Best of
International

2000

Foreign to Familiar: A Guide to Understanding Hot- And Cold-Climate Cultures


Sarah Lanier - 2000
    Whether you are a cross-cultural worker or simply live in a cross-cultural neighborhood, you'll find this book to be a valuable resource for understanding and relating to others from a different climate.

Imprisoned in Iran: International Adventures


Dan Baumann - 2000
    From the streets of Amsterdam to remote Pacific islands to the jungles of Ecuador and beyond, each international adventure that emerges is a dramatic episode that could be directed only by the hand of God. Wrongly accused of espionage and thrown into the most infamous high-security prison in Iran, one American man witnessed the powerful triumph of God's love over fear.

Wisdom of the Sadhu: Teachings of Sundar Singh


Kim Comer - 2000
    His beggar-like existence, his intense devotion, his mystical encounters with Jesus, and his simple yet profound parables became the stuff of legends. No one who met him - including the thousands who flocked to hear him during his visits to Europe, the Far East, and the United States - remained unaffected.Known in his lifetime as India's most famous convert to Christianity, Sundar Singh would not approve of that characterization. He loved Jesus and devoted his life to knowing and following him, but he never accepted Christianity's cultural conventions, even as he embraced its stark original teachings.Wisdom of the Sadhu, a collection of anecdotes, sayings, parables, and meditations, brings together the best of Sundar Singh's teachings. Couched as they are in a distinctly Indian idiom, they probe the essence of the Gospels with unusual freshness and offer insights of great depth and value to every serious seeker.

The Composition


Antonio Skármeta - 2000
    But when the soldiers come and take his friend Daniel's father away, things suddenly become much more complicated.Why, for instance, do Pedro's parents secretly listen to the radio every evening after dinner? And why does the government want Pedro and his classmates to write compositions about what their parents do in the evening?Humorous, serious and intensely human, this powerful picture book by Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta presents a situation all too familiar to children around the world. And for children it provides food for thought about freedom, moral choices and personal responsibility.

A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide


Linda Melvern - 2000
    For six years Linda Melvern has worked on the story of this horrendous crime, and this book, a classic piece of investigative journalism, is the result. Its new and startling information has the making of an international scandal.The book contains a full narrative account of how the genocide unfolded and describes its scale, speed and intensity. And the book provides a terrible indictment, not just of the UN Security Council, but even more so of governments and individuals who could have prevented what was happening but chose not to do so.Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews, the author also tells the story of the unrecognized heroism of those who stayed on during the genocide - volunteer UN peacekeepers, their Force Commander the Canadian Lt.-General Romeo A. Dallaire, and Philippe Gaillard, the head of a delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, helped by medical teams from Medecins Sans Frontieres.The international community, which fifty years ago resolved that genocide never happened again, not only failed to prevent it happening in Rwanda, but, as this book shows, international funds intended to help the Rwandan economy actually helped to create the conditions that made the genocide possible. Documents held in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, as well as hitherto unpublished evidence of secret UN Security Council deliberations in New York, reveal a shocking sequence of events.What happened in Rwanda shows that despite the creation of an organisation set up to prevent a repetition of genocide - for the UN is central to this task - it failed to do so, even when the evidence was indisputable. At a time when increasing attention is being given to the need for UN reform, this book provides evidence to urgently accelerate and focus that process. Only by understanding how and why the genocide happened can there be any hope that this new century will break with the dismal record of the last.

Totally Surrounded


Christina Di Stefano Davis - 2000
    From the streets of Amsterdam to remote Pacific islands to the jungles of Ecuador and beyond, each international adventure that emerges is a dramatic episode that could be directed only by the hand of God. Surrounded by militant rebels, which doctors, and the Philippine jungle, one woman relentlessly proclaimed the transforming power of God.

Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History


Erna Paris - 2000
    Combining storytelling with observation, Paris takes the reader on a remarkable journey through four continents to explore how nations reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events. She seeks out politicians and powerbrokers, as well as men and women living in the aftermath of repression, asking the question: Who gets to decide what actually happened yesterday, then to propagate the tale? How do people live with the consequences? Any why is it that many countries cannot lay the past to rest?Her journey takes her to the United States, with its memories of slavery; to South Africa, to sit in on a Truth and Reconciliation hearing to heal the divisions of apartheid; to Japan, to probe the unresolved struggled for truth in Second World history; to France, still wrestling with its wartime legacy of collaboration; to Germany, where ferocious 'memory battles' continue to swirl around the Holocaust; and to the former Yugoslavia, where she exposes the cynical shaping of historical memory, and the way the international community responded to the lethal outcome.Paris takes us directly to the places of reckoning; she finds hope in the way ordinary people grapple with defining events of their lives, and in the changing face of international justice. Long Shadows illuminates the modern world and makes us question where we stand as individuals in relation to our own collective histories.

