Reaktion Books strana 6 z 9

The most radical and divisive composer of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg remains a hero to many, and a villain to many others. In this refreshingly balanced biography, Mark Berry tells the story of Schoenberg's remarkable life and work, situating his tale within the wider symphony of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Born in the Jewish quarter of his beloved Vienna, Schoenberg left Austria for his early career in Berlin as a leading light of Weimar culture, before being forced to flee in the dead of night from Hitler's Third Reich. He found himself in the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where he would inspire composers from George Gershwin to John Cage. Introducing all of Schoenberg's major musical works, from his very first compositions, such as the String Quartet in D Major, to his invention of the twelve-tone method, Berry explores how Schoenberg's revolutionary approach to musical composition incorporated Wagnerian late Romanticism and the brave new worlds of atonality and serialism. Essential reading for anyone interested in the music and history of the twentieth century, this book makes clear Schoenberg changed the history of music forever.

In The Europe Illusion, Stuart Sweeney considers Britain's relationships with France and Prussia-Germany since the map of Europe was redrawn at Westphalia in 1648. A timely and far-sighted study, it argues that integration in Europe has evolved through diplomatic, economic, and cultural links cemented among these three states. Indeed, as wars became more destructive and economic expectations were elevated these states struggled to survive alone. Yet it has been rare for all three to be friends at the same time. Instead, apparent setbacks like Brexit can be seen as reflective of a more pragmatic Europe, where integration proceeds within variable geometry.

This concise yet thorough critical biography throws new light on the work of German novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and social critic Thomas Mann. It also offers a fresh look at the value of his short stories. Looking closely at how Mann's brother Heinrich as well as the work of philosophers (notably Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Goethe) influenced Mann's writing, Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell reveal how Mann's fictional worlds criticized the prevailing bourgeois order, and how his first novel, Buddenbrooks, signaled the need for change. Lehnert and Wessell also explore the lasting significance of such groundbreaking works as The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and Doctor Faustus, a novel that, in view of fascism, asks whether the bourgeois culture of the individual has not become diseased. Thomas Mann also investigates Mann's political views, from his anti-Nazi speeches to his anti-McCarthyist activities. The book offers an engaging, fresh account of an essential German writer, one which illustrates how the context of Mann's life shaped his achievements.

Victor Hugo is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and he was also elected to both houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the Second Empire in exile, he became synonymous with the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. His state funeral in Paris made headlines across the world, and his breadth of appeal remains evident today, not least thanks to the popularity of his bestseller, Les Mis rables, and its myriad theatrical and cinematic incarnations. This biography, the first in English for more than twenty years, provides a concise but comprehensive exploration of Hugo's monumental body of work within the context of his dramatic life. Hugo wrestled with family tragedy and personal misgivings while being pulled into the turmoil of the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon's Empire to the rise of France's Third Republic. Throughout these twists of fate, he sensed a natural order of collapse and renewal. This unending cycle of creation shaped his ideas about freedom and roused his imagination, which he channeled into his prolific writing and other outlets like drawing. As Bradley Stephens argues, such creative intellectual vigor suggests that Hugo was too restless to sit comfortably on the pedestal of literary greatness; Hugo's was a mind as revolutionary as the time in which he lived.

Georgia is the most Western-looking state in today's Near or Middle East and, despite having one of the longest, most turbulent histories in the Christian or Near Eastern world, no proper history of the country has been written for decades. Eminent historian Donald Rayfield redresses this balance in Edge of Empires, focusing not merely on the post-Soviet era, like many other books on Georgia, but on the whole of its history, accessing a mass of new material from the country's recently opened archives. Rayfield describes Georgia's swings between disintegration and unity, making full use of primary sources, many not available before in an English-language book. He examines the history of a country which, though small, stands at a crossroads between Russia and the Muslim world, between Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and is a dramatic example of state-building and, also, of tragic political mistakes.

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today's cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities--submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged--Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai's recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.

All aboard for a delicious ride on nine legendary railway journeys! Meals associated with train travel have been an important aspect of railway history for more than a century - from dinners in dining cars to lunches at station buffets to foods purchased from platform vendors. For many travellers, the experience of eating on a railway journey is often a highlight of the trip, a major part of the `romance of the rails'. Food on the Move focuses on the culinary history of these famous journeys on five continents, from the earliest days of rail travel to the present. The engaging story and vivid illustrations invite readers to discover an array of railway feasts: haute cuisine in the elegant dining carriages of the Orient Express, American steak-and-eggs on the Santa Fe Super Chief, and home-cooked regional foods along the Trans-Siberian tracks. Readers will be tempted to eat their way across Canada's vast interior and Australia's dusty Outback; grab an infamous `British railway sandwich' to munch on the Flying Scotsman; snack on spicy samosas on the Darjeeling Himalayan `Toy Train'; dine at high speed on Japan's `Bullet Train'; and sip South African wines in a Blue Train luxury lounge car featuring windows of glass fused with gold dust. Written by eight different authors who have travelled on those legendary lines, the book include recipes, from the dining cars and station eateries, taken from historical menus and contributed by contemporary chefs. Food on the Move is a veritable feast!

