Libros de Biografías, página 35 de 686

Il libro racconta le ragioni del dolore collettivo e dello smarrimento che si diffusero di fronte all'agonia, alla morte, ai funerali di Enrico Berlinguer. Ma soprattutto cerca di restituire cio che di esemplare, unico, valido ancora resta dell'eredita politica del segretario del PCI. Da allora, molto e cambiato. Meno una cosa. Il bisogno che la politica sia coraggio.

Not since the end of the Roman Empire, almost fifteen hundred years earlier, is there a parallel, in Europe at least, to the fall of the German nation in 1945. Industrious and inventive, home over centuries to a disproportionate number of western civilization's greatest thinkers, writers, scientists and musicians, Germany had entered the twentieth century united, prosperous, and strong, admired by almost all humanity for its remarkable achievements. During the 1930s, embittered by one lost war and then scarred by mass unemployment, Germany embraced the dark cult of National Socialism. Within less than a generation, its great cities lay in ruins and its shattered industries and cultural heritage seemed utterly beyond saving. The Germans themselves had come to be regarded as evil monsters. After six years of warfare how were the exhausted victors to handle the end of a horror that to most people seemed without precedent? In Exorcising Hitler, Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's year zero and what came after. As he describes the final Allied campaign, the hunting down of the Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of peoples in central and eastern Europe, the attitudes of the conquerors, the competition between Soviet Russia and the West, the hunger and near starvation of a once proud people, the initially naive attempt at expunging Nazism from all aspects of German life and the later more pragmatic approach, we begin to understand that despite almost total destruction, a combination of conservatism, enterprise and pragmatism in relation to former Nazis enabled the economic miracle of the 1950s. And we see how it was only when the '60s generation (the children of the Nazi era) began to question their parents with increasing violence that Germany began to awake from its 'sleep cure'.

Ven la luz, al fin, las Memorias de Joaquín Costa, texto revelador donde los haya del carácter y las ambiciones, glorias y miserias del célebre pensador. Ideadas como memorándum, minuta de acontecimientos y censo de progresos y fracasos personales en este valle de lagrimas, las Memorias ayudan a resolver el enigma que entrañaba la pregunta ¿Quien fue Costa? Y es que el fue el primer interesado en despejar esa incognita a traves de unas paginas terribles, agonicas, hijas de un caracter fuerte que termino reconociendose en el espejo, doloroso aunque consolador, de su propio discurso autobiografico entre 1864 y 1878.

During the four years of physician Margaret Overton's acrimonious divorce, she dated widely and sometimes indiscriminately, determined to find her soulmate and live happily ever after. But then she discovered she had a brain aneurysm. She discovered it at a particularly awkward moment on a date with one of many Mr Wrongs. Overton, an anaesthetist, realised she had been so busy looking after the needs of others that she had forgotten to look after herself. So she set out on a course to take control of her future and finally become independent of men. Good in a Crisis is Overton's laugh-out-loud account of dealing with the most serious of life's problems: loss of life, loss of love and loss of innocence. It is a story of spirituality and self-delusion; of coming of age in adulthood and of navigating the terrible events that can cluster in midlife. Honest, hopeful and hilarious, this unforgettable memoir will make you laugh and cry. It will leave you a lot humbler, and just a little wiser.

Gang- and drug-related inner-city violence, with its attendant epidemic of incarceration, is the defining crime problem in our country. In some neighborhoods in America, one out of every two hundred young black men is shot to death every year, and few initiatives of government and law enforcement have made much difference. But when David Kennedy, a self-taught and then-unknown criminologist, engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the mid-1990s, he pointed the way toward what few had imagined: a solution. Don't Shoot tells the story of Kennedy's long journey. Riding with beat cops, hanging with gang members, and stoop-sitting with grandmothers, Kennedy found that all parties misunderstood each other, caught in a spiral of racialized anger and distrust. He envisioned an approach in which everyone-gang members, cops, and community members-comes together in what is essentially a huge intervention. Offenders are told that the violence must stop, that even the cops want them to stay alive and out of prison, and that even their families support swift law enforcement if the violence continues. In city after city, the same miracle has followed: violence plummets, drug markets dry up, and the relationship between the police and the community is reset. This is a landmark book, chronicling a paradigm shift in how we address one of America's most shameful social problems. A riveting, page-turning read, it combines the street verite of The Wire, the social science of Gang Leader for a Day, and the moral urgency and personal journey of Fist Stick Knife Gun. But unlike anybody else, Kennedy shows that there could be an end in sight.

