Novedades que me interesan

En el Sunday Book Review del NYT recomiendan entre otros, éstos libros:



Harvard University Press.

A Secular Age
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor is Winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/TAYSEC.html


Other HUP Books by Charles Taylor
The Ethics of Authenticity
Philosophical Arguments
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited

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WEIMAR GERMANY
Promise and Tragedy.
By Eric D. Weitz.
Illustrated. 425 pp. Princeton University Press.

Berlin Stories
By BRIAN LADD
Democracy is a fragile flower, as we learn again and again. Among the many failed democracies of the past century, few held more promise than Germany’s Weimar Republic, and none collapsed into greater horror. Its story can be told in two ways: as a drama of decadent excess and tragic flaws, or as an elegy recalling noble promises betrayed by treacherous enemies. Eric D. Weitz’s “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” falls squarely into the second category.
Weitz, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, praises the republic’s achievements and condemns its murderers: the right-wing businessmen, army officers and civil servants who handed the country over to the Nazis. Together, the respectable and the radical right nourished the toxic lie that Germany lost World War I because it was “stabbed in the back” by leftist democrats. Still, the Weimar of this book is not a prelude to Hitler, who barely puts in an appearance.

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THE SLAVE SHIP
A Human History.
By Marcus Rediker.
Illustrated. 434 pp. Viking.

Voyage of the Damned
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD
Most spasms of cruelty in history we know about largely through the testimony of victims. It is thanks to acts of witness by survivors like Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, that we can begin to picture what life was like in Auschwitz and the gulag. There is no great trove of memoirs by retired concentration camp guards.
By contrast, a much more prolonged bout of suffering, the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic, on which more than 12 million Africans were embarked for the Americas over more than three centuries, we know about almost entirely from the perpetrators. There are few accounts of this voyage by slaves, and historians are now not 100 percent sure of the authenticity of the most famous of them, the 18th-century autobiography of Olaudah Equiano. But an astonishingly large body of evidence remains from those who trafficked in human beings: letters, diaries, memoirs, captain’s logbooks, shipping company records, testimony before British Parliamentary investigations, even poetry and at least one play by former slave-ship officers.
It is this rich array of material that Marcus Rediker plumbs, more thoroughly than anyone else to date, for his masterly new book, “The Slave Ship: A Human History.” His focus is on the period after 1700, when this traffic was increasingly dominated by Britain — a country where, as anyone who has worked in its libraries and archives knows, they seldom seem to throw a piece of paper away. The documents mounted up because the transport of chained and shackled Africans was once so central a part of world commerce.

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