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World Book Day 2020: Marrakesh Treaty
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Turn Right at Machu Picchu
by Mark AdamsWhat happens when an adventure travel expert-who's never actually done anything adventurous-tries to re-create the original expedition to Machu Picchu?
July 24, 1911, was a day for the history books. For on that rainy morning, the young Yale professor Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and encountered an ancient city in the clouds: the now famous citadel of Machu Picchu.
Nearly a century later, news reports have recast the hero explorer as a villain who smuggled out priceless artifacts and stole credit for finding one of the world's greatest archaeological sites.
Mark Adams has spent his career editing adventure and travel magazines, so his plan to investigate the allegations against Bingham by retracing the explorer's perilous path to Machu Picchu isn't completely far- fetched, even if it does require him to sleep in a tent for the first time.
With a crusty, antisocial Australian survivalist and several Quechua-speaking, coca-chewing mule tenders as his guides, Adams takes readers through some of the most gorgeous and historic landscapes in Peru, from the ancient Inca capital of Cusco to the enigmatic ruins of Vitcos and Vilcabamba.
Along the way he finds a still-undiscovered country populated with brilliant and eccentric characters, as well as an answer to the question that has nagged scientists since Hiram Bingham's time: Just what was Machu Picchu?
Gendered Paradoxes
by Fida J. AdelyIn 2005 the World Bank released a gender assessment of the nation of Jordan, a country that, like many in the Middle East, has undergone dramatic social and gender transformations, in part by encouraging equal access to education for men and women. The resulting demographic picture there--highly educated women who still largely stay at home as mothers and caregivers-- prompted the World Bank to label Jordan a "gender paradox. " In Gendered Paradoxes, Fida J. Adely shows that assessment to be a fallacy, taking readers into the rarely seen halls of a Jordanian public school--the al-Khatwa High School for Girls--and revealing the dynamic lives of its students, for whom such trends are far from paradoxical.
Through the lives of these students, Adely explores the critical issues young people in Jordan grapple with today: nationalism and national identity, faith and the requisites of pious living, appropriate and respectable gender roles, and progress. In the process she shows the important place of education in Jordan, one less tied to the economic ends of labor and employment that are so emphasized by the rest of the developed world. In showcasing alternative values and the highly capable young women who hold them, Adely raises fundamental questions about what constitutes development, progress, and empowerment--not just for Jordanians, but for the whole world.
Israeli Identities
by Yair AuronThe question of identity is one of present-day Israel's cardinal and most pressing issues. In a comprehensive examination of the identity issue, this study focuses on attitudes toward the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora; the Holocaust and its repercussions on identity; attitudes toward the state of Israel and Zionism; and attitudes toward Jewish religion.
Israeli Arab students (Israeli Palestinians) and Jewish Israeli students were asked corresponding questions regarding their identity. It was found that, rather than lessening its impact over the years, the Holocaust has become a major factor, at times the paramount factor in Jewish identity. Similarly, among Palestinians the Naqba has become a major factor in Palestinian-Israeli identity.
However, the overall results show that the identity of a Jewish citizen of Israel is not purely Israeli, nor is it purely Jewish. It is, to varying degrees, a synthesis of Jewish and Israeli components, depending on the particular sub-groups or sub-identities. The same holds for Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Palestinians who have neither a purely Israeli identity nor a purely Palestinian (or Arab) one.
Trust in the European Union in Challenging Times
by Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt and Niklas Bremberg and Anna Michalski and Lars OxelheimThis is the first book in the Interdisciplinary European Studies collection. This volume provides an interdisciplinary perspective on trust in the EU from the vantage point of political science, law and economics. It applies insights from a number of different dimensions – political institutions, legal convergence in criminal and civil law, social trust, digitalization, the diffusion of political values and norms, monetary convergence and the legitimacy of political systems – to approach the highly complex issue of trust in the EU in a clear-sighted, relevant and insightful manner.
Written by renowned experts in the field, the style is accessible and reader-friendly, yet concise, knowledgeable and thought-provoking. The individual chapters combine up-to-date research findings with reflections on on-going political debates and offer useful, concrete ideas on what steps the EU could take to address the challenge of trust. The book provides the reader with invaluable insights into how trust, or rather the lack of trust, poses a challenge to the future of the social, economic and political developments in the EU. It is a must-read for policy-makers, students and interested members of the public who feel concerned by the future of Europe.
