What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the true spirit of a nation? In November 2017 the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle, and wrest their country back from over thirty years of Robert Mugabe's rule. In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir and critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the 'coup that was not a coup', the telling of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two women - her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.

With syndication in more than 200 newspapers and a faithful readership nationwide, Bill Maxwell's status as one of the country's preeminent black journalists is unquestionable. This collection of his columns, primarily from the St. Petersburg Times, forms a body of commentary on humanity (and lack of same) that will capture the hearts and minds of Americans. Maxwell covers a sweeping range of subjects, including race-a central but not exclusive theme. He asks hard questions that courageously attempt to understand hatred and injustice in America; and he takes on controversial issues many columnists avoid and a wide spectrum of national figures-from Jeb, George W. and Clarence Thomas to the Pope and Jesse Jackson. Maxwell writes movingly about his childhood as the son of migrant farm workers in rural Florida, his love of books-beginning with those plucked from garbage cans-and his everyday encounters with the white world and the black one. With a voice that is provocative and insights that are deep and passionate, he tackles the plight of migrant workers, the devastation of the environment, religious intolerance, homophobia, affirmative action, illiteracy, public education, civic responsibility, politics-and racism. He criticizes blacks and whites alike in his search for truth and right, especially in his exploration of what he calls 'resurgent bigotry and Republicanism' and 'the black writer's most agonizing task-and duty-being dispassionate about the foibles and self-destructive behavior of African-Americans. Setting a standard for the newspaper column as social criticism, Maximum Insight illuminates the role of the black writer as an interpreter of the forces that define a diverse America.

Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author's decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.

A wonderfully frank and funny memoir by Britain's greatest and most ferocious interviewer, Lynn Barber. 'Packed full of incredible stories' Glamour 'Funny, bold, incisive, clever and interesting' Independent 'Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout' Zoe Heller Lynn Barber, by her own admission, has always suffered from a compelling sense of nosiness. An exceptionally inquisitive child she constantly questioned everyone she knew about imitate details of their lives. This talent for nosiness, coupled with her unusual lack of the very English fear of social embarrassment, turned out to be the perfect qualification for a celebrity interviewer. In A Curious Career, Lynn Barber takes us from her early years as a journalist at Penthouse - where she started out interviewing foot fetishists, voyeurs, dominatrices and men who liked wearing nappies - to her later more eminent role interrogating a huge cross-section of celebrities ranging from politicians to film stars, comedians, writers, artists and musicians. A Curious Career is full of glorious anecdotes - the interview with Salvador Dali that, at Dali's invitation, ended up lasting four days, or the drinking session with Shane MacGowan during which they planned to rob a bank. It also contains eye-opening transcripts, such as her infamous interview with the hilarious and spectacularly rude Marianne Faithfull. A wonderfully frank and funny memoir by Britain's greatest and most ferocious interviewer, A Curious Career is also a fascinating window into the lives of celebrities and the changing world of journalism.

Since the beginning of human history, stories have helped people make sense of their lives and their world. Today, an understanding of storytelling is invaluable as we seek to orient ourselves within a flood of raw information and an unprecedented variety of supposedly true accounts. In Stories Make the World, award-winning screenwriter Stephen Most offers a captivating, refreshingly heartfelt exploration of how documentary filmmakers and other storytellers come to understand their subjects and cast light on the world through their art. Drawing on the author's decades of experience behind the scenes of television and film documentaries, this is an indispensable account of the principles and paradoxes that attend the quest to represent reality truthfully.

Thirty-two years ago Mrs Li and Mr Wu from Zhejiang abandoned their second baby daughter at a marketplace. Mrs Wang Maochen from Beijing has seven children, but six of them are illegal so they could not go to university, could not take a job, go to the doctor, or marry, or even buy a train ticket. Zhao Min from Guangzhou first learned about the concept of a sibling at university, in her town there were no sisters or brothers. With the Chinese government now adapting to a two child policy, Secrets and Siblings outlines the scale of its tragic consequences, showing how Chinese family and society has been forever changed. In doing so it also challenges many of our misconceptions about family life in China, arguing that it is the state, rather than popular prejudice, that has hindered the adoption of girls within China. At once brutal and beautifully hopeful, Secrets and Siblings asks what the state and its children will do now that they are becoming adults.

