LITMIR.BIZ

A blistering firsthand account of the conflict in Homs by the internationally acclaimed author of The Kindly Ones. “We fight for our religion, for our women, for our land, and lastly to save our skin. As for them, they’re only fighting to save their skin.” In 2012, Jonathan Littell traveled to the heart of the Syrian uprising, smuggled in by the Free Syrian Army to the historic city of Homs. For three weeks, he watched as neighborhoods were bombed and innocent civilians murdered. His notes on what he saw on the ground speak directly of horrors that continue today in the ongoing civil war. Amid the chaos, Littell bears witness to the lives and the hopes of freedom fighters, of families caught within the conflict, as well as of the doctors who attempt to save both innocents and combatants who come under fire. As government forces encircle the city, Littell charts the first stirrings of the fundamentalist movement that would soon hijack the revolution. Littell’s notebooks were originally the raw material for the articles he wrote upon his return for the French daily Le Monde. Published nearly immediately afterward in France, Syrian Notebooks has come to form an incomparable close-up account of a war that still grips the Middle East—a classic of war reportage.

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Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century. Kristin Ross’s new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris.The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own ‘working existence.’ Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.

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What is life really like in Gaza and the West Bank? For more than six decades, Israel and Palestine have been the center of one of the world’s most widely reported yet least understood human rights crises. In Palestine Speaks men and women from the West Bank and Gaza describe in their own words how their lives have been shaped by the conflict. This includes eyewitness accounts of the most recent attacks on Gaza in 2014.The collection includes Ebtihaj, whose son, born during the first intifada, was killed by Israeli soldiers during a night raid almost twenty years later. Nader, a professional marathon runner from the Gaza Strip who is determined to pursue his dream of competing in international races despite countless challenges, including severe travel restrictions and a lack of resources to help him train.

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Among the first written accounts of the concentration camps—a major literary and historical discovery. While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public. Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Reportdetails the authors’ harrowing deportation to Auschwitz, and how those who disembarked from the train were selected for work or extermination. As well as being a searing narrative of everyday life in the camp, and the organization and working of the gas chambers, it constitutes Levi’s first lucid attempts to come to terms with the raw horror of events that would drive him to create some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature and testimony. Auschwitz Reportis a major literary and historical discovery.

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Author of the acclaimed Liberalism: A Counter-History dissects the revisionist attempts to expunge or criminalize revolutions. War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that’s grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It’s a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or François Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an “illness” originating with the French Revolution. The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past, but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes, as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson. In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt, providing a new perspective on the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions.

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Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for “freedom” after the American Civil War. How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the jubilee, using fresh sources and texts to build on the leading historical accounts of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Reinstating ex-slaves’ own “freedom dreams” in constructing these histories, Roediger creates a masterful account of the emancipation and its ramifications on a whole host of day-to-day concerns for Whites and Blacks alike, such as property relations, gender roles, and labor.

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A bold new history of the French Revolution from the standpoint of the peasants, workers, women and sans culottes. The legacy of the French Revolution has remained a fascinating and contentious subject for over two centuries. Instead of seeing the revolution as an aberrant bloodbath on the path to a liberal society, this new book, the first significant history of the French Revolution in over twenty years, maintains that it fundamentally changed the Western world. Looking at history from the bottom up, the history of working people and peasants, Hazan asks: How did they see their opportunities? What were they fighting for? What was the Terror and could it be justified? And how was the revolution stopped in its tracks? This is vivid historical writing – the multitude of voices of the Revolution come to life. Hazan shows how only through the people can we fully understand the legacy of the French Revolution.

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Twenty-first-century revolution in one of the remotest places in the world. In 1996, when Nepal’s Maoists launched their armed rebellion, their ideology was widely considered obsolete and they had limited public support. By 2008 they had gained access to state power and their ambitious plan of social transformation dominated the national agenda. How did this become possible? The Bullet and the Ballot Box offers a rich and sweeping account of a decade of revolutionary upheaval. Adhikari draws on a broad range of sources, including novels, letters and diaries, to illuminate both the history and human drama of the Maoist rebellion. An indispensible guide to Nepal’s recent history, the book also offers a fascinating case study of how communist ideology has been reinterpreted and translated into political action in the twenty-first century.

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The classic social history of the great English agricultural uprising of 1830, from two of the greatest modern historians. In our increasingly mechanized age, the Swing revolts are a timely record of the relationship between technological advance, labour and poverty. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism swept from the cities into the countryside, and tensions mounted between agricultural workers and employers. From 1830 on, a series of revolts, known as the «Swing» shook England to its core. Landowners wanting to make their land more profitable started to use machinery to harvest crops, causing widespread misery among rural communities. Captain Swing reveals the background to that upheaval, from its rise to its fall, and shines a light on the people who tried to change the world and save their livelihoods.

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A radical intepretation of the divisions leading up to the declaration of war in 1914. The Darkest Days shows how the war-hungry leaders and the right-wing press hustled the nation into war, making only the barest efforts to save the peace. As a result the declaration was the result of political negotiation, dishonesty and willful belligerence that split the cabinet and kept the opposition and the nation itself in the dark until it was too late. Through a forensic study of the personal papers of many of the key figures on both sides of the debate, historian Douglas Newton pieces together what really went on in the frenetic weeks between the assassination in Sarajevo and Britain's declaration of war upon Germany on Tuesday 4 August 1914. Many recently published histories of Britain's Great War embrace the conflict as a good war—irresistible, righteous—and popular. It has become almost heretical to offer criticism of Britain's intervention. This book presents a new critical examination of the government's choice for war, and weaves into the story an account of those «radicals» and other activists who urged neutral diplomacy in 1914.

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