Résultats lu par "Robert Blumenfeld" dans Toutes les catégories

A brilliant skeptic, Jose Saramago envisions the life of Jesus Christ and the story of his Passion as things of this earth: A child crying, the caress of a woman half asleep, the bleat of a goat, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. His idea of the Holy Family reflects the real complexities of any family, and, as only Saramago can, he imagines them with tinges of vision, dream, and omen.

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages...or seventy? In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages; Emil Krebs, a pugnacious German diplomat, who spoke sixty-eight languages; and Lomb Kat, a Hungarian who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels.

Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches, and public buildings. The Louvre Palace was expanded, Notre-Dame Cathedral was restored and the French masterpiece of the Second Empire, the Opra Garnier, was built.

On October 14, 1943, 600 Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories

Can the Bible be approached both as sacred scripture and as a historical and literary text? For many people, it must be one or the other. How can we read the Bible both ways? The Bible and the Believer brings together three distinguished biblical scholars--one Jewish, one Catholic, and one Protestant--to illustrate how to read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament critically and religiously.

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers "yes!" Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments - drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy - that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally.

Already infamous for the arbitrary, paranoid persecution of its own citizens throughout much of the 20th century, the Soviet Union - as is revealed in John Koeher’s revelatory, eye-opening exposé - also waged a vicious espionage campaign against the Catholic Church and its followers. From the persecution of local priests to an assassination order against Pope John Paul II, the KGB viewed Catholicism as a threat to stability in Eastern Europe and treated the church as an enemy of the State. Lifetime journalist and former U.S. Army Intelligence Officer John Koehler has written the definitive book on this startling history.

"Aquitaine is mine. It will never belong to anyone else."

With these words, 15-year-old Eleanor seals her fate. Aquitaine is under the French king’s safekeeping, and Eleanor, the Duke of Aquitaine’s eldest daughter, knows she must wed Prince Louis in order to insure the future of her beloved duchy. Fiercely independent, filled with untapped desire, the woman who would be queen must provide Louis VII, her monkish husband, with heirs. But it is young Henry of Anjou who catches Eleanor’s eye - and sets fire to her heart.

More Americans have been killed by well-meaning liberal policies than by all the wars of the last century combined. J. R. Dunn not only analyzes the unintended consequences of liberal policies, but argues that these consequences have resulted in millions of fatalities in the United States and around the world.

Beijing presents a clear and gathering threat to Washington, but not for the reasons you think. China's challenge to the West stems from its transformative brand of capitalism and an entirely different conception of the international community.

In the sulphurous The High Place, the amoral hero Florian enters the sleeping-beauty story and (unlike Jurgen with Helen) does not draw back at the sight of excessive beauty. Complications ensue: Beauty is realistically diminished during pregnancy, the first-born child is forfeit to Satan under the pact that guaranteed Florain's success, and an irascible saint is eager to call down holy fire on transgressors. Florian treads close to damnation and is saved only when Satan and the angel Michael conspire to let recent events become, again, a dream: he has a rare second chance and learns better.

Figures of Earth, subtitled "A Comedy of Appearances", follows the vicissitudes of Dom Manuel the Redeemer from his lowly swineherd origins through his unlikely elevation to the Count of Poictesme, and beyond. Published in 1921, it was the second volume of “The Biography of Manuel”, Cabell’s great work about an imaginary land that also managed to skewer the world of his upbringing as a Southern Gentleman of Virginia, and nearly everything else, besides!