Mixing scholarship with a fan's devotion to the crooked roads of critique, Miklitsch autopsies marquee films like D. Throughout, he addresses the social and technological factors that dealt deuce after deuce to the genre--its celebrated style threatened by new media and technologies such as TV and 3-D, color and widescreen, its born losers replaced like zombies by All-American heroes, the nation rocked by the red menace and nightmares of nuclear annihilation. L'homme ne faisant jamais dans la demi- mesure, c'est peu de dire qu'elles nous sont grandes ouvertes.
Car au fond, qui est Jean-Pierre Mocky? Da Romanzo criminale a Gomorra e Suburra: Tatortphilosophie, Salzburg, Residenz Verlag, , pages. Introduction 1 From Paget to Screen: Jencson Fan Fiction as an Argument: With illustrations and an extensive Bibliography. Jazz and Cocktails explores the use of jazz in film noir, from its early function as a signifier of danger, sexuality, and otherness to the complex role it plays in film scores in which jazz invites the spectator into the narrative while simultaneously transcending the film and reminding viewers of the world outside the movie theater.
Wager demonstrates how the evolving role of jazz in film noir reflected cultural changes instigated by black social activism during and after World War II and altered Hollywood representations of race and music. Casey McKittrick argues in this tantalizing study that we cannot fully grasp Hitchcock's film oeuvre without examining his life as a fat man. Drawing on fat studies as well as queer theory, McKittrick adds depth and nuance to our picture of the great director and his legendary appetites- and to our collective appetite for him.
Sword, Fist, or Gun? Anatomy of a Scene, Julian Stringer Chapter 9: The Tentacles of History: A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others.
This book offers a chronological overview of the genre in fiction and explores its development and mutations over the past years. It also challenges the common misjudgement that horror fiction is necessarily frivolous or dispensable. Leading experts on Gothic and horror literature introduce readers to classics of the genre as well as exciting texts they may not have encountered before. The topics examined include: Property Possession in the English Gothic 1. A Century of Loss: Historical Contexts for Property Anxieties 19 3. Property Restoration Imagined 28 4.
- Synonyms and antonyms of Zeitmaschine in the German dictionary of synonyms.
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Possession of Person in the English Gothic 5. Dispossessions of the Mind and the Body: A Gothic Tropology 56 7. The Double and the Ghost: Refusals of Self- Dis Possession 67 8. Gothic Reflections of Political Rhetoric 81 Missing Mothers and Suppressed Sisters: Fragmented Stories; Appropriated Voices: Possession of the Narrative in the English Gothic Gothic Conventions; Narrative Dispossessions Contexts of Contested Narratives: Can the Text Be Possessed?
The Political Fantastic Conclusion. Toward a Transatlantic Investigation: Pho reviews the racial and national identities of steampunk, bringing in discussions of British chap-hop artists, African American steamfunk practitioners, and multicultural steampunk fan cultures.
Precursors to steampunk can be found in the works of Jules Verne and H. Among young people, steampunk has found common aesthetic cause with Goth style. This volume recognizes that steampunk, a unique popular culture phenomenon, presents a prime opportunity for rhetorical criticism. Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, , This book offers a new perspective on the "otherworlds" of medieval literature.
These fantastical realms are among the most memorable places in medieval writing, by turns beautiful and monstrous, alluring and terrifying. Passing over a river or sea, or entering into a hollow hill, heroes come upon strange and magical realms. These places are often very beautiful, filled with sweet music, and adorned with precious stones and rich materials. There is often no darkness, time may pass at a different pace, and the people who dwell there are usually supernatural. Sometimes such a place is exactly what it appears to be--the land of heart's desire--but, the otherworld can also have a sinister side, trapping humans and keeping them there against their will.
The regions on which this book focuses, Britain, Ireland, and the surrounding islands, prove particularly susceptible to this characterization. This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium.
Avatars postmodernes du merveilleux, in M gm , dir. Au rendez-vous du merveilleux noir: The Sleeper and the Spindle de Neil Gaiman: Quand les reines prennent leur destin en main 7. Les Cendres de Faery: Medieval Karl Tobias Steel; 2. Early modern Kevin LaGrandeur; 3. Romantic Ron Broglio; 4. Modern Jeff Wallace; 5. Science fiction Lisa Yaszek and Jason W. Autobiography Kari Weil; 8. Comics and graphic novels Lisa Diedrich; 9. Film Anneke Smelik; The nonhuman Bruce Clarke; Bodies Manuela Rossini; Objects Ridvan Askin; Germany's place in the history of the vampire in literature -- The Habsburgs, vampires and scientific inquiry: Lawrence, this book ultimately expands the boundaries of the Gothic genre and provides a fresh, new approach to better understanding the modernist movement.