As American-Cuban relations begin to warm, tourists are rushing to discover the throwback tropical paradise just eighty miles off of the American coast. But even as diplomatic relations are changing and the country opens up to the Western world, Cuba remains a rare and fascinating place. Cuba: A Cultural History tells the story of Cuba’s history through an exploration of its rich and vibrant culture. Rather than offer a timeline of Cuban history or a traditional genre-by-genre history of Cuban culture, Alan West-Durán invites readers to enter Cuban history from the perspective of the island’s uniquely creative cultural forms. He traces the restless island as it ebbs and flows with the power, beauty, and longings of its culture and history. In a world where revolutionary socialism is an almost quaint reminder of the decades-old Cold War, the island nation remains one of the few on the planet guided by a Communist party, still committed to fighting imperialism, opposed to the injustices of globalization, and wedded to the dream of one day building a classless society, albeit in a distant future. But as this book shows, Cuba is more than a struggling socialist country—it is a nation with a complex and turbulent history and a rich and varied culture.

The Goths are truly a “lost civilization.” Sweeping down from the north, ancient Gothic tribes sacked the imperial city of Rome and set in motion the decline and fall of the western Roman empire. Ostrogothic and Visigothic kings ruled over Italy and Spain, dominating early medieval Europe. Yet after the last Gothic kingdom fell more than a thousand years ago, the Goths disappeared as an independent people. Over the centuries that followed, as traces of Gothic civilization vanished, its people came to be remembered as both barbaric destroyers and heroic champions of liberty. In this engaging history, David M. Gwynn brings together the interwoven stories of the original Goths and the diverse Gothic heritage, a heritage that continues to shape our modern world. From the ancient migrations to contemporary Goth culture, through debates over democratic freedom and European nationalism, and drawing on writers from Shakespeare to Bram Stoker, Gwynn explores the ever-widening gulf between the Goths of history and the popular imagination. Historians, students of architecture and literature, and general readers alike will learn something new about this great lost civilization.

Sit through any live stage production these days and you’re bound to hear the sing-song twerping of a cell phone. We live in an electronic world, saturated with electronic sounds. Yet, electronic sounds aren’t a new phenomenon; they have long permeated our sonic landscape. In Live Wires, Daniel Warner explores how five key electronic technologies—the tape recorder, circuit, computer, microphone, and turntable—have revolutionized musical thought. Electronic music began as the otherworldly sounds of the film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausen’s Kontakte a few years later, and is now a common soundscape in technology, media, and an array of music genres. The rise of a new audio culture has enabled more people than ever before to produce and listen to electronic music, from isolated experimenters, classical musicians, and jazz musicians to rock musicians, sound recordists, and newer generations of electronic musicians making hiphop, house, techno, and ambient music. Even the electrosonic debris of the world—glitches, bursts of amplitude and frequency modulated radio transmissions, fragments of media speech, and noise—find their way into our musical lives. Warner argues that the prevalence of electronic music means we are not only listening to electronic sounds, but thinking about them, finding new meanings in them, experimenting with them, and rehearing them as listeners and makers. The book is peppered throughout with engaging anecdotes from the artists, engineers, and creators involved in the production of electronic music. It features the work of major figures in electronic music, including Schaeffer, Oliveros, Xenakis, Eno, Grandmaster Flash, Francisco López, and Juan Atkins. Live Wires is an arresting discussion of the powerful musical ideas that are being recycled, rethought, and remixed by the most interesting electronic composers and musicians today.

Although Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries never called themselves Utopians—believing strictly in a science of revolution, they considered Utopians to be merely dreamers—they were enormously inspired by the grand humanitarian aims of the French Revolution of 1789. Taking up this French revolutionary agenda and reinforcing it with German philosophy, Russians formed a beautiful vision in which an imaginary theology blended with a premier role for art. Arc of Utopia offers a fresh look at these German philosophical origins of the Russian Revolution. In the book, Lesley Chamberlain explains how influential German philosophers like Kant, Schiller, and Hegel were dazzled by contemporary events in Paris, and how this led a century later to an explosion of art and philosophy in the Russian streets, with a long-repressed people reinventing liberty, equality, and fraternity in their own cultural image. Chamberlain examines how some of the greatest Russian names of the nineteenth-century—from Alexander Herzen to Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev to Fyodor Dostoevsky—defined their visions for Russia in relationship to their views on German enthusiasm for revolutionary France. With the centenary of the Russian Revolution approaching, Arc of Utopia is an important and timely revisioning of this tumultuous moment in history.