An Australian Indigenous Diaspora
by Paul BurkeSome indigenous people, while remaining attached to their traditional homelands, leave them to make a new life for themselves in white towns and cities, thus constituting an “indigenous diaspora”.
This innovative book is the first ethnographic account of one such indigenous diaspora, the Warlpiri, whose traditional hunter-gatherer life has been transformed through their dispossession and involvement with ranchers, missionaries, and successive government projects of recognition.
By following several Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, far from their home settlements, this book explores how they sustained their independent lives, and examines their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.
Tragic Spirits
by Manduhai BuyandelgerThe collapse of socialism at the end of the twentieth century brought devastating changes to Mongolia. Economic shock therapy—an immediate liberalization of trade and privatization of publicly owned assets—quickly led to impoverishment, especially in rural parts of the country, where Tragic Spirits takes place. Following the travels of the nomadic Buryats, Manduhai Buyandelger tells a story not only of economic devastation but also a remarkable Buryat response to it—the revival of shamanic practices after decades of socialist suppression.
Attributing their current misfortunes to returning ancestral spirits who are vengeful over being abandoned under socialism, the Buryats are now at once trying to appease their ancestors and recover the history of their people through shamanic practice. Thoroughly documenting this process, Buyandelger situates it as part of a global phenomenon, comparing the rise of shamanism in liberalized Mongolia to its similar rise in Africa and Indonesia. In doing so, she offers a sophisticated analysis of the way economics, politics, gender, and other factors influence the spirit world and the crucial workings of cultural memory.
The Korean Popular Culture Reader
by Youngmin Choe and Kyung Hyun KimOver the past decade, Korean popular culture has become a global phenomenon. The "Korean Wave" of music, film, television, sports, and cuisine generates significant revenues and cultural pride in South Korea. The Korean Popular Culture Reader provides a timely and essential foundation for the study of "K-pop," relating the contemporary cultural landscape to its historical roots. The essays in this collection reveal the intimate connections of Korean popular culture, or hallyu, to the peninsula's colonial and postcolonial histories, to the nationalist projects of the military dictatorship, and to the neoliberalism of twenty-first-century South Korea. Combining translations of seminal essays by Korean scholars on topics ranging from sports to colonial-era serial fiction with new work by scholars based in fields including literary studies, film and media studies, ethnomusicology, and art history, this collection expertly navigates the social and political dynamics that have shaped Korean cultural production over the past century.Contributors. Jung-hwan Cheon, Michelle Cho, Youngmin Choe, Steven Chung, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Stephen Epstein, Olga Fedorenko, Kelly Y. Jeong, Rachael Miyung Joo, Inkyu Kang, Kyu Hyun Kim, Kyung Hyun Kim, Pil Ho Kim, Boduerae Kwon, Regina Yung Lee, Sohl Lee, Jessica Likens, Roald Maliangkay, Youngju Ryu, Hyunjoon Shin, Min-Jung Son, James Turnbull, Travis Workman
African Market Women
by Gracia C. ClarkIn these lively life stories, women market traders from Ghana comment on changing social and economic times and on reasons for their prosperity or decline in fortunes. Gracia Clark shows that market women are intimately connected with economic policy on a global scale. Many work at the intersection of sophisticated networks of transnational commerce and migration. They have dramatic memories of independence and the growth of their new nation, including political rivalries, price controls, and violent raids on the market.
The experiences of these women give substance to their reflections on globalization, capital accumulation, colonialism, technological change, environmental degradation, teenage pregnancy, marriage, children, changing gender roles, and spirituality. Clark's commentary illuminates the complex historical and cultural setting of these deeply revealing lives.
Afghan Modern
by Robert D. CrewsRugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age.
Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, the residents of Kabul, Kandahar, and other urban centers forged linkages with far-flung imperial centers throughout the Middle East and Asia. Focusing on the emergence of an Afghan state out of this imperial milieu, he shows how Afghan nation-making was part of a series of global processes, refuting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the “Great Game” of European powers and of Afghanistan as a “hermit kingdom.”
