutionary acts. Freda Bedi (1911–1977) broke the rules of gender, race, and religion—in many cases before it was thought that the rules were ready to be challenged. She was at various times a force in the struggle for Indian independence, spiritual seeker, scholar, professor, journalist, author, social worker, wife, and mother of four children. She counted among her friends, colleagues, and teachers Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and many others. She was a woman of spiritual focus and compassion who was also not without contradictions. Vicki Mackenzie gives a nuanced view of Bedi and of the forces that shaped and motivated this complex and compelling figure.
Download or read book Che Guevara a Revolutionary Life written by Ernesto Che Guevara and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jos Mart written by Alfred J. López and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The one and only book that treats the nineteenth-century Cuban figure José Martí as a human instead of an idol, an apostle, or an unblemished personality.” —Tom Miller, author of Revenge of the Saguaro José Martí (1853–1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the “Great Liberator” Simón Bolívar rivals Martí in stature and legacy. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the “apostle” of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint. In José Martí: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. López presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Martí biography, López strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Martí as Cuba’s greatest founding father and one of Latin America’s literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, López traces the full arc of Martí’s eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Ríos. The first major biography of Martí in over half a century and the first ever in English, José Martí is the most substantial examination of Martí’s life and work ever published. “The life, the history and the facts are all here in López’s volume.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book Marx s General written by Tristram Hunt and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Written with brio, warmth, and historical understanding, this is the best biography of one of the most attractive inhabitants of Victorian England, Marx's friend, partner, and political heir."—Eric Hobsbawm Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family, he spent his life enjoying the comfortable existence of a Victorian gentleman; yet he was at the same time the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless political tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so that Karl Marx could have the freedom to write. Although his contributions are frequently overlooked, Engels's grasp of global capital provided an indispensable foundation for communist doctrine, and his account of the Industrial Revolution, The Condition of the Working Class in England, remains one of the most haunting and brutal indictments of capitalism's human cost. Drawing on a wealth of letters and archives, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt plumbs Engels's intellectual legacy and shows us how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his exuberant personal life with his radical political philosophy. This epic story of devoted friendship, class compromise, ideological struggle, and family betrayal at last brings Engels out from the shadow of his famous friend and collaborator.
