Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Surviving the 21st Century

  Saúl Alvídrez, Noam Chomsky,...

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  Explore freedom, power, and the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century with two extraordinary thinkersTwo world-renowned figures of contemporary politics come together to debate alternatives for the future: José "Pepe" Mujica, former President of Uruguay and an ex-guerrilla who acquired an international following for his message of sustainability and common sense, and Noam Chomsky, who revolutionized linguistics and has become a beacon for radical thinking around the world. From the meeting of these peerless figures emerge reflections on the major global issues of our time: climate change, corruption, populism, the crisis of capitalism, and the logic of the market economy, among many others. Speaking especially to younger generations who inherited an unstable world, Chomsky and Mujica emphasize the values required to survive the challenges of the twenty-first century and to build a new world: democracy, freedom, humility, and friendship. Brought together by Mexican activist Saúl Alvídrez, Chomsky and Mujica offer a wise and passionate guide to salvaging the future.

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  Playing Possum - How Animals...

  Susana Monsó, Mark Rowlands

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  When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralyzed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from being a uniquely human attribute, is widespread in the animal kingdom. 
   
   
   
  With humor and empathy, Susana Monsó tells the stories of ants who attend their own funerals, chimpanzees who clean the teeth of their dead, dogs who snack on their caregivers, crows who avoid the places where they saw a carcass, elephants obsessed with collecting ivory, and whales who carry their dead for weeks. Monsó, one of today's leading experts on animal cognition and ethics, shows how there are more ways to conceive of mortality than the human way, and challenges the notion that the only emotional reactions to death worthy of our attention are ones that resemble our own. 
   
   
   
  Blending philosophical insight with new evidence from behavioral science and comparative psychology, Playing Possum dispels the anthropocentric biases that cloud our understanding of the natural world, and reveals that, when it comes to death and dying, we are just another animal.

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  Popularizing the Past -...

  Nick Witham

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  Popularizing the Past tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history. 
    
  What’s the matter with history? For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past, Nick Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of five historians—Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner—who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history. 
    
  Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. He shows how the lives and writings of these five authors were fundamentally shaped by their desire to write histories that captivated both scholars and the elusive general reader. He also reveals how these authors’ efforts could not have succeeded without a publishing industry and a reading public hungry to engage with the cutting-edge ideas then emerging from American universities. As Witham’s book makes clear, before we can properly understand the heated controversies about American history so prominent in today’s political culture, we must first understand the postwar effort to popularize the past.

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  Swimming to Freedom - My Escape...

  Kent Wong

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  An extraordinary memoir of Communist China, the Cultural Revolution, and a yearning to be free 
   
  When Kent Wong was a young boy, his father, a patriotic Chinese official in the customs office in Hong Kong, joined an insurrection at work, allowing the family to return to the newly established People’s Republic of China. Hailed as heroes, they settled in the southern city of Canton. But Chairman Mao’s China was dangerous and unstable, with landlords executed en masse and millions dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. 
   
  In Swimming to Freedom, Kent Wong captures his childhood amidst revolutionary times, where boyish adventures and school days mixed with dire poverty and political persecution. Mao’s Hundred Flower Campaign had ensnared Kent’s father. A decade later, the Cultural Revolution closed schools, plunged the country into chaos, and scattered Kent and his sisters to disparate villages, where they struggled to eke out a bare existence. As the son of a “capitalist rightist,” Kent began to realize that with higher education closed to him, he had no future in China. So when he hooked up with a dissident underground and heard about fellow countrymen, known as “Freedom Swimmers,” braving great hardship to reach freedom by swimming across miles of open water to Hong Kong, he decided to join them, risking his life for a better future. A gripping, heart-rending journey, this memoir is a moving testament to the human spirit.

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  Revolutionaries - The Other...

  Sanjeev Sanyal

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  The history of India's struggle for freedom is usually told from the perspective of the non-violent movement. Yet, the story of armed resistance to colonial occupation is just as important. Names such as Vinayak Savarkar, Aurobindo Ghosh, Rashbehari Bose, Bagha Jatin, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and Subhas Chandra Bose are still widely remembered. Their story is almost always presented as acts of individual heroism and not as part of a wider movement that had any overarching strategy or significant impact on the overall struggle for Independence. In reality, the revolutionaries were part of a large network that sustained armed resistance against the British Empire for half a century. They not only created a wide network inside India but also established nodes in Britain, France, Thailand, Germany, Persia, Russia, Italy, Ireland, the United States, Japan and Singapore. At various points, they received official support and recognition from the governments of some of these countries. Even the internal dynamics of the Indian National Congress of the time cannot be understood without the revolutionaries, who enjoyed widespread support within the organization. This was no small-scale movement of naive individual heroism but one that involved a large number of extraordinary young men and women who were connected in multiple ways to each other and to the evolving events of their times.  
  Revolutionaries tells their story, one that is replete with swashbuckling adventure, intrigue, espionage, incredible bravery, diabolical treachery and shockingly unpredictable twists of fate.  
  Revolutionaries sheds light on the often-overlooked armed resistance to colonial rule in India, featuring the stories of iconic figures such as Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, and Subhas Chandra Bose, and highlighting the significant impact they had on the overall struggle for independence. 
  HarperCollins 2024

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  Paula Modersohn-Becker: A short...

  5 Minutes, 5 Minute Biographies,...

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  Paula Modersohn-Becker, German paintress of global fame: Life and work in a short biography! Everything you need to know, brief and concise. Infotainment, education and entertainment at its best!

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