VersoBooks.com

Sort by

Most Recent Discussion
- Most Recent Response
- Most Responses

TURKISH / ARMENIAN / AMERICAN discourse GROUP & Educational TRAVEL in LOS ANGELES area universities! We would like to add your book to our reading list :)

Barev-Merhaba-Hello!
Your book & interview on Al-Jazeera was very inspiring!! Please **join or spread the word** about our related group of Professors, Students, Alumni & Community Members from Turkish, Armenian & American backgrounds! We started 1.5 years ago at the University of California, Irvine, with students, alumni & community members - some of whom had never before talked to the ''other'' - and ended with an amazing journey very reminiscent of your wonderful book :)

ALL narratives are welcome & scholarly articles/oral history accounts are discussed on a weekly basis (suggestions welcome!), culminating in an educational journey to BOTH countries (funded by individual donations only, and bake sales if needed)!

We **just came back** from talking 1:1 with nearly 40 high-level speakers (Politicians, historians, artists, architects, film makers, business people, journalists, every-day people, students etc.) in Turkey and Armenia (4 cities over an 8 day Spring Break!) & are doing panel discussions about our trip & process now (we had 100 people come to our first event!)! Interested in hearing our panel of speakers or starting your own chapter through your local college or university? Please contact: info [at] olivetreeinitiative.org! Thank you!

Could we please talk with you on our next trip (2013)? Also, do you have any suggestions for who we talk to next time around? Our full itinerary of who we talked with (on an informal, non recorded basis) is here for your reference: http://www.olivetreeinitiative.org/the-trip/turkey-armenia-curriculum-2012/.

Sincerely,
-Aysha Ruya Cohen , UC Irvine ''Olive Tree Initiative'', Founding Member
(Follow us on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/olivetreeinit)

In response to Deep Mountain by Ece Temelkuran

Post a response
Why not in paperback?

The price of the hardback edition is prohibitively expensive to all except academics. How about a paperback edition for the rest of us?

In response to The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1 by Rosa Luxemburg

4 responses Post a response
A brilliant analysis, but no practical proposals.

Perry Anderson has produced a brilliant study of the EU, the organisation which poses the greatest threat to us in Britain today. He displays, as usual, his peerless acuity and huge range of reference. This book includes superb surveys of France, Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Turkey, but not of Britain. Anderson explains grandly, “I do not regret the omission of Britain, whose history since the fall of Thatcher has been of little moment.” (It was not a ‘fall’ - we pushed her out.) He refers to ‘England’ three pages later, then to Britain again, then to the UK, a slippage whose uncharacteristic uncertainty betrays his disdain for its object. He shows that the EU had no democratic foundations. Jean Monnet, the ‘father of Europe’, was an international financier, never elected to anything. Now the EU ‘more and more openly flouts the popular will’. Anderson rightly cites the falls in EU election turnout as evidence that the EU ‘wants even a modicum of popular credibility’. Yet he inconsistently writes of US elections that high abstention rates are ‘the surest sign of popular contentment with society as it is’. Anderson observes sensibly of Le Pen’s Front National, “Immigration is a minority phenomenon, virtually by definition, as war between the classes was not. In consequence, xenophobic responses to it, however ugly, have little power of political multiplication. Aron, who had witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany and knew what he was talking about, understood this from the start, criticizing panicky over-estimations of the Front. In effect, from the mid-eighties onwards its electoral scores oscillated within a fixed range, never dropping much below a national average of 10 per cent and never rising above 15 per cent.” There is no need to obsess about the far tinier BNP. On the EU’s economic policies, he quotes EU-enthusiast Andrew Moravcsik: “the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones.” And, “The EU is basically about business.” Its Constitution makes a ‘highly competitive’ market ‘free of distortions’ a legal obligation, wrecking a ‘social Europe’. Inside monetary union, “The historic commitments … to full employment and social services … cease to have any further institutional purchase.” Growth suffers too. Before the euro started in 1999, growth was 2.4 per cent a year, after, 2.1 per cent. Non-euro EU members grew faster than euro members. Eurozone income per head rose more slowly than in the previous decade, while productivity growth halved. Anderson points out that British governments always sought a wider EU, wanting to use the ‘vast reserve armies of cheap labour in the East, exerting downward pressure on wage costs in the West’. He shows the EU’s embrace of capitalism, its contempt for democracy and its failure to create either a European society or a common culture. He ends the book with the feeblest of forecasts – “But it remains unlikely that time and contradiction have come to a halt.” He is brilliant at tracing intellectuals’ responses to problems, but not at engaging with the problems or proposing solutions.

In response to The New Old World by Perry Anderson

Post a response
New edition or re-issue?

The publication date is given as January 2012 but this book first appeared decades ago.

In response to Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? by Arno Mayer

Post a response
It is great to see a critical piece on Thomas Friedman given the undue veneration he is accorded in U.S. society. Now, what is still needed is a critique of his domestic issues counter part at the NYT, David Brooks. Won't someone, please, write a book exp

Book on Brooks still needed

In response to The Imperial Messenger by Belén Fernández

4 responses Post a response

< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 >

View discussions about

Want to start a discussion?

Sort by