The Beggar, The Thief and the Dogs, Autumn Quail


Naguib Mahfouz - 2000
    Assembled here is a collection of Mahfouz's artful meditations on the vicissitudes of post-Revolution Egypt. Diverse in style and narrative technique, together they render a rich, nuanced, and universally resonant vision of modern life in the Middle East.The Beggar is a complex tale of alienation and despair. In the aftermath of Nasser's revolution, a man sacrifices his work and family to a series of illicit love affairs. Released from jail in post-Revolutionary times, the hero ofThe Thief and the Dogs blames an unjust society for his ill fortune, eventually bringing himself to destruction. Autumn Quail is a tale of moral responsibility, isolation, and political downfall about a corrupt bureaucrat who is one of the early victims of the purge after the 1952 revolution in Egypt.

Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory


Yo'av Karny - 2000
    Moreover, in the 1990s Russia twice went to war in the Caucasus, and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a nation so tiny that it could fit into a single district of Moscow.What is it about the Caucasus that makes the region so restless, so unpredictable, so imbued with heroism but also with fanaticism and pain? In Highlanders, Yo'av Karny offers a better understanding of a region described as a "museum of civilizations," where breathtaking landscapes join with an astounding human diversity. Karny has spent many months among members of some of the smallest ethnic groups on earth, all of them living in the grim shadow of an unhappy empire. But his book is a journey not only to a geographic region but also to darker sides of the human soul, where courage vies with senseless vindictiveness; where honor and duty require people to share the present with long-dead ancestors, some real, some imaginary; and where an ancient way of life is drawing to an end under the combined weight of modernity and intolerance.

This Is The Tree: A Story Of The Baobab


Miriam Moss - 2000
    The baobab is a timeless feature of the African plains and has great cultural significance.

Operation China: Introducing All the People of China


Paul Hattaway - 2000
    These diverse cultures, from the blue-eyed Muslims of Xinjiang to the tribal people of the jungles of Yunnan, are presented using brilliantly colored photographs, anthropological and geographical data, maps, statistics and a prayer calendar. Operation China is indexed with an extensive bibliography of English and Chinese-language publications. Also available on CD-ROM.

The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion


Brendan O'Malley - 2000
    The island remains split in two, policed by the United Nations. Henry Kissinger claimed he could do nothing to stop this because of the Watergate crisis. The Cyprus Conspiracy provides crucial evidence that this was no failure of American foreign policy, revealing for the first time the explosive strategic reasons why Washington had to divide the island.

Rice Is Life


Rita Golden Gelman - 2000
    While eels slip through the mud and dragonflies flutter overhead, farmers plant seedlings in the wet rice field, or 'saweh.' Soon each plant is crowned with flowers, and tiny green kernels appear. Rain nourishes the kernels, which grow plump and sweet. The green plants turn golden and ripe, and everyone helps harvest the grain. When the harvest is finished, the farmers give thanks to the goddess of rice for a successful crop.From planting the seeds to harvesting the ripe grain, this beautiful, poetic book tells the story of rice and of the Balinese people, for whom rice is life.

The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender


Himani Bannerji - 2000
    Though they begin from experiences of non-white people living in Canada, they provide a critical theoretical perspective capable of exploring similar issues in other western and also third world countries. This reading of 'difference' includes but extends beyond the cultural and the discursive into political economy, state, and ideology. It cuts through conventional paradigms of current debates on multiculturalism. In particular, these essays take up the notion of 'Canada' - as the nation and the state - as an unsettled ground of contested hegemonies. They particularly draw attention to how the state of Canada is an unfinished one, and how the discourse of culture helps it to advance the legitimation claim which is needed by any state, especially one arising in a colonial context, with unsolved nationality problems. The myth of the 'two founding peoples', anglos and francophones, has always conveniently ignored the reality of First Nations. More recently, it has also ignored the entrance of non-European immigrants who may have a history of being indentured and politically marginalised and only begin struggling for political enfranchisement in their new homeland.