In the twentieth century, the pace of Afghan interaction with the rest of the world dramatically increased, and many Afghan men and women came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned the globe. Through revolution, war, and foreign occupations, Afghanistan became even more enmeshed in the global circulation of modern politics, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the tumultuous decades that followed.
Back in the USSR
by Rory Maclean and Nick DanzigerIan Fleming could not have imagined a better place to set a thriller: an upstart mini-state on the edge of Europe, Transnistria is a nowhereland, a Soviet museum occupied by Russian peace-keepers near the Black Sea.
Its oligarchs in Adidas tracksuits hunt wild boar with AK-47s. Its young people train for revolution at the Che Guevara High School of Political Leadership. Its secret factories have supplied arms to Chechnya and electrical cable to Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. Its isolation and tiny size belie the real threat it poses to the West. To many observers, Transnistria is the North Korea of Europe.
Yet its new president has launched a cunning coup of political marketing, appointing as his top ministers personable young women like the Facebook-savvy Cheryl Cole lookalike Foreign Minister, sexing-up the republic's image abroad, and using their glitter to obscure this internationally unrecognised non-state's shadowy past. Now Western ambassadors and foreign ministers are queuing up to meet them.
Rory MacLean and Nick Danziger, two of Europe's most intrepid travellers and chroniclers, document life in the only country in the world not to have recognised the collapse of the Soviet Union. Readers will find themselves truly back in the USSR… with a difference.
Canadians at Table
by Dorothy DuncanHere is one of the most unique and fascinating food histories in the world, exploring the diverse culinary history of Canada. Winner of the 2007 Canadian Culinary Book Award for Canadian Food Culture
In Canadians at Table we learn about lessons of survival from the First Nations, the foods that fueled fur traders, and the adaptability of early settlers to their new environment. As communities developed and transportation improved, waves of newcomers arrived, bringing memories of foods, beverages, and traditions they had known, which were almost impossible to implement in their new homeland. They discovered instead how to use native plants for many of their needs. Community events and institutions developed to serve religious, social, and economic needs from agricultural and temperance societies to Womens Institutes, from markets and fairs to community meals and celebrations.
First Kill Your Family
by Peter EichstaedtTold through the voices of those who have suffered, this illuminating exposé examines how a forgotten region of one of Africa's most promising nations--Uganda, dubbed "the pearl of Africa" by Winston Churchill--has been systematically destroyed by a bloody, senseless, and seemingly endless war that has gone largely unnoticed by the rest of the world.
For the past 20 years, the Lord's Resistance Army has ravaged northern Uganda and has been led by the reclusive Joseph Kony, a former witch doctor and self-professed spirit medium. Through the large-scale abduction and manipulation of children, Kony transformed his army into an efficient killing machine that has murdered nearly 100,000 and displaced two million people.
Kony utilized the society's pervasive belief in witchcraft to instill cultlike convictions in his fighters.
This insightful analysis delves into the war's foundations and argues that, much like Rwanda's genocide, international intervention is needed to stop Uganda's virulent cycle of violence.
This updated paperback edition includes a new afterword by the author that discusses developments since 2008, including failed attempts to capture Joseph Kony and the controversial Kony 2012 video.
Reinterpreting the Banana Republic
by Darío A. EuraqueIn this new analysis of Honduran social and political development, Dar degreeso Euraque explains why Honduras escaped the pattern of revolution and civil wars suffered by its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Within this comparative framework, he challenges the traditional Banana Republic 'theory' and its assumption that multinational corporations completely controlled state formation in Central America. Instead, he demonstrates how local society in Honduras's North Coast banana-exporting region influenced national political development.
According to Euraque, the reformism of the 1970s, which prevented social and political polarization in the 1980s, originated in the local politics of San Pedro Sula and other cities along the North Coast. Moreover, Euraque shows that by the 1960s, the banana-growing areas had become bastions of liberalism, led by local capitalists and organized workers. This regional political culture directly influenced events at the national level, argues Euraque. Specifically, the military coup of 1972 drew its ideology and civilian leaders from the North Coast, and as a result, the new regime was able to successfully channel popular unrest into state-sponsored reform projects.
Based on long-ignored sources in Honduran and American archives and on interviews, the book signals a major reinterpretation of modern Honduran history.
33 Men
by Jonathan FranklinHaving had unparalleled access to the Chilean mine disaster, award-winning journalist Jonathan Franklin takes readers to the heart of a remarkable story of human endurance, survival, and historic heroism.