Can you be a pilgrim without leaving your life behind? How does it feel to approach everyday places with the same reverence as grand cathedrals? And how are we changed by even the smallest of journeys? James Attlee asks these questions and more in his thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of a pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew: the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door. Attlee's Cowley has little to do with the dreaming spires of his city. Leaving tourism and student life aside, Attlee instead presents a vital and delightfully motley collection of places, people, languages, and cultures. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, from halal shops to Brazilian art dealers to reggae clubs to quiet churchyards, Attlee celebrates the appealing and homegrown eclecticism that so often comes under attack from predatory developers. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Isolarion is at once a charming road movie, a battle cry raised against creeping homogenisation, and a love song to the gloriously messy real life of the city he calls home.

In this follow-up to their landmark first book, Deric Henderson and Ivan Little have gathered new stories from seventy journalists who have worked in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. These contributors write powerfully about the victims they have never forgotten, the events that have never left them, and the lasting impact of working through those terrible years. Reporting the Troubles 2, which includes contributions from a new generation of journalists, who came up in the years leading to the Good Friday Agreement, provides a compelling narrative of the last fifty years, and covers many of the key events in Northern Ireland's troubled history, from Bloody Sunday in 1972 to the inquest into the Ballymurphy Massacre in 2021. Grounded in the passionate belief that good journalism and good journalists make a difference, Reporting the Troubles 2 is a profoundly moving act of remembrance and testimony. 'I am sometimes asked to identify the most important story that I dealt with while I was editor of the Irish Times ... I answer that the most important story was not published in a single day but over years. And it was not put together by any one journalist but by a whole cohort of reporters, photographers, feature writers and editors ... For the most part they just got by-lines and the satisfaction of knowing that what they were doing was important, that the story had to be told, day by day, hour by hour. And that telling it could make a difference. It is difficult to imagine that there could ever have been a peace process without that.' CONOR BRADY, former editor, Irish Times Contributions from - Gordon Adair, Don Anderson, Ciaran Barnes, Colin Bateman, Jilly Beattie, Charlie Bird, David Blevins, Declan Bogue, Conor Brady, Stephen Breen, Eugene Campbell, Peter Cardwell, Mark Carruthers, Niall Carson, Paddy Clancy, Simon Cole, Liam Collins, Mark Davey, Donna Deeney, Michael Denieffe, Patricia Devlin, Michael Donnelly, Roisin Duffy, Gavin Esler, Michael Fisher, Jim Flanagan, Mike Gaston, Gareth Gordon, Jim Gracey, Paul Harris, Deric Henderson, Mark Hennessy, Gary Honeyford, Paul Johnson, Fergal Keane, Vincent Kearney, Gerry Kelly, Will Leitch, Ivan Little, Robin Livingstone, David Lynas, Darragh MacIntyre, Michael Macmillan, Kevin Magee, Stanley Matchett, Don McAleer, Roisin McAuley, Barry McCaffrey, Jonny McCambridge, Freya McClements, Sir Trevor McDonald, Lindy McDowell, Mark McFadden, Hugh McGrattan, Seamus McKee, Fearghal McKinney, Allison Morris, Rod Nawn, Malachi O'Doherty, Maggie O'Kane, Mike Parry, Lance Price, Colin Randall, Paul Reynolds, Maggie Taggart, Eric Villiers, John Ware, Nicholas Watt, Johnny Watterson, David Young.

In the spring of 2014, the Sunflower Movement's three-week occupation of the Legislative Yuan brought Taiwan back to international media attention. It was the culmination of a series of social movements that had been growing in strength since 2008 and have become even more salient since the spring of 2014. Social movements in Taiwan have emerged as a powerful new actor that needs to be understood alongside those players that have dominated the literature such as political parties, local factions, Taishang, China and the United States. This book offers readers an introduction to the development of these social movements in Taiwan by examining a number of important movement case studies that focus on the post 2008 period. The return of the Kuomintang (KMT) to power radically changed the political environment for Taiwan's civil society and so the book considers how social activists responded to this new political opportunity structure. The case chapters are based on extensive fieldwork and are written by authors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches; in some cases authors combine being both academics and activists themselves. Together, the chapters focus on a number of core issues, providing the book with four key aims. Firstly, it investigates the roots of the movements and considers how to best explain their emergence. Secondly, it examines the development trajectories of these movements. Thirdly, it looks at the best way to explain their impact and development patterns, and finally it assesses their overall impact, questioning whether they can be regarded as successes or failures. Covering a unique range of social movement cases, the book will be of interest to students and researchers interested in Taiwanese society and politics, as well as social movements and civil society.