Il y sera notamment question d'organisations juridico-politiques, d'exploration et d'exploitation de l'espace, de la condition future de l'homme, du statut des robots, des interactions possibles avec d'autres formes de vie intelligentes In so doing, we structure the book around geographical coordinates from North to South and move between various national traditions of the gothic Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc alongside regional manifestations of the Gothic the US south and the Caribbean as well as transnational movements of the Gothic within the Americas.
Ghost stories play a prominent role in American childhood. Circulated around playgrounds and whispered in slumber parties, their history in American literature is little known and seldom discussed by scholars.
Translation of «Zeitmaschine» into 25 languages
This book explores the fascinating origins and development of these tales, focusing on the social and historical factors that shaped them and gave birth to the genre. Science Fiction Fandom in the UK: VI, NO , , pages. A cognitive approach to "dragon" conceptualisations in "Beowulf" and selected writings of J. Kosmologie und Science Fiction: Vorwort Kim Stanley Robinson. Einsteins Universum und die Phantasie des Menschen 2. Science-Fiction und die Religionen - 5. Science-Fiction und die Erschaffung des Universums 6. Science-Fiction und der ewige Kreislauf von Vergehen und Entstehen 7.
Die Evolution des Universums: Science-Fiction und Kosmologie 8. Science-Fiction und die Ewigkeit 9. Die Konstruktion einer Zeitmaschine: Science-Fiction und die Vorstellung von Reisen durch die Zeit Mahlstrom in die Zukunft: Science-Fiction und Klimawandel Good Governance in der Zukunft: Science-Fiction und Demokratie Science-Fiction und die Evolution der Menschheit im Universum Science-Fiction und die Begegnung mit intelligentem Leben aus dem All Die Kulturen der Aliens: Science-Fiction und Astrobiologie - Science- Fiction und Musik.
Attention to conventions such as crying, victimization, and happy endings in the context of the Twilight-Jane Eyre relationship reveals melodrama as an empowering mode of communication for girls. Bilancio critico e bibliografia commentata dal a oggi , Florence, Mondodari Education - , vi, pages. This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story.
The book studies the work of four major authors of the supernatural tale: Mit einem Blick auf Osteuropa, Frankfurt am Main, et al. Peter Lang, , pages. The fantastic raises a number of significant questions about cultural and social developments and challenges existing boundaries. By creating hybrid zones of autonomy, the fantastic provides alternatives to conventional understandings of world, knowledge or identity. With regard to fantastic fiction in literature and different media representations the articles explore crossings into other worlds, time travel, metamorphoses, hybrid creatures and a variety of other transitions and transgressions.
They analyse hybrid genres, inter-media adaptations, transpositions into new media, as well as various forms of crossover as exemplified in the increasing trend of generation-spanning all-age literature. Both pseudoscience and science fiction SF are creative endeavours that have little in common with academic science, beyond the superficial trappings of jargon and subject matter. The most obvious difference between the two is that pseudoscience is presented as fact, not fiction.
This has led to significant cross-fertilization between the two disciplines. This collection of 54 biographical essays examines many overlooked and underrated figures who have played a role in the ever expanding world of horror and gothic entertainment. The contributors push the boundaries of how we define these terms, bringing into the discussion such diverse figures as singer-songwriter Tom Waits, occultist Dion Fortune, author Charles Beaumont, historian and bishop Gregory of Tours and video game designer Shinji Mikami. Miller takes readers on a visual journey through the history of the spaceship both in our collective imagination and in reality.
The vivid illustrations trace the spaceship through its conception, engineering, and building, from the practical origins of spaceflight in the wartime V-2 rocket to future Mars programs. They also chart, in exquisite detail, the ubiquity of spaceships in the golden age of space travel s and '60s plus their broad influence in popular art, television, film, and literature. Spaceships reminds us of the romance of manned space travel as it has been, as we imagined it could be, and as it may be in the future.
Des textes de fiction: Des articles de Mario Tessier: The number of newspaper articles they examined may not be seen as completely representative, however. Kroppach dealt with the length of sentences and parataxis and hypotaxis respectively in his dissertation on sports reportage in the German press. Even though he focuses on language in German newspapers, his results are relevant to the second part of the present study, which examines many of the aspects Kroppach researched in the German press.
In his analysis, he counted sentences per newspaper and divided them into categories of 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32 words. He concluded that the 8-word sentence was most frequent with 6. Sentences with a length ranging from words accounted for almost half of the evaluated material Since the most frequently used sentence of German sports reporting is only half as long as the most frequently used sentence in sophisticated prose 16 words , he concluded that the newspaper language of sport is far less demanding than the language of scientific texts He states that the reports are intentionally kept as clear and uncomplicated as possible in order to simplify the reading flow.