Poder, política y cultura refleja como ningún otro libro el alcance del trabajo teórico llevado a cabo por Edward Said en terrenos aparentemente tan dispares como la crítica cultural, la musicología o el pensamiento politico. En estas veintiuna conversaciones registradas a lo largo de tres decadas, el polemico profesor aborda una extraordinaria variedad de temas sin excluir los vaivenes de su propia biografia. Desde Palestina a Pavarotti, desde su errante infancia bajo el dominio colonial britanico a sus controversias ideologicas en Estados Unidos, todo lo aborda con una singular combinacion de lucidez analitica, pasion etica y perspicacia estetica.El lector hallara en estas paginas una aproximacion oblicua y cautivadora a la mente de quien ha sabido crear a traves de sus textos una brillante cronica que pone en cuestion los valores de la cultura contemporanea (Nadine Gordimer).

«Estudiar una figura histórica no es tarea que se agote en investigar sus hechos y conexiones (...). Hay algo más; algo a lo que ya no puede llamárselo tarea, si se habla con propiedad, pero que incorpora y organiza los resultados del trabajo, haciéndolo fecundo, y es el momento de la pura intuición, que nos entrega de un golpe la individualidad del hombre (...). Sin eso no podemos decir que lo conocemos. (...) Confieso que si yo no hubiera encontrado la mirada de Jovellanos a través de la balumba de sus escritos y de la suma de sus actos, no estaría en condiciones de interpretar su personalidad.» Los temas variadísimos y el entrecruzamiento constante de las líneas de investigación de esta cincuentena de reflexiones que ahora se publican con motivo del bicentenario de la muerte de Jovellanos confirman la riqueza en la diversidad y el rigor en la exploración de los gestos, de los ademanes, de los que hablaba Francisco Ayala; en definitiva, de la mirada múltiple y cómplice que observa al personaje estudiado. La variedad temática de estos estudios da precisa medida de la actividad intelectual, diversa y abierta, de Jovellanos a lo largo de su vida, desde los aspectos biográficos a los asuntos vinculados con su dedicación a la justicia, a la ciencia económica o a la literatura, así como a la construcción de su imagen desde la posteridad y la recepción de su pensamiento. Censor, filólogo, lector, economista, decidido interventor en política cultural? son perfiles que complementan en estas páginas la imagen más habitual del escritor, el magistrado, el historiador, el educador o el político, y que superan las añejas calificaciones del «patricio», del «prócer» o del «polígrafo», en una efeméride que ha vuelto a poner de manifiesto la atracción que desde múltiples disciplinas y enfoques sigue ejerciendo la figura de quien fue quizá el principal de los ilustrados españoles.

Over seventy years the dinner table became a stage for Churchill's brilliant conversational talents, an intimate world in which both gossip and diplomatic secrets could be shared, and a confidential arena where he could debate with the great minds of his time the problems of a difficult century and their possible solutions.

Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en el Archivo General de Simancas, noviembre 2011 - marzo 2012. Muestra los documentos que se conservan en este Archivo sobre Alonso de Quintanilla, Contador Mayor de los Reyes Católicos, en su gran mayoría, manuscritos oficiales que proceden de su dilatada vida profesional y que nos dan una idea de su personalidad como gran gobernante y hombre de Estado.

"Barón Ungern (1885-1921) ¿Estaba loco?, ¿era un demonio? ¿O era un semidiós, la reencarnación del Dios Blanco de la Guerra? Odiado y temido, venerado hasta hoy en día en Mongolia y el norte de Europ