Over the last three decades, Michiko Kakutani has been thinking and writing about the demise of objective truth in popular culture, academia, and contemporary politics. In The Death of Truth, she connects the dots to reveal the slow march of untruth up to our present moment, when Red State and Blue State America have little common ground, proven science is once more up for debate, and all opinions are held to be equally valid. (And, more often than not, rudely declared online.) The wisdom of the crowd has diminished the power of research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the "facts" that best confirm our biases.With wit, erudition, and remarkable insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.

    . . serious, entertaining, provocative and distinctive." --Cleveland Plain Dealer In the fifty years since his suicide amid the ruins of Berlin, Adolf Hitler has been the subject of more biographies than any comparable figure of our time--and at the center of a crucial historical debate over the nature of evil and moral responsibility in the twentieth century. In this brilliant and original book, the historian John Lukacs climbs above the fray to produce a definitive "history of a history: the history of the evolution of our understanding of Hitler's life and our debates about its meaning."Like an expert attorney, Lukacs puts the biographies on trial, identifying their strengths, weaknesses, and hidden agendas. And through their intersecting and conflicting accounts, he addresses the enduring enigmas surrounding the demiurge of the Third Reich. Was Hitler a revolutionary or a reactionary? How successful was he as a statesman and a strategist? What was his primary motive for the extermination of the Jews? The Hitler of History answers these questions as fully as any modern work can hope to, with an intellectual boldness that makes it absolutely essential to any understanding of the post-Hitler world."Lukacs is a shrewd historian and an engaging writer . . . a sharp and sober portrait." --Philadelphia Inquirer

    Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths.After a long stay on Israel’s bestseller list, and winning the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, The Invention of the Jewish People is finally available in English. The central importance of the conflict in the Middle East ensures that Sand’s arguments will reverberate well beyond the historians and politicians that he takes to task. Without an adequate understanding of Israel’s past, capable of superseding today’s opposing views, diplomatic solutions are likely to remain elusive. In this iconoclastic work of history, Shlomo Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.

    This book documents those conversations where Hitler talked freely of his aims, his early life, and his plans for world conquest.

    The smallest of the extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II, Sobibor was where now-retired auto worker John Demjanjuk has been accused of working as a prison guard. Sobibor also was the scene of the war's biggest prisoner escape.   Richard Rashke's interviews with eighteen of  those who survived provide the foundation for this volume. He also draws on books, articles, and diaries to make vivid the camp, the uprising, and the escape. In the afterword, Rashke relates how the Polish government in October 1993, observed the fiftieth anniversary of the escape and how it has beautified the site since a film based on his book appeared on Polish television.

    The French turned them over to the Gestapo, who imprisoned them. Dudach was executed by firing squad in May; Delbo remained in prison until January 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbruck, where she remained until the end of the war. This book - Delbo's vignettes, poems and prose poems of life in the concentration camp and afterwards - is a literary memoir. It is a document by a female resistance leader, a non-Jew and a writer who transforms the experience of the Holocaust into prose.

    This classic work of the sixteenth century political philosopher, in reply to Machiavelli's The Prince, seeks to answer the question of why people submit to the tyranny of government, and as such, has exerted an important influence on the traditions of dissidence from Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Tolstoy, to Gandhi.

    During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget is a riveting memoir, an illuminating history, and an urgent call for remembering.

    VI Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism was one of the first attempts to account for the increasing importance of the world market in the twentieth century. Originally published in 1916, Imperialism explains how colonialism and the First World War were inherent features of the global development of the capitalist economy.In a new introduction, Norman Lewis and James Malone contrast Lenin's approach with that adopted by contemporary theories of globalisation. They argue that, while much has changed since Lenin wrote, his theoretical framework remains the best method for understanding recent global developments.

    '[A] masterpiece of reportorial thoroughness, painstaking research, and serious reflection.' Edward Said

    With clarity as well as a sharp eye for historical detail, Hazard depicts the progressive erosion of the respect for tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage that had characterized classicism. He shows how a new awareness of the countries beyond Europe encouraged a fresh critical re-evaluation of European institutions and how the growth of modern science and scientific method threatened the accepted intellectual order, while also prompting prosecution of free inquiry.Hazard goes on to consider the situation of the new thinkers who confronted this turbulent world, from Locke, who sought the foundations of reality in sensation and so paved the way for Rousseau, to Bayle, the Huguenot exile whose great dictionary taught Voltaire and his generation that morality could be separated from religion. Throughout, Hazard conveys the excitement of a revolution, the impact of which continues to be felt in our own time.

    Meant as a practical guide for the aspiring hippie, Steal This Book captures Hoffman's puckish tone and became a cult classic with over 200,000 copies sold. Outrageously illustrated by R. Crumb, it nevertheless conveys a serious message to all would-be revolutionaries: You don't have to take it anymore. "All Power to the Imagination was his credo. Abbie was the best." —Studs Terkel

    Che's call to action, his proclamation of _invincibility_-the ultimate victory of revolutionary forces-continues to influence the course of Latin American history and international relations. His amazing life story has lifted him to almost legendary status. This edition of Che's classic work Guerrilla Warfare contains the text of his book, as well as two later essays titled _Guerrilla Warfare: A Method_ and _Message to the Tricontinental._ A detailed introduction by Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr., examines Guevara's text, his life and political impact, the situation in Latin America, and the United States' response to Che and to events in Latin America. Loveman and Davies also provide in-depth case studies that apply Che's theories on revolution to political situations in seven Latin American countries from the 1960s to the present. Also included are political chronologies of each country discussed in the case studies and a postscript tying the analyses together. This book will help students gain a better understanding of Che's theoretical contribution to revolutionary literature and the inspiration that his life and Guerrilla Warfare have provided to revolutionaries since the 1960s. This volume is an invaluable addition to courses in Latin American studies and political science.

    They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.

    Its principles can be found in our Bill of Rights and in the Constitution. But what was this strange document that dwells on tax relief and greater fishing rights, and how did it gain legendary status?Dan Jones takes us back to 1215, the turbulent year when the Magna Carta was just a peace treaty between England’s King John and a group of self-interested, violent barons who were tired of his high taxes and endless foreign wars. The treaty would fail within two months of its confirmation. But this important document marked the first time a king was forced to obey his own laws. Jones’s 1215 follows the story of the Magna Carta’s creation, its failure, and the war that subsequently engulfed England and is book that will appeal to fans of microhistories of pivotal years like 1066, 1491, and especially 1776—when American patriots, inspired by that long-ago defiance, dared to pick up arms against another English king.