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CHOMSKY
₨ 3,540“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.” This declaration by Noam Chomsky exemplifies the uncompromising radicalism that has long defined his life and work. A linguist, philosopher, prolific author, and political activist, Chomsky is one of the most influential Western intellectuals of the last half-century.
Yet it is this very capaciousness that biographers and interpreters have struggled with, and as a result, there are very few readable accounts of Chomsky and his project.
Wolfgang B. Sperlich surmounts this challenge with his succinct yet in-depth introduction to the thinker in Noam Chomsky, one of the new titles in the acclaimed Critical Lives series. Beginning with Chomsky’s formative years as a sixteen-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania, Sperlich traces his education in linguistics and politics in its rich historical context. He explores Chomsky’s main intellectual influences, particularly in language studies, and charts his strained relationship with mainstream American academia. Sperlich also offers an informed overview of Chomsky’s landmark linguistic contributions as a comprehensive introduction to his work, and he explains the latest developments in Chomskyan linguistics and how they influence research in fields as varied as neuroscience, biology, and evolution. Sperlich is equally attentive to Chomsky’s political activism: through Sperlich’s account we follow Chomsky from his pacifist-anarchist lectures and writings of the 1950s and 1960s to his seminal 1988 treatise, Manufacturing Consent, and his relentless criticism of the American government over two decades.
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THE NIGHT WATCH
₨ 2,580The Night Watch is the extraordinary story of four Londoners: Kay, who wandethe streets in mannish clothes, restless and searching . . . Helen, who harboa troubling secret. . . Viv, glamour girl, recklessly loyal to her soldier lover… and Duncan, an apparent innocent, struggling with demons of his own.
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked- out streets, illicit liaisons and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, this is an astonishing novel.
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THE NEXT GREAT GLOBALIZATION
₨ 7,770Many prominent critics regard the international financial system as the dark side of globalization, threatening disadvantaged nations near and far. But in The Next Great Globalization, eminent economist Frederic Mishkin argues the opposite: that financial globalization today is essential for poor nations to become rich. Mishkin argues that an effectively managed financial globalization promises benefits on the scale of the hugely successful trade and information globalizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This financial revolution can lift developing nations out of squalor and increase the wealth and stability of emerging and industrialized nations alike. By presenting an unprecedented picture of the potential benefits of financial globalization, and by showing in clear and hard-headed terms how these gains can be realized, Mishkin provides a hopeful vision of the next phase of globalization.
Mishkin draws on historical examples to caution that mismanagement of financial globalization, often aided and abetted by rich elites, can wreak havoc in developing countries, but he uses these examples to demonstrate hoi better policies can help poor nations to open up their economies to the benefits of global investment. According to Mishkin, the international community must provide incentives for developing countries to establish effective property rights, banking regulations, accounting practices, and corporate governance—the institutions necessary to attract and manage global investment. And the West must be a partner in integrating the financial systems of rich and poor countries—to the benefit of both.
The Next Great Globalization makes the case that finance will be a driving force in the twenty-first-century economy, and ‘demonstrates how this force can and should be shaped to the benefit of all, especially the disadvantaged nations most in need of growth and prosperity.
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DIPLOMACY AND MURDER IN TEHRAN
₨ 3,870In this first biography of Alexander Griboyedov in English, Laurence Kelly paints a vivid picture of a man of remarkable literary talent and diplomatic gifts that were nevertheless overshadowed by ill-fortune. Involved in the 1825 Decembrist plot to overthrow the Tsarist state and the mission to further Russia’s expansionist agenda in the Caucasus, the famous writer was eventually murdered by zealous mobs in Tehran. This book makes an invaluable contribution to the diplomatic history of Russia, the Caucasus and Iran at the same time illuminating the life and works of a writer who was among nineteenth-century Russia’s most respected and prominent writers.
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JAMES JOYCE
₨ 3,540In this new study, Andrew Gibson sets out to reverse the traditional view of Joyce and his work as the paradigm of international modernism in literature. Where criticism has usually consigned Ireland to secondary status in Joyce’s work, Gibson firmly relocates the writer and his work in Ireland, showing them at all points to be intricately bound up in Irish history, politics and culture. Crucially, he views Joyce’s departure for Europe as allegiance to an Irish emigratory tradition that is centuries old, rather than the abandonment of the old country. Accounts of Joyce’s life and work have tended to give rather short shrift to his profound engagements with Irish history and politics. Gibson argues that there have been important reasons for this, themselves often historical and political. Tracing the development of Joyce as a critic and writer, he maps this development to specific political and historical events. Beginning with the political traditions and allegiances that formed part of Joyce’s family background, he pinpoints the fall of Parnell, the collapse of political hope, and the transfer of political energies to cultural activity as crucial in the writer’s early formation. Joyce’s prodigious renown has been due above all to his reputation as an experimental, modernist writer. His works’ open-endedness and seemingly infinite availability to differing interpretations has allowed criticism to constantly update his politics. The book argues that Joyce’s most important concerns were historically material and specific. Yet, it also recognises that Joyce himself encouraged and fostered the view of his work as modernist, which became the dominant tradition in Joyce studies.
