Srl | Item |
1 |
ID:
135555
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
Until recently, it was a safe assumption that it would be impossibly hard to sell a book by an obscure left-wing French intellectual to Americans, especially a 700-page tome. No longer. This spring Thomas Piketty, a 43-year-old Paris-based economist and expert on wealth and inequality, published Capital in the Twenty-First Century in English. The book compares how wealth patterns have evolved in different countries over the past few centuries and points out that inequality has been rising almost everywhere, including in the United States. Piketty’s academic publisher initially expected to sell only a modest number of copies. But Capital shot into best-sellers lists. Sales of the book were so high that it even beat out two literary adaptations of Frozen, the hit Disney film. When Piketty appeared at literary events to discuss his work, he attracted such crowds that American media dubbed him a “rock star” economist.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
ID:
135554
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
What the British historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the long 19th century” ended 100 years ago, in 1914, in Sarajevo, with the two pistol shots that sparked World War I. Another historian, Fritz Stern, described that war as “the first calamity of the 20th century … the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.” These disasters included the Great War itself, which claimed some 20 million lives, including victims of the new century’s first genocide, in Turkey; the October Revolution in St. Petersburg, which gave birth to an ideological empire that would kill tens of millions of people and imprison hundreds of millions more; the rise of Nazism out of Germany’s defeat; World War II, with another 60 million deaths, including genocide on an unprecedented scale; the upheavals and wars beyond the borders of Europe that followed the end of colonialism; and the division of the postwar world into two nuclear-armed camps, which fought each other through proxies in post-colonial lands.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
ID:
135556
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
It’s been touted as a revolutionary platform for expressions, but does twitter literature really have future?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
ID:
135553
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
While ongoing peace talks may finally put an end to Colombia’s guerrilla fighting, it remains to be seen what will happen to Buenaventura, the urban monster the war created.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|