Tomaz Aquino de Braganca, a close adviser to former Mozambican president Samora Machel, dedicated his life to the liberation struggles of southern Africa. Before his death in a plane crash (along with President Machel) in 1986, he was a journalist, an academic, a diplomat, and a public intellectual known for his skill in sensitive and discreet political negotiation, most notably his role in Mozambique's revolution and independence from Portugal in 1975. Marco Mondaini and Colin Darch present a selection of Aquino's postindependence writings and interviews, many published here in English for the first time. They also provide a general introduction to Aquino's life and thought and short introductions to the texts. The result is both a compelling glimpse into the inner workings of several liberation movements and a window on the development of Aquino's thinking around issues of independence, nationalism, and the character of the struggles.

Sandi Toksvig - broadcaster, writer, actor, and seeker of all things whimsical, has turned her probing mind to many of the most intriguing questions of our times in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph for many years. Now, for the very first time, these musings have been collected in one hilarious collection. In The Chain of Curiosity, Sandi takes the reader on a side-splitting journey through life's peculiarities in a book packed with wit, wisdom and wonderment. From pondering the joys of World Pencil Day to examining the intricacies of applause etiquette, and from tip-toeing around the delicate art of school report vocabulary to researching the oddest way to meet a sticky end, the tickling tidbits and intriguing revelations contained within the book will delight Sandi's fans, both old and new.

James Cameron admired Martha Gellhorn above all other war-reporters 'because she combined a cold eye with a warm heart'. The Chicago Times described her writing as 'wide ranging and provocative, a blend of cool lyricism and fiery emotion, alternately prickly and welcoming, funny and stern'. But make your own judgements, and in the process find yourself plunged straight back into Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, feel the frozen ground of the Finno Russian war, the continent-wide Japanese invasion of China, the massacres in Java, the murderously naive intervention in Vietnam and the USA's dirty little wars in Central America. You will also experience the process of the Second World War by the seat of your pants. It is a tough way to learn history, but also one created in bite-sized chunks, that inspire just as often as they shock.

Fur ihn scheint heute kein Superlativ gewaltig genug: Einer der grossten Deutschen aller Zeiten wird er genannt, wichtigster Inspirator und Irritierer. Vielleicht war Max Weber vor 150 Jahren in Erfurt geboren einer der letzten Universalgelehrten. Sein Werk blieb ratselhaft. Doch er hinterliess eine Vielzahl einpragsamer Begriffe und Formeln: Idealtypus, Verantwortungsethik, Charisma, die harten Bretter, die der Politiker bohren muss und vor allem die Entzauberung der Welt . Zu den Themen seiner Analyse der modernen Gesellschaft gehorten auch die Massenmedien. Das grosse empirische Projekt, welches er 1910 der deutschen Soziologie zur Vermessung der Medienwelt in die Wiege gelegt hatte, scheiterte. Seine Anregungen aber haben sich seither in vielfaltiger Weise in den Diskursen uber Medien und Journalismus niedergeschlagen. Die Ergebnisse einer detaillierten Spurenlese werden in dieser Studie prasentiert, die erstmals mit bibliometrischen Methoden durchgefuhrt wurde. Sie mundet in eine aktuelle Zustandsbeschreibung der Kommunikationsverhaltnisse und ihrer Erforschung 100 Jahre nach Weber.

Stimmen zur Max Weber und die Entzauberung der Medienwelt

Man liest die 400 Seiten dieses grossformatigen Buches ... fasziniert. Mit einem oft geradezu erzahlerischen Duktus, sprechenden Zitaten, Assoziationen kultureller Bildung, munteren Polemiken, lockeren Formulierungen und einer jargonlosen Sprache bereitet Weischenbergs Buch eindeutig mehr Vergnugen als die real existierende Fachprosa. So nimmt man Teil an einer Synthese grosser Stoffmassen, erfreut sich an detailversessenen, faktenintensiven Anmerkungen, dem Assoziationsreichtum geistiger Bezuge, der Kennerschaft in der Kontextualisierung, den wissenssoziologischen Tiefenbohrungen, aber auch dem bezeichnenden Klatsch, der sich in diversen Briefwechseln findet. ... Die Lekture vermittelt ... einen ganzen Kosmos von Ideen und Entwicklungen zu Max Weber und seiner Rezeption. ... Damit vermittelt das Buch auch die weitere sozialwissenschaftliche Fachgeschichte, die Jahrzehnte des Denkens und Streitens in einer souveranen Synthese nachzuvollziehen erlaubt.

Wolfgang R. Langenbucher (in: H-Soz-u-Kult)"

Rana Jawad, a British-Lebanese journalist who has reported from Tripoli for the BBC for seven years, found herself the last British journalist reporting from inside Tripoli early in 2010. Defiant and terrified in turns, she went into hiding and bravely issued the series of anonymous Tripoli Witness blogs that have become famous among anyone following the course of the insurgency. The raw blog accounts published here are accompanied by a short introductory pieces as well as a series of opening essays of what it was like to live in Gaddafi's Libya. Paul Kenyon, the acclaimed Panorama Presenter who was recently awarded for his BBC documentary on Libya, introduces Rana's work and gives an insight into this remarkable young journalists's brave reporting through harrowing times.