In addition, he points out that this tendency predominantly occurs in the tabloid category. A further reason for the short sentence style is the possibility to represent the fast-paced and diverse course of the event. In this way, the report is emotionalized and puts the audience closer to the action Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen investigated the readability of quality versus popular newspapers and aspects of style of all newspaper sections.
Although she did not concentrate only on sports, some aspects might also be relevant to the present study. Like Crystal and Davy, she also found in her results that sentences in tabloids are not as long as in up-market papers. The highest percentage of words per sentence was found for The Times, whereas The Daily Mirror and The Sun showed the lowest percentage see table 1.
Nevertheless, The Times and The Telegraph showed the highest percentage of complex sentences and The Mirror the lowest rate. Since the present study follows a similar approach and will also refer to them later on, some of Simon-Vandenbergens results are listed below:. In his study Ghadessy focused on the vocabulary used in written sports commentary.
He analyzed a corpus of 37 reports taken from The Times. He emphasizes the different use of certain expressions within the written language of sport i. Moreover, Ghadessy looks at involved and uninvolved language. He divided the corpus of his study into up-market papers, mid-market and down-market papers and further analysed five different sections: When analyzing linguistic aspects, he concentrated on investigating noun phrases and pre- and postmodifications in British newspapers.
He concluded that the three categories of newspaper up-markets, mid-markets and down-markets can clearly be linked to the readership the different kinds of newspapers aim at. With regard to the use of noun phrases, up-market papers use far more complex noun phrases than the down-market papers A comprehensive work that also examined the topic, was that by Knobbe The analysis is based on certain criteria that are particularly appropriate for a syntactic analysis of press texts These include, for example, the length of sentences and the number of post modifications and premodifications of nominal phrases.
As the present study will also be based on some of these criteria, his work is of great significance to this study. Concerning the use of active and passive forms he observed a far higher number of active sentences Westin carried out a diachronic study of newspaper language in which she analysed English newspaper editorials. For this purpose she compiled a corpus that featured editorials from to Westin observed a decrease in the usage in the pronoun it Moreover, she noticed a decrease of the average sentence length over the years: Whereas in the mean sentence length was Concerning the use of passive voice she observed a decrease in the use of agentless passive forms and no significant shift in by -passive forms Partly based on the findings of the above mentioned studies, the present study will apply the following criteria in its analysis:.
This chapter will give an overview of the British print media landscape and give an insight into some of the major British newspapers. Furthermore, it will assign the newspapers to different categories and describe them. The most striking differences concerning the style of writing and the question of how this could affect the syntax used in the articles will be discussed.
In addition, the readership of the various newspapers will be briefly described. First of all, the sources for printed texts that deal with sport reportage are basically the various issues of the daily press, and the numerous weekly sport magazines that predominantly concentrate on the mainstream sports. This work will exclusively focus on the daily press in order to provide a genuine result, as the style of writing in pure sport magazines may differ from the way articles are written in papers that do not only include sports coverage.
Jucker states in his introduction that British newspapers can generally be divided into three types — quality papers and popular papers, and those are further subdivided into down-market papers and mid-market papers The standard of news reporting in quality papers is higher, whereas popular papers aim at having many readers Jucker Tunstall categorises the major British newspapers as follows: Bregman tells this story not without admiration for the early thinkers Hayek and Friedman , but does paint Friedman as rather fundamentalist after , when he became a mouthpiece for markets being the best solution for every problem.
Bregman calls for the Left to become brave and constructive again. He says they should "reclaim the language of progress": Spur "innovation" by putting talent where it helps societal outcomes. Be "efficient" - investing in poor people saves a lot of costs. Promote "freedom" - spend time on meaningful work, where we choose more wwhat we value. A great read on a camping trip.
Because this is what you might call this - camping on Mars, with lots of difficulties. The stranded astronaut is required to think hard about the solutions to his hardships before he tries them. I'm told that the problems and solutions are very-well researched. A thriller with lots of engineering and physics lessons built in!
Der Roman ist lang, doch liest sich sehr schnell. Dieses Buch findet weitesgehend im Kopf der Hauptperson statt. Eine prickelnde kognitive Dissonanz. Ich habe es deshalb mehr genossen als Homo Faber, damals im Deutsch Leistungskurs ;-. This book can be read in 2 to 3 hours, without being mentally challenging. Its main goal is to give you an idea of what Scrum means - by the tool of storytelling.
It is really just a page story of a CTO who embraces Scrum in a time of desparation and turns things around within a few months. It is well-written and relatable. The main points of Scrum are repeated in a short bullet list after each chapter. This is really useful. A good whodunit novel which is narrated by several mostly female protagonists.