Gypsies have for centuries been simultaneously vilified and romanticized—associated with criminality and dirt, but at the same time with color, magic, and music. Gypsy music is popular around the world and often performed with gusto at major events, including at weddings in Bulgaria, jazz bars in Paris, and festivals in the United States. In Gypsy Music, Alan Ashton-Smith explores why this music has such wide appeal, surveying the varied styles that are considered to be gypsy music and asking what links them together. The book begins in the Balkans, home to the world’s largest Romani populations and a major site of gypsy music production. But just as the traditionally nomadic Roma have traveled globally, so has their music. Gypsy music styles have roots and associations outside of the Balkans, including Russian Romani guitar music, flamenco and gypsy jazz, and the more recent forms of gypsy punk and Balkan beats. Covering the thirteenth century to the present day, and with a geographical scope that ranges from rural Romania to New York by way of Budapest, Moscow, and Andalusia, Gypsy Music reveals the remarkable diversity of this exuberant art form.

When Alexander the Great’s army invaded the valley of the Indus River in the fourth century BC, it was wholly unaware that this region of northwest India had once been the centre of a civilization worthy of comparison with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Indus civilization flourished for half a millennia from about 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE, when it mysteriously declined and eventually vanished. It remained invisible for almost 4,000 years, until its ruins were discovered in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists. Today, after almost a century of excavation, it is regarded as the beginning of Indian civilization and possibly the origin of Hinduism. More than 1,000 Indus settlements covered at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan and India: the most extensive urban culture of its age, with a vigorous maritime export trade to the Persian Gulf and cities such as Ur. The two largest Indus cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – boasted sophisticated street planning and house drainage, including the world’s first toilets, along with finely crafted gemstone jewellery and an exquisite, part-pictographic writing system carved on seal stones that has defied numerous attempts at deciphering. Astonishingly, there is no evidence for armies or warfare. The Indus is a fascinating look at the vital legacy of the Indus within modern India and an accessible introduction to this tantalizing ‘lost’ civilization.

How do we really think about the world? We may use words to tell stories about it or draw pictures to represent it, but one thing we do far more than either of those is make calculations of the things that are in it—and to do that we use numbers. Numbers give shape and texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream, and do, a fact that Steven Connor explores in this qualitative assessment of the quantifiable. Looking at how numbers play a part in nearly every aspect of our lives, he offers a fascinating portrait of the world as a world of numbers. Connor explores a host of thought-provoking aspects of our numerical existence. He looks at the unexpected oddities that shape the loneliest number—the number one. He looks at counting as a human phenomenon and the ways we negotiate crowds, swarms, and multitudes. He demonstrates the work of calculation as it lies at the heart of poetry, jokes, painting, and music. He shows how we use numbers to adjust to uncertainty and chance and how they help us visualize the world in diagrammatic ways, and he unveils how numbers even help us think about death. Altogether, Connor brings into relief an aspect of our lives so ubiquitous that we often can’t see it, unveiling a rich new way of thinking about our existence.

Orwell's Nose, now available in paperback, is an original and imaginative account of the life and work of George Orwell, exploring the 'scent narratives' that abound in Orwell's fiction and non-fiction. This illuminating and irreverent book provides a new understanding of one of our most iconic and influential writers.

This sumptuously illustrated volume, edited by eminent war historian Joanna Bourke, offers a comprehensive visual, cultural and historical account of the ways in which armed conflict has been represented in art. Covering the last two centuries, the book shows how the artistic portrayal of war changed, from a celebration of heroic exploits to a more modern, truthful depiction of warfare and its consequences. Featuring illustrations by artists including Paul Nash, Judy Chicago, Pablo Picasso, Melanie Friend, Francis Bacon, Käthe Kollwitz, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, Dora Meeson, Otto Dix and many others, as well as those who are often overlooked, such as children, non-European artists and prisoners of war, this extensive survey is a fitting and timely contribution to the understanding, memory and commemoration of war, and will appeal to a wide audience interested in warfare, art, history or politics. Introduction by Joanna Bourke, with essays by Jon Bird, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Joanna Bourke, Grace Brockington, James Chapman, Michael Corris, Patrick Crogan, Jo Fox, Paul Gough, Gary Haines, Clare Makepeace, Sue Malvern, Sergiusz Michalski, Manon Pignot, Anna Pilkington, Nicholas J. Saunders, John Schofield, John D. Szostak, Sarah Wilson and Jay Winter.