|
Books > History > European history
In the late seventeenth century, a team of scientists managed to
free, for the first time, the soft tissues of the brain and nerves
from the hard casing of the skull. In doing so, they not only
engendered modern neuroscience, and with it the promise of knowing
the mind through empirical study of the brain; they also unleashed
a host of questions, problems, paradoxes, and--strangest of
all--literary forms that are still with us today. Nervous Fictions
is the first account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar
literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science
and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention
to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing
evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts:
the nervous fiction. Apparent not just in scientific work, but also
in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne,
Smollett, ""it-narratives""), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish,
Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville,
Boswell), nervous fictions dissect the brain through metaphor,
personification, and other figurative language. Nervous fictions
stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind
and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed
with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific
study of our brains as simply complex physical systems.
In the immediate decades after World War II, the French National
Railways (SNCF) was celebrated for its acts of wartime heroism.
However, recent debates and litigation have revealed the ways the
SNCF worked as an accomplice to the Third Reich and was actively
complicit in the deportation of 75,000 Jews and other civilians to
death camps. Sarah Federman delves into the interconnected
roles-perpetrator, victim, and hero-the company took on during the
harrowing years of the Holocaust. Grounded in history and case law,
Last Train to Auschwitz traces the SNCF's journey toward
accountability in France and the United States, culminating in a
multimillion-dollar settlement paid by the French government on
behalf of the railways.The poignant and informative testimonies of
survivors illuminate the long-term effects of the railroad's impact
on individuals, leading the company to make overdue amends. In a
time when corporations are increasingly granted the same rights as
people, Federman's detailed account demonstrates the obligations
businesses have to atone for aiding and abetting governments in
committing atrocities. This volume highlights the necessity of
corporate integrity and will be essential reading for those called
to engage in the difficult work of responding to past harms.
In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving, whose
libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt was
tried in April 2000, the High Court in London labeled Irving a
falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge,
would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did.
Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief adviser for
the defense, uses this famous trial as a lens for exploring a range
of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's
enterprise.
On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the
Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf
fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two
shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still.
Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly
tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the
span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong."
In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual
and artistic talents--and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among
them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl,
Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde
was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies
these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with
that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of
Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent
sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara
Hitler.
|
|