33 Men is the groundbreaking, authoritative account of the Chilean mine disaster, one of the longest human entrapments in history. Rushing to the scene when the miners were discovered, Franklin obtained a coveted "Rescue Team" pass and reported directly from the front lines of the rescue operation, beyond police controls, for six weeks. Based on more than 110 intimate interviews with the miners, their families, and the rescue team, Franklin's narrative captures the remarkable story of these men and women, in details shocking, beautiful, comedic, and heroic.
Gripping and raw with never-before-revealed details, 33 Men is a true story that reads like a thriller.
The Dance of Politics
by Lisa GilmanElection campaigns, political events, and national celebration days in Malawi usually feature groups of women who dance and perform songs of praise for politicians and political parties. These lively performances help to attract and energize throngs of prospective voters.
However, as Lisa Gilman explains, “praise performing” is one of the only ways that women are allowed to participate in a male-dominated political system. Although political performances by women are not unique to Malawi, the case in Malawi is complicated by the fact that until 1994 allMalawianwomen were required to perform on behalf of the long-reigning political party and its self-declared “President for Life,” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda+.
This is the first book to examine the present-day situation, where issues of gender, economics and politics collide in surprising ways. Along with its solid grounding in the relevant literature, The Dance of Politics draws strength from Gilman’s first-hand observations and her interviews with a range of participants in the political process, from dancers to politicians.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig
by John GimletteA wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay-South America's darkly fabled, little-known "island surrounded by land."
Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette's eye-opening book-equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide-breaches the boundaries of this isolated land," and illuminates a little-understood place and its people.
It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States.
The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the "green hell" covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists-more or very-much-less peacefully-with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis.
Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey.
Escape from Camp 14
by Blaine HardenA New York Times bestseller, the shocking story of one of the few people born in a North Korean political prison to have escaped and survived.
North Korea is isolated and hungry, bankrupt and belligerent. It is also armed with nuclear weapons. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are being held in its political prison camps, which have existed twice as long as Stalin's Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. Very few born and raised in these camps have escaped. But Shin Donghyuk did.
In Escape from Camp 14, acclaimed journalist Blaine Harden tells the story of Shin Dong-hyuk and through the lens of Shin's life unlocks the secrets of the world's most repressive totalitarian state. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence-he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his own family.
Through Harden's harrowing narrative of Shin's life and remarkable escape, he offers an unequaled inside account of one of the world's darkest nations and a riveting tale of endurance, courage, and survival.
The "Greening" of Costa Rica
by Ana IslaSince the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept of sustainable development has become the basis for a vast number of "green industries" from eco-tourism to carbon sequestration.
In The "Greening" of Costa Rica, Ana Isla exposes the results of the economist's rejection of physical limits to growth, the biologist's fetish with such limits, and the indebtedness of peripheral countries.
Isla's case study is the 250,000 hectare Arenal-Tilaran Conservation Area, created in the late 1990s as the result of Canada-Costa Rica debt-for-nature swaps.
Rather than reducing poverty and creating equality, development in and around the conservation area has dispossessed and disenfranchised subsistence farmers, expropriating their land, water, knowledge, and labour.
Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted into commercial assets such as carbon credits, intellectual property, cash crops, open-pit mining, and eco-tourism, few of whose benefits flow to the local population.
Blood Ties and the Native Son
by Aksana IsmailbekovaA pioneering study of kinship, patronage, and politics in Central Asia, Blood Ties and the Native Son tells the story of the rise and fall of a man called Rahim, an influential and powerful patron in rural northern Kyrgyzstan, and of how his relations with clients and kin shaped the economic and social life of the region. Many observers of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia have assumed that corruption, nepotism, and patron-client relations would forestall democratization.
Looking at the intersection of kinship ties with political patronage, Aksana Ismailbekova finds instead that this intertwining has in fact enabled democratization—both kinship and patronage develop apace with democracy, although patronage relations may stymie individual political opinion and action.