I felt like taking mental rides both into female trains of thought and also into memory lane, because british cities have a unique architectural flair to me. I guess this has to be counted as complements to the author: A thriller taking place in the Swiss world of finance but it could be any Western country. Very readable and the background facts check out, as is to be expected from this author I praise his book "Small World". I don't mind the ending, which seems a bit fantastic, but it might actually be plausible.
I can't forgive the beginning though, where the protagonist stumbles upon the evil mystery per random chance - which is okay, once. He stumbles into two coincidences, both of which are highly unlikely. I can't believe that there wasn't a better solution for this plot to get started. Why would I, a German, read an autobiography by a German which he wrote in English? Because I am not Neumann's indended audience. He wrote it for his fellow Americans, his countrymen since he arrived there in , to answer their questions about life in East Prussia, being a member of the Hitler Youth, digging trenches on the Eastern Front in WW2 and of being stuck in the newly-Sowjet part of Germany in the years following WW2.
Claus Neumann born lived in Germany for 21 years, across Europe as a travelling apprentice and then in the U. His countrymen expect him to acknowledge the incomparable guilt which the Germans put on themselves. But they also expect him to spend most of his words on his story - his personal circuumstances and his transformation.
Neumann does not speak about racism and fascism in each chapter, but when he does, he puts weight on his words. He mentions hearing about and discussing concentration camps, for instance. One can argue about whether he dealt enough with his families' shortcomings, besides giving some hints, but I won't.
Kriegsspiel: Wie preußische Militärs den Rollenspiel-Ahnen erfanden
Otherwise, he is telling his story to the point, and one can tell that his storytelling is of American nature: This is, for the most part, a fascinating view into a world that is basically dead - the Germans living in East Prussia. Of course there are many people who wrote down a lot of facts and stories.
But this account can do without most of those dramatic layers which many who still yearn for their lost home use when they talk about it. This is what I believe makes this a rare and valuable document of history. Kurzgeschichten, vielleicht teilweise wahr, aus dem Repertoire eines Strafverteidigers. Fast-paced drug dealing drama, placed in Southern California. A quick read, also due to the unique style of narration, much like a movie script, with much weight on dialogue and short descriptions of actions.
Characters are interestingly described on the "good" as well as the "bad" side , but remain a bit shallow. This book is about things that gain from uncertainty or volatility. For instance, a candle is extinguished by a random wind blow, but a fire might just thrive from it. The candle light is fragile. Taleb says that a fire is not just robust against the volatile wind - it does not stay the same, but becomes better. So he proposes the term " antifragile " for such things.
Another example of his: The employee may have stable income, but he gets complacent and an unforseeable "Black Swan" event the book that made Taleb famous could get him fired. The taxi driver constantly needs to reevaluate himself and adapt. He is constantly antifragile, the average employee is constantly fragile. Scientists or corporate executives are fragile with respect to reputation. A majority of people being dismissive could be fatal for their career. Artists and writers on the other hand thrive on criticism, all they need is a few followers as well.
Big successes in the world can, according to Taleb, be explained by the antifragility in which the actors were be it that they were by accident or not. A lot of it comes down to not having complex models and strategies in this complex world. We are better at doing than thinking, if doing is done right: A mix of small-error-tolerating tinkering and experience-based heuristics, instead of complex theories which need to be correct about what happens when.
The choice to be a free, independent actor instead of joining large complex structures. Keeping options open to yourself that will do less harm than good in the long run, whatever happens. This is an especially strong message in a civilisation that is building more and more complex structures. Taleb is coming from the financial world he was a quantitative trader , so he's seen all the needless and hurtful complexities that make up our economies. In the course of the book, Taleb explores the idea in various ways, among them: A more mathematical but readable for everyone look at the issue.
He introduces convex and concave payoffs to events. We might not have a good idea of the event x's distribution, but to be prepared for the payoff f x , we can at least look at the function f. Substracting things from models and strategies is more often than not enriching. He uses medicine as an extended example. Ethics of being antifragile. Many people can be antifragile to the cost of others who have to be fragile. Most currently, and in Talebs, experience, bankers are still anti-fragile as they're being bailed out by fragile tax payers. He argues that only of you have put value into y time or work of building it, or money betting on it you can be taken serious in your opinion about y - this is what he calls "having skin in the game".
Now, how is this book written? It is a wild ride of opinions, personal and biographic stories all in favour of the author , many little tidbits and example from classic literature, repitions and also dialogues between more or less made-up characters. Honestly, I was close to giving up on it because the author thinks he is insightful and helpful but really isn't. It is mostly the overly creative chapter names and little chapter summaries that throw the reader out of the flow and make him forget where he is.
