Download or read book Leon Trotsky s Stopwatch written by Rax Rinnekangas and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico City - Autumn 2004. A Nordic filmmaker arrives in the city to make a documentary about a major architectural landmark - Luis Barragán's Casa Estudio house. He meets a Mexican woman who opens a totally new door into the world of the Russian Jewish ex-communist leader Leon Trotsky, who was murdered in Mexico in August 1940. The encounter sends the filmmaker on an extraordinary journey into an entirely new aspect of the most mistreated political figure of the 20th century and his philosophy. The novel is also an exceptional love story set in an era when the concept of time has lost its original meaning and climate change is just an unpleasant possibility.
Download or read book Cybernetic Revolutionaries written by Eden Medina and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.
Download or read book Economics for Real People written by Gene Callahan and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2002 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book New Atlantis Revisited written by Paul R. Josephson and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1958 construction began on Akademgorodok, a scientific utopian community modeled after Francis Bacon's vision of a "New Atlantis." The city, carved out of a Siberian forest 2,500 miles east of Moscow, was formed by Soviet scientists with Khrushchev's full support. They believed that their rational science, liberated from ideological and economic constraints, would help their country surpass the West in all fields. In a lively history of this city, a symbol of de-Stalinization, Paul Josephson offers the most complete analysis available of the reasons behind the successes and failures of Soviet science--from advances in nuclear physics to politically induced setbacks in research on recombinant DNA. Josephson presents case studies of high energy physics, genetics, computer science, environmentalism, and social sciences. He reveals that persistent ideological interference by the Communist Party, financial uncertainties, and pressures to do big science endemic in the USSR contributed to the failure of Akademgorodok to live up to its promise. Still, a kind of openness reigned that presaged the glasnost of Gorbachev's administration decades later. The openness was rooted in the geographical and psychological distance from Moscow and in the informal culture of exchange intended to foster the creative impulse. Akademgorodok is still an important research center, having exposed physics, biology, sociology, economics, and computer science to new investigations, distinct in pace and scope from those performed elsewhere in the Soviet scientific establishment.
Download or read book World War II written by Michael J. Lyons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly regarded for its concise clarification of the complexities of World War II, this book illuminates the origins, course, and long-range effects of the war. It provides a balanced account that analyzes both the European and Pacific theaters of operations and the connections between them. The Fifth Edition incorporates new material based on the latest scholarship, offering updated conclusions on key topics and expanded coverage throughout.
Download or read book Time in Marx written by Stavros Tombazos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates that the basic concepts of the three volumes of Capital come under different categories of time: "time of production" in the first volume is linear, “time of circulation” in the second is circular, while in the third volume “organic time” is the unity of the two. Capitalist relations emerge as a definite organisation of social time that obeys its own intrinsic criteria and operates as an autonomous, social subject. Reading Capital from this perspective, it becomes possible to restore its dialectical (Hegelian) logic – not in order to reveal the “real” Marx, but as a means to contribute to the understanding of the real, capitalist world with its present-day fetishes, its explosive contradictions and its ever deeper crises.
Download or read book We Modern People written by Anindita Banerjee and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How science fiction forged a unique Russian vision of modernity distinct from Western models
Download or read book The Time Traveler s Wife written by Audrey Niffenegger and published by Night Bookmobile Editions. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love. “Niffenegger’s inventive and poignant writing is well worth a trip” (Entertainment Weekly).
Download or read book Ocean of Sound written by David Toop and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ocean of Sound" begins in 1889 at the Paris Exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. A culture absorbed in perfume, light and ambient sound developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications. David Toop traces the evolution of this culture, through Erik Satie to the Velvet Undergound; Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix. David Toop, who lives in London, is a writer, musician and recording artist. His other books are "Rap Attack 3 "and "Exotica,"
Download or read book Omon Ra written by Viktor Pelevin and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A satire about the Soviet space program finds Omon, who has dreamed of space flight all of his life, enrolled as a cosmonaut only to learn that his task will be piloting a supposedly unmanned lunar vehicle to the Moon and remaining there to die.
Download or read book The Dialectics of Seeing written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1991-07-01 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.
Download or read book In 1926 written by Hans Ulrich GUMBRECHT and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thoroughly innovative work, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht evokes the year 1926 through explorations of such things as bars, boxing, movie palaces, hunger artists, airplanes, hair gel, bullfighting, film stardom and dance crazes. From the vantage points of Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York, the reader is allowed multiple itineraries, ultimately becoming immersed in the activities, entertainments, and thought patterns of the citizens of 1926.
Download or read book Ordinary Lives written by Ben Highmore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new study from Ben Highmore looks at the seemingly banal world of objects, work, daily media, and food, and finds there a scintillating array of passionate experience. Through a series of case studies, and building on his previous work on the everyday, Highmore examines our relationship to familiar objects (a favourite chair), repetitive work (housework, typing), media (distracted television viewing and radio listening) and food (specifically the food of multicultural Britain). A chair allows him to consider the history of flat-pack furniture as well as the lively presence of inorganic ‘stuff’ in our daily lives. Distracted television watching and radio listening becomes one of the preconditions for experiencing wonder through the media. Ordinary Lives links the concrete study of routine existence to theoretical reflection on everyday life. The book discusses philosophers such as Jacques Rancière, William James and David Hume and combines them with autobiographical testimonies, historical research and the analysis of popular culture to investigate the minutiae of day-to-day life. Highmore argues that aesthetic experience is embedded in the mundane sensory world of everyday life. He asks the reader to reconsider the negative associations of habit and routine, focusing specifically on the intrinsic ambiguity of habit (habit, we find out, is both rigid and adaptive). Rather than ask ‘what does everyday life mean?’ this book asks ‘what does everyday life feel like and how do our sensual, emotional and temporal experiences interconnect and intersect?’ Ordinary Lives is an accessible, animated and engaging book that is ideally suited to both students and researchers working in cultural studies, media and communication and sociology.
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 1612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Arcades Project written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 1100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources. 46 illustrations.
Download or read book Cornelius Castoriadis Political and Social Writings 1955 1960 from the workers struggle against bureaucracy to revolution in the age of modern capitalism written by Cornelius Castoriadis and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political and Social Writings:Volume 2, 1955–1960 was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. A series of writings by the man who inspired the students of the Workers' Rebellion in May of 1968. "Given the rapid pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the radical nature of these transformations, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, a consistent and radical critic of Soviet Marxism, gains renewed significance....these volumes are instructive because they enable us to trace his rigorous engagement with the project of socialist construction from his break with Trotskyism to his final breach with Marxism. . . and would be read with profit by all those seeking to comprehend the historical originality of events in the USSR and Eastern Europe." –Contemporary Sociology
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence written by Nigel West and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligence is now acknowledged as the hidden dimension to international diplomacy and national security. It is the hidden piece of the jigsaw puzzle of global relations that cements relationships, undermines alliances and topples tyrants, and after many decades of being deliberately overlooked or avoided, it is now regarded as a subject of legitimate study by academics and historians. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on espionage techniques, categories of agents, crucial operations spies, defectors, moles, double and triple agents, and the tradecraft they apply. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the international intelligence.