Urban Dreams
by Claudia Roth† and Willemijn De Jong and Manfred Perlik and Noemi SteuerClaudia Roth's work on Bobo-Dioulasso, a city of half a million residents in Burkina Faso, provides uniquely detailed insight into the evolving life-world of a West African urban population in one of the poorest countries in the world. Closely documenting the livelihood strategies of members of various neighbourhoods, Roth’s work calls into question established notions of “the African family” as a solidary network, documents changing marriage and kinship relations under the impact of a persistent economic crisis, and explores the increasingly precarious social status of young women and men.
Planet India
by Mira KamdarIndia is everywhere: on magazine covers and cinema marquees, at the gym and in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. Through incisive reportage and illuminating analysis, Mira Kamdar explores India's astonishing transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse. She takes us inside India, reporting on the people, companies, and policies defining the new India and revealing how it will profoundly affect our future -- financially, culturally, politically.
The world's fastest-growing democracy, India has the youngest population on the planet, and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Its market has the potential to become the world's largest. As one film producer told Kamdar when they met in New York, "Who needs the American audience? There are only 300 million people here." Not only is India the ideal market for the next new thing, but with a highly skilled English-speaking workforce, elite educational institutions, and growing foreign investment, India is emerging as an innovator of the technology that is driving the next phase of the global economy.
While India is celebrating its meteoric rise, it is also racing against time to bring the benefits of the twenty-first century to the 800 million Indians who live on less than two dollars per day, to find the sustainable energy to fuel its explosive economic growth, and to navigate international and domestic politics to ensure India's security and its status as a global power. India is the world in microcosm: the challenges it faces are universal -- from combating terrorism, poverty, and disease to protecting the environment and creating jobs. The urgency of these challenges for India is spurring innovative solutions, which will catapult it to the top of the new world order. If India succeeds, it will not only save itself, it will save us all. If it fails, we will all suffer. As goes India, so goes the world.
Mira Kamdar tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and our world. Provocative, timely, and essential, Planet India is the groundbreaking book that will convince Americans just how high the stakes are -- what there is to lose, and what there is to gain from India's meteoric rise.
Qatar
by Mehran KamravaThe Persian Gulf state of Qatar has fewer than 2 million inhabitants, virtually no potable water, and has been an independent nation only since 1971.
Yet its enormous oil and gas wealth has permitted the ruling al Thani family to exert a disproportionately large influence on regional and even international politics.
Qatar is, as Mehran Kamrava explains in this knowledgeable and incisive account of the emirate, a "tiny giant": although severely lacking in most measures of state power, it is highly influential in diplomatic, cultural, and economic spheres. Kamrava presents Qatar as an experimental country, building a new society while exerting what he calls "subtle power." It is both the headquarters of the global media network Al Jazeera and the site of the U.S. Central Command's Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center. Qatar has been a major player during the European financial crisis, it has become a showplace for renowned architects, several U.S. universities have established campuses there, and it will host the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Qatar's effective use of its subtle power, Kamrava argues, challenges how we understand the role of small states in the global system. Given the Gulf state's outsized influence on regional and international affairs, this book is a critical and timely account of contemporary Qatari politics and society.
Inside the Kingdom
by Robert LaceySaudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: it sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world, and yet the country's roiling disaffection produced sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, driven by contemporary technology, and yet its powerful religious establishment would have its customs and practices rolled back to match those of the Prophet Muhammed over a thousand years ago.
In a world where events in the Middle East continue to have geopolitical consequences far beyond the region's boundaries, an understanding of this complex nation is essential.
With Inside the Kingdom, British journalist and bestselling author Robert Lacey has given us one of the most penetrating and insightful looks at Saudi Arabia ever produced. More than twenty years after he first moved to the country to write about the Saudis at the end of the oil boom, Lacey has returned to find out how the consequences of the boom produced a society at war with itself. Filled with stories told by a broad range of Saudis, from high princes and ambassadors to men and women on the street, Inside the Kingdom is in many ways the story of the Saudis in their own words.
These Truths
by Jill LeporeIn the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.
Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—"these truths," Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?
These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.
Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.
Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."
A New York Times Bestseller
The Path Between the Seas
by David McculloughThe National Book Award–winning epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal, a first-rate drama of the bold and brilliant engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph, told by master historian David McCullough.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal. In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise.
The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.
Winner of the National Book Award for history, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the Cornelius Ryan Award (for the best book of the year on international affairs), The Path Between the Seas is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of technology, international intrigue, and human drama.