That's what you get if you refuse to accept an editor - a luxury Taleb can afford after his two best-selling books beforehand. However, this previous success and experiences in the media world after that also allowed him to be refreshingly harsh. Several professions, such as my current one research , are not treated well and even specific persons are put in the spotlight. I was delighted that Taleb shares my refusal to like Thomas "the world is flat" Friedman and Ray "the singularity is near" Kurzweil for the simplistic visions they have about our complex world.
He also picked Nobel price winner Joseph Stiglitz as his preferred target of critique, for being seriously wrong about the crisis, during the crisis, and having cherry-picked his past statements afterwards this cherry-picking is currently too easy for all experts who have no skin in the game, I wonder if there is a future technology to make cherry-picking harder, given that lots of statements are actually published, as this is how economic commentators like Stiglitz or, more general, scientists, operate.
Several reviews have focused on Taleb's self-centeredness, favourably or not. I agree to a lot of what they have to say. However, the metaphor he proposes seems useful and, sometimes, the messenger is important: Taleb rode around in the complex world of finance for decades so if he argues in favour of substracting complexities from the world, he is more believable than someone who comes from the outside.
He actually bet on the system failing for years losing money and in the end won big. It's debatable if that is ethically what you want your messenger to have done, but he can say that he not only said something was going to happen many people did actually but he had "skin in the game". Again, this is helping believability in most circles, especially inside the complex modern ones.
At their core, the models of the human economy have always been sketches of the real thing, at best. And economic practice i. What this book delivers is highly enjoyable education. It has many gaps, but who would expect no emissions has no respect for the multi-dimensionality of the topic. Everyone always cuts it their own way, so let's leave Goodwin to his cuts. He tells a good story which must have been hard to carve out, with very nice illustrations from Dan Burr.
I think the book does work as an introduction as well as a reference to come back to. Though it proceeds chronologically, I think the book is in essence two parts:. The second part is much bigger than the first. Goodwin also has a strong anti-cooperation, anti-corruption, U. It was interesting to get a new view on how the U. I didn't know that it was republican president Eisenhower who coined the term military-industrial complex.
Den Untertitel des Buches finde ich eigentlich passender: Erheblich beeinflusst war Dobelli dabei aus dem Feld der "Heuristics-and-Bias" Literatur, wie sie derzeit von ehemaligen Investmanagern wie Nassim Nicholas Taleb ins Rampenlicht getragen werden. Unsere Intuition ist effizient. Der Autor ist in den Niederlanden sehr bekannt.
Sein Mandant ist ein alter Mann, das Opfer auch, beide schienen sich nicht zu kennen. In dieser Reihe ist der Held ein Autopsie-Experte. Dieser Krimi ist sehr lesbar kostete mich ca. Sie ist zum Teil autobiographisch und portraitiert junge Menschen, die im Europa der 50er Jahre einen eigenen Zugang zu ihrem Leben suchen. Damals reisten viele junge Menschen per Anhalter durch Europa, und anhand der Menschen, die sie treffen Autofahrer, Bewohner lokaler Orte und nicht zuletzt andere Hitchhiker , lernen sie, was ihnen selbst wichtig ist.
Sie scheinen mir als Stream Of Consiousness niedergeschrieben. Es leidet dann aber ein wenig die Spannung unter all dem Realismus. This book has a lot of insight to offer about the background on which we should lead current discussions about debt and money. I found a lot of things to think about in here and very much enjoyed reading it. However, it is maybe too rich.
It is so full of anthropological evidence as well as Graebers own interpretation of circumstances that it is not easy to keep all of them in mind, much less to make out the big picture that Graeber wants to paint. In fact, I only got a feeling of the big picture of Graebers line of thought by compiling this post. I decided therefore to write neither a review nor a complete summary. Instead, I provide here the shortest summary I can come up with in three minutes and then leave the reader with a chronological collection of notes I made while reading.
Sometimes I summarized the gist of an idea, sometimes I simply cited important or well-written paragraphs that capture the gist well by themselves. I do not make any claim to completeness or having picked all the cherries. The too short summary: The book first looks for the foundations of money and debt, both in human morality and culture Chapters 2 through 7.
Graeber finds a deep tie in the anthropological evidence between debt and violence and dishonor and reminds us that being in debt is a social construction much more than a mathematical fact and thus can mean different things. Then, it provides a compelling history of four known and very long world-stretching ages of markets and money Chapters 8 through This history of ages seems to be cyclic and in fact, we entered a new age in the last decades. The effects of this transition may become more understandable in this big picture. Is that really true? And in the light of the financial crisis, this question has been asked many times - even if the conversation everyone was expecting has never really taken place: There's really no nicer way to say this.