Karlheinz Weinberger: Photos, 1954-1995


Thomas Meyer - 2000
    In the 1950s he published numerous homoerotic photographs under the pseudonym "Jim" in Der Kreis (The Circle), the legendary international gay magazine that featured highly sophisticated photographs by, among others, George Platt Lynes and Herbert List. Weinberger was one of the first queer photographers to show his often working class models posing in their everyday surroundings. For Weinberger, eroticism was always grounded in the quotidian -- a revolutionary and courageous approach back in the 1950s. In the late 1950s Weinberger started to develop an obsessive interest in the nascent biker culture and its proud and self-confident celebration of the body, embarking on a longtime study of their lifestyle. In many ways, Weinberger's photographs will remind viewers of Kenneth Anger's cult classic Scorpio Rising. Weinberger's photographs are a unique document both of pre-Stonewall gay culture and postwar youth culture and its cycles. His erotic and provocative photographs are imbued with a mischievous sense of humor that makes them as vibrant and vital today as they were when they were first taken.

The Other Face of America: Chronicles of the Immigrants Shaping Our Future


Jorge Ramos - 2000
    Writing from his own heartfelt perspective as an immigrant, Jorge Ramos, one of the world’s most popular and well-respected Spanish-language television news broadcasters, listens to and explores stories of dozens of immigrants who decided to change their lives and risk everything -- families, jobs, history, and their own culture -- in order to pursue a better, freer, and opportunity-filled future in the United States.In his famously clear voice, Jorge Ramos brings to life the tales of individuals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, among other countries, and explains why they first immigrated, what their dreams are, how they deal with American racism, and what they believe their future in America will hold for them and their children.From the Vieques controversy to the "Spanglish" phenomenon to the explosion of Latino creativity in the arts, Ramos shows that there is a new face in America -- one whose colors and countries of origin are as diverse as the country it has adopted as home.

A Crash of Rhinos


Paisley Rekdal - 2000
    The tension between the public and the private saturates these poems with a breathless energy that carries the reader through Rekdal’s self-aware depiction of American culture and romance, complete with Harlequin romance novels and an account of her parents’ courtship. Though Rekdal delights in turning traditional images of love upside down, what she finally offers is a grateful and graceful view of humanity, which convinces us that, as she says in “Convocation”: “Nothing is a single moment . . . / No private event lacks history.”

The International Law Commission of the United Nations


Jeffrey S. Morton - 2000
    It sheds light on its functions and the process by which it pursues its stated goals of codifying and developing international law. It also addresses the dearth of systematic analysis of the Commission's work.

The Ultimate, Ultimate, Ultimate Mallworld: The 35th Anniversary Complete Mallworld Collection


S.P. Somtow - 2000
    Somtow has produced the Ultimate, Ultimate, Ultimate Mallworld collection. Included are all the original stories (and the one story left out of the Starblaze trade edition), all the ads for the Mallworld products (left out in the TOR mass market re-printing), and all the original artwork by Karl Kofoed (the artwork was not included in the TOR edition) and Kofoed's cover art (left out of the Meisha Merlin edition!) With a new introduction by the author. Mallworld was an iconic science fiction novel of the 1980s and a pungent satire of the commercialism of the era as well as eerily prophetic. The Selespridar have locked us, the planet Earth, part of our solar system, and our sun up in a force field because the rest of the Galaxy plain and simple does not want to associate with us. Do we care? Not really. We have Mallworld, the shopping center the size of a planet! So come along and play human pinball at the arcades, order your custom-designed baby at Storkways, Inc., experience your ultimate death at the Way Out Suicide Parlors-death by vampire is a special way to go and just one of the three-hundred ways you can decide to end your life.

The Hand of Nature: Butterflies, Beetles, and Dragonflies


Jacques Kerchache - 2000
    Composed of 69 boxes, Kerchache's collection is part of a tradition that dates back to the Renaissance, when people created curio rooms to house the discoveries of the great voyagers.

Crisis of the European Subject


Julia Kristeva - 2000
    A gem of a personal exploration by Julia Kristeva, examining contemporary issues such as European identity, the role of religion in political life, and the meaning of equality for women.

Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture


Irit Rogoff - 2000
    She uses the work of international contemporary artists to explore how art in the twentieth century has confronted and challenged issues of identity and belonging.Rogoff's dazzling and richly-illustrated study takes in painting, installation art, film and video by a wide range of artists including Charlotte Salomon, Ana Mendieta, Joshua Neustein, Yehoshua Glotman, Mona Hatoum, Hans Haacke, Ashley Bickerton, Alfredo Jaar and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Structuring her argument through themes of luggage, mapping, borders and bodies, Rogoff explores how artists have confronted twentieth century phenomena such as the horror of the Holocaust, the experience of diaspora at New York's Ellis Island, and, in the present day, disputed and fraught boundaries in the Middle East, the two Germanies, the Balkan states and the US-Mexican border.