David Baron. American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. xviii + 319 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York/London: Liveright Publishing, 2017. $27.95 (cloth).

Isis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 109 (2) ◽  
pp. 418-419
Author(s):  
Pamela Gossin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Moon ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Walsh

Saul bellow'sbookMr. Sammler's Planetdocuments contemporary life in New York as seen through the eyes of the hero Arthur Sammler, an ambitiously complex creation. A Polish Jew from Cracow, he had lived for several years in London on nodding terms with H. G. Wells, and had thus become attuned to the scientific humanism which optimistically visualized the world as the oyster ofhomo sapiens. Then by a dreadful irony he returned to Poland, where he was put in a concentration camp from which he escaped only after his wife's death and the cold-blooded murder of a German guard. Now living with Jewish relatives in New York, Sammler reads little except the treatises of Meister Eckhart in which that fourteenth-century Dominican urges the renunciation of worldly possessions to discover God. Simultaneously Sammler is casting his one sound eye dispassionately and without condemnation over New York life. He lectures on Wells at Columbia, only to have the microphone wrenched from his hand by a revolting student. He witnesses the anarchy of New York society—the pickpocketing, the violence, the hasty evasive action of those avoiding involvement. He sees the avarice of relatives, the nephew ransacking the attics while the uncle lies dying in hospital. He observes the obsessive role accorded to sex—the wife-swapping, the promiscuous hunger of emancipated female relatives. And with this bleak vision of the abrogation of reason and the growth of moral anarchy, he meditates on the possibility of a fresh start for man on the moon.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 240-243
Author(s):  
Nicole Nau

Dace Prauliņš, Latvian. An Essential Grammar. London & New York: Routledge, 2012. ɪsʙɴ 978-0-415-57692-5. Descriptive grammars of Modern Latvian written in English are still something of a rarity, and any such book will be warmly welcomed bylinguists as well as by the growing number of people learning Latvian all over the world. It is for the latter group that Dace Prauliņš wrote this book, and it would be unfair to review it as a scholarly contribution to the analysis of Latvian grammar.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Janet Klein ◽  
David Romano ◽  
Michael M. Gunter ◽  
Joost Jongerden ◽  
Atakan İnce ◽  
...  

Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 352 pp. (ISBN: 9780199603602).Mohammed M. A. Ahmed, Iraqi Kurds and Nation-Building. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 294 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-137-03407-6), (paper). Ofra Bengio, The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State. Boulder, CO and London, UK: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012, xiv + 346 pp., (ISBN 978-1-58826-836-5), (hardcover). Cengiz Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey, from Protest to Resistance, London: Routledge, 2012, 256 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-415—68047-9). Aygen, Gülşat, Kurmanjî Kurdish. Languages of the World/Materials 468, München: Lincom Europa, 2007, 92 pp., (ISBN: 9783895860706), (paper).Barzoo Eliassi, Contesting Kurdish Identities in Sweden: Quest for Belonging among Middle Eastern Youth, Oxford: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 234 pp. (ISBN: 9781137282071).


Author(s):  
Anwar Ibrahim

This study deals with Universal Values and Muslim Democracy. This essay draws upon speeches that he gave at the New York Democ- racy Forum in December 2005 and the Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in Istanbul in April 2006. The emergence of Muslim democracies is something significant and worthy of our attention. Yet with the clear exceptions of Indonesia and Turkey, the Muslim world today is a place where autocracies and dictatorships of various shades and degrees continue their parasitic hold on the people, gnawing away at their newfound freedoms. It concludes that the human desire to be free and to lead a dignified life is universal. So is the abhorrence of despotism and oppression. These are passions that motivate not only Muslims but people from all civilizations.


2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Göran Gunner

Authors from the Christian Right in the USA situate the September 11 attack on New York and Washington within God's intentions to bring America into the divine schedule for the end of the world. This is true of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and other leading figures in the ‘Christian Coalition’. This article analyses how Christian fundamentalists assess the roles of the USA, the State of Israel, Islam, Iraq, the European Union and Russia within what they perceive to be the divine plan for the future of the world, especially against the background of ‘9/11’. It argues that the ideas of the Christian Right and of President George W. Bush coalesce to a high degree. Whereas before 9/11 many American mega-church preachers had aspirations to direct political life, after the events of that day the President assumes some of the roles of a mega-religious leader.


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