The Myth of Barter Graeber takes some time to take a stab at the myth from page one in every text book of economics: According to Graeber who also cites other anthropologists, by the way , this image is based on no evidence at all: In particular, it can serve as an argument against the notion that money is created by and belongs to the government.
In fact, Graeber makes clear later in the book that governments are actually always crucial in markets that use coinage. Primordial Debts Societies have had to deal with overbearing of debt for thousands of years - and the evidence tells us that most of the time, they cancelled most of the debt at some point, be it through revolution or to avert a revolution.
Often, it was a newly installed king e. A brief treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic relations Graeber identifies three main moral principles of economic relations among humans. In our lives, we often switch back and forth between them. Graeber says a kind of "base communism" is basis of a lot of our daily lives, mostly in small, but numerous interactions. Here, economic relations are all about equivalence between the actors. Gift exchange economies often insist on inexact retribution of gifts, in order to keep the system out of equilibrium and in motion.
With gifts, honor enters the picture and with it, the third moral principle:. Precedents often happen not with the actual intent to create this durable relation - examples are violent acts e. Graeber concludes that often, there is no definition of which type an economic relation actually is, which creates conceptual confusion in economics.
Mathematical models of markets certainly do not cover all of these aspects. What, then, is debt? A debt creates relationships. Not being able to pay off a debt creates hierarchy subordination. Wealthy debtors on the other hand, get leverage over their creditors if you owe the bank dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe million dollars, you own the bank. Games with Sex and Death Graeber makes a distinction between "Human Economies" and commercial economies. Graeber shows examples from African societies, where a human can not even be exchanged with another human, even if the cultural laws do something very similar e.
Less extreme cases are for instance societies that establish that certain forms of violence, e. Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundation of Contemporary Civilisation Graeber paints an image from ancient times that seems familiar today: The prospering cities with free expression and choice of life, surrounded by evangelising nomads, the latter growing stronger as debt-ridden citizens, victims of the city's ruthless accounting, having often lost their families, join their ranks - founding and deepening the nomad's hatred of the city and its way of life.
This image comes up again and again in the history of civilization. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. It is fitting to think of a living human who is completely owned by other humans as undead - and by those who own him as having unnatural powers.
But this theory is one of the wilder ones in the book. Credit versus Bullion, and the Cycles of History Graeber notes how years of human economic history seems to be cyclic, to some extent. Two types of economic age interchange. Rome, or The East India Company.
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The second type are ages of paper virtual credit money, with smaller empires, less production and slower innovation, where religious preachers try to tame economic effects on humans e. He only shortly visits the First Agrarian Empires Mesopotamia, Egypt, China - which had virtual credit money of which we don't know much and then explains the next four great ages in detail see next chapters , where the last one again one of virtual credit money is only 40 years old.
It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty - … as the kind of absolute power of 'use' and 'abuse' … - to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke and Smith, about the origin of human society in some collection of … males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully-formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or to begin to swap beaver pelts. As a sidenote, the emergence of the main philosophical ideas is why Karl Jaspers called it the "Axial Age".
This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us. Then, Graeber also notes that he would not write off religion as purely escapist movements - they brought overall positive effects, e. Certainly, it had terrible effects on literacy; but one must also bear in mind that ancient cities could only be maintained by extracting resources from the countryside. They were, after all, enormous concentrations of wealth managed by what were in effect monastic corporations, which were constantly seeking new opportunities for profitable investment.
Regularly, when they were in dangerous shortage of precious metals, Confucian regimes had to break down monasteries, in order to melt the giant Buddha statues that had once been coins. Commerce in the Islamic world was very flourishing and some islamic thinkers formulated foundational ideas about money centuries before Adam Smith did. Islamic commerce forbade usury no interest on loans , and as a result there was much more emphasis on trust p.
True value lay elsewhere. The Age of the great capitalistic empires - Without exploding population and market activity in China, as well as a government which had recently switched from paper money to silver and gold as currencies, the extraction of precious metals from the New World by Europeans could not have gone on profitably for as long as it did three centuries - and who knows how different the outcomes would have been for Native Americans? The Ming dynasty, after regaining power from Mongol rule, had returned to the silver standard around and abandoned paper money.
Also in that time, the Chinese population strived and thus the Chinese were in dire need of silver to keep their domestic commerce flowing. The European merchants accumulated world trade in these times. They imported a lot of Chinese goods and thus all currency made from gold and silver actually never really reached the European people. Those making the decision did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of [personal] credit [among people] was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal -and often vindictive- power of the state.
Graeber shares stories from the first bubbles in early modern western capitalism. Of course, we all know the Dutch tulip bubble. In Britain, there was also the "South Sea Bubble" of , where the South Sea company very quickly became too big too fail as big as national debt. If that doesn't already relate well enough to our modern times keyword: The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill.
Graeber wonders why capitalistic regimes are constantly overshadowed by a fear of impending doom social revolution, nuclear holocaust, global warming. Because if there's no end to it, there's absolutely no reason not to generate credit -that is, future money- infinitely. The beginning of something yet to be determined -?
President Nixon abolished the international gold standard - an age of credit money began. We don't know much about the effect on the coming time yet - the early decades showed the opposite of what one might expect in terms of moral institutions and even stronger U. But the latter seems to be on the decline, maybe the former observation is bound to change, as well. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept. What we have seen so far is the opposite [but elsewhere he says that four decades are a very short time in history].
We were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations, organized around the same relationship of investor and executive: In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have been the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense os possible alternative futures. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away. Graeber notes that the banking system is often justified as democratic in two ways.
He cites Ludwig von Mises and Niall Ferguson Both seemingly contradictory arguments are used, whenever the situation requires it. Graeber thinks this approach asks the wrong questions. What about the "non-industrious poor"? They are completely left out here, as if they do not deserve not to live in poverty. And do the industrious people really help us as society, given that we now see that the assumption of endless economic growth is destroying our resources? Manna is a short SciFi novel that you can read in a couple hours.
It's the classic setup of portaying a doom scenario versus an utopia scenario. The first part is the doom scenario, in which the narrator explains how the U. This part is very plausible, with the simple beginning assumption that it is not the low-wage work that gets automatised first, but middle management. Through innovations in the fast food industry, the management software "Manna" quickly makes low-skilled workers so efficient, that all middle-management gets replaced by it.
Soon, all air travel gets automatised and when robot vision is finally good enough, all transportation and all general low-skilled work is also replaced. The giant out-of-work population is put in welfare homes out of sight, supervised and being kept hidden in the most efficient manner by robots. This development is explained in a very plausible manner and serves as an example of the perils of automisation in the name of profit-making.
I often see people on the internet linking to this story when they want to make that point and now I finally read it. The second part deals with the narrator being flown out of his welfare housing to Australia, where his dad had, years ago, bought him a place in a novel society, which was built with technology that is open-source, transparent and centered around human needs, not profit everyone has the same budget of credits to spend, it is a zero-waste system run by robots.
It deals less with a scenario how it developed. Instead, it spends almost all pages with descriptions of the coolest technologies which the author could think of. Kreisler ist auch herumgekommen. Er musste Wien verlassen und durfte mit Chaplin arbeiten. Einer der allerersten Science Fiction Romane, geschrieben um konnte ich grad nicht genauer rausfinden. Ein junges Liebespaar findet nach Umwegen entgegen gesellschaftlichen Konventionen zusammen.
Sehr gut geschrieben und interessant - gerade auch aus der Perspektive der Welt um herum. Aber polnisch kann ich nun eh nicht. Mir gefiel der zweite Teil des Buches am Besten. Das Buch ist sehr lesbar - Eschbach ist ein sehr erfahrener Bestseller-Autor. Ich empfehle das Buch also trotzdem. Werde sicher noch versuchen, einen anderen Near-Future Sciencefiction mit diesem Thema zu finden. A Cambridge physicist derives systematically if and how Britain could live on locally generated renewable energy.
And in which cases nuclear power or external renewables think Desertec need to be part of the equation. He describes every source of energy that is worth mentioning wind, solar, hydro, offshore wind, wave, tide, geothermal. He conveniently uses one unit of measurement everywhere: Currently, the outlook is bleak: Then, he describes what he thinks are ways to narrow that gap.
Finally he sketches 5 energy plans that would even out. It is partly estimation and partly prognosis, both seem mostly reasonable and I learned a lot. I bet that he is wrong here or there, but at least it is a documented process it also has an extended technical appendix. My recommendation is the new indicator he introduces to compare security of generation technologies deaths per Megawatt and when he notes how house-cats kill many many more birds than windmills.
Vieleicht ein kleiner Vergleich: Kiss haben Rock'n'Roll satirisch aufs Korn genommen mit ihrem Auftreten, machten aber zugleich auch noch selbst wirklich guten Rock'n'Roll. Und Moers zeigt hier wirklich viel davon. There is organisational concept that many of you would might find intriguing: It is a method of organising people on the basis of consent, while maintaining a form of collaboration that is looking out for its own effectiveness, such that it can actually be used for modern businesses.
It is based on the ideas of a dutch Quaker from the early s. It then was further transformed by a dutch entrepreneur who inherited a large electrician company and was looking for a humane way to manage it and this company is still large and successful after several decades of employing sociocratical concepts. This book is one of the only newer ones I could find which is not written by one of the original main figures. It was written by two American consultants who fell in love with the concept and are using and promoting it. The authors do three things in this book: First, they give a readable introduction to the history of sociology so far, which is very interesting.
Then, they describe the basics of the method, which turns out to be a rather short exercise. The last part is a set of tools and practices for someone looking to introduce Sociocracy to an organisation e. To conclude, the book helped me to learn and understand what this concept is about, though not in too much depth.
But as far as it gives an explanation, this book is very readable. I had no use at this point for the third part applying Sociocracy , so I will not judge on it here. A very readable exploration of a british journalist, who researches the true history of humor under communism. Said humor is known to be the funniest and most cynical humor created by oppressed humans that we know of 'Why, despite all shortages, was the toilet paper in East Germany always 2-ply? Because they had to send a copy of everything they did to Russia. Many argue that it helped bring communism to its end.
Lewis put this hypothesis to a test and this book is the well-written tale of this test, in which he speaks to many interesting old people all over Eastern Europe and his eastern-german ex-girlfriend , sprinkled with many jokes. I learned even more about communism history on the way. Maybe not a coincidence that it works well when a resident of one great humor-culture Britain researches another great humor-culture. Gelesen im Budapest Urlaub. Dalos beschreibt einige Wochen aus seiner Jugend in den 60er Jahren, als er in Budapest als naiver Parteigaenger aufwuchs und sich zum ersten Mal verliebte.
Waehrend eines Schulfestes kommt es zu einem Eifersuchtsdrama, wegen dem er zum ersten Mal Kontakt mit der polizei bekommt. Wenig spaeter wanderte Dalos nach Wien aus. Wieder kramt ein beruehmter Autor nochmal in seinen Kindheitserinnerungen. Heeresma wuchs in Sued-Amsterdam auf waehrend der deutschen Besatzungszeit. Sein Vater gab ihm Halt waehrend dieser Zeit, in der viele seiner juedischen Freunde ploetzlich verschwanden. Sie versteckten sogar jem anden in ihrer Wohnung. Fuer mich war es nicht nur sinnvoll, um die Besatzungzeit dieser Stadt besser zu verstehen, sondern auch interessant, bekannte Strassennamen mit 60 Jahre alten Eindruecken zu verbinden.
Da stecken sicher ein paar Wahrheiten drin Jared Diamond's take on collapsing societies is widely praised and a lot has been written. I don't want to add to much to that, other than a few notes:. Visions This is the actual "timeline" part. Throughout several workshops held in english transition communities, four scenarios were developed, running from now, , to In the first two, we continue business as usual and ignore 1 or acknowledge 2 the evidence, respectively.
In the third and fourth scenario we make cultural shifts s, but fail to really acknowledge the challenge 3 or acknowledge them and start to transition early on 4. All four timelines are described in text and make up several events that could happen in such a scenario with title and year. Challenges in transition This chapter details some topics that pose quests for our society in transition to post-peak-oil.
It covers demographics, food and water, energy, travel and transport and health. The road to energy descend plans what could be the steps to make and the tools to use when preparing for energy descend? An energy descend plan is made by the people in order to imagine what their lives could be like and prepare. A timeline is one of the first tools that come to mind and this chapter introduces some more that could be used in practice, like planning the high school reunion, visualisation techniques or finding indicators of resilience.
Peak Oil and Climate Change This section surprised me by being a short, but highly informative primer on these two topics. For instance, I learned what the most basic indicators for climate change are plus what the likely sources of confusion in discussions are. Also, it was explained how the reports of the IPCC come about and what they say.
There are a lot of numbers to back up certain claims and the whole point seems to be made pretty objectively. I might give this chapter some people I know to read. The challenges we face are likely to be threatening our economic growth model at its core. The transition movement has some clear messages and a solid concept I am anticipating the video of Rob Hopkins TED talk - notes are already here. This book, however, has several ingredients.
Every chapter has its own message. In this book, they assume it will be The question to me is: Will we be able to feed cities at all in the future? I should look at this book. I already mentioned some of the thoughts of this book here when I started it. Though it is pretty long, it was a rewarding read and I came back after a break from it to finish it. Beinhocker claims and who would argue with him about it that economics as we have it develops models that seldom relate to reality and leads to false predictions, false hopes and false politics.
He argues for a new kind of economics, which he calls "Complexity Economics", in which it is acknowlegded that the human economy is one of the most complex systems imaginable and in a constant state of unrest as opposed to the equillibrium view of traditional economics. He puts his case forward on the shoulders of many advancements in science: The books proceeds in four parts:. It is always interesting to see when someone tries to put pieces together. Then, of course, he mixes facts with wishful thinking and it can be hard to set those apart.