American Modernism and Depression Documentary surveys the uneven terrain of American modernity through the lens of the documentary book. Jeff Allred argues that photo-texts of the 1930s stage a set of mediations between rural hinterlands and metropolitan areas, between elite producers of culture and the "forgotten man" of Depression-era culture, between a myth of consensual national unity and various competing ethnic and regional collectivities. In light of the complexity this entails, this study takes issue with a critical tradition that has painted the documentary expression" of the 1930s as a simplistic and propagandistic divergence from literary modernism. Allred situates these texts, and the "documentary modernism" they represent, as a central part of American modernism and response to American modernity, as he looks at the impoverished sharecroppers depcited in the groundbreaking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the disenfranchised African Americans in Richard Wright's polemical 12 Million Black Voices, and the experiments in Depression-era photography found in Life magazine.

This book focuses on musical writings in the daily and periodical press in France during the nineteenth century. It covers the criticism of a wide range of Western music, from c. 1580 to 1880, explaining how composers such as Bach and Beethoven secured a permanent place in the repertory. In particular, Dr Ellis considers the music journalism of the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, the single most important specialist periodical of the mid nineteenth century, explaining how French music criticism was influenced by aesthetic and philosophical movements. Dr Ellis analyses the process of canon formation, the development of French musicology and the increasing sensitivity of critics to questions of performance practice. Chapters on new music examine the conflict, inevitable in publishers' journals, between commercial interest and aesthetic integrity.

David Mitchell’s 2014 bestseller Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse must really have made people think – because everything’s got worse. We’ve gone from UKIP surge to Brexit shambles, from horsemeat in lasagne to Donald Trump in the White House, from Woolworths going under to all the other shops going under. It’s probably socially irresponsible even to try to cheer up.

But if you’re determined to give it a go, you might enjoy this eclectic collection (or eclection) of David Mitchell’s attempts to make light of all that darkness. Scampi, politics, the Olympics, terrorism, exercise, rude street names, inheritance tax, salad cream, proportional representation and farts are all touched upon by Mitchell’s unremitting laser of chit-chat, as he negotiates a path between the commercialisation of Christmas and the true spirit of Halloween. Read this book and slightly change your life!

Alfred Kazin has aptly remarked that "the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived." Newsboy, factory "work beast," gang member, hobo, sailor, Klondike argonaut, socialist crusader, war correspondent, utopian farmer, and world-famous adventurer: London is the closest thing America has had to a literary folk hero. His writing itself is concerned with nothing less than the largest questions and the grandest themes: What does it mean to be a human being in the natural world? What debts do human beings owe each other - and to all their fellow creatures? This collection places London, at last, securely within the American literary pantheon. It includes the complete novel The Call of the Wild; such famous stories as "Love of Life," "To Build a Fire," and "All Gold Canyon"; journalism, political writings, literary criticism, and selected letters.

Die beiden Kommunikationsprofis zeichnen in ihrem Roman ein Sittenbild der aktuellen Medienlandschaft und liefern zugleich ein Beispiel dafur, wie die Newsroom-Strategie in der Unternehmenskommunikation umgesetzt werden kann. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Nachricht als altester und schwierigster Teil der menschlichen Massenkommunikation: knapp, schnell und bedeutend. Die moderne Kommunikationsabteilung wird zum Newsroom, der multimedial und grenzenlos agiert und alle Zielgruppen auf allen Plattformen bedient von der Lokalzeitung bis Twitter."

"Much madness is divinest sense," wrote Emily Dickinson, "And much sense the starkest madness." The idea that poetry and madness are deeply intertwined, and that madness sometimes leads to the most divine poetry, has been with us since antiquity. In his critical and clinical introduction to this splendid anthology--the first of its kind--psychiatrist and poet Mark S. Bauer considers mental disorders from multiple perspectives and challenges us to broaden our outlook. He has selected more than 200 poems from across seven centuries that reflect a wide range mental states--from despondency and despair to melancholy, mania, and complete submersion into a world of heightened, original perception. Featuring such poets as George Herbert, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Weldon Kees, Lucille Clifton, Jane Kenyon, and many others, A Mind Apart has much to offer those who suffer from mental illness, those who work to understand it, and all those who value the poetry that has come to us from the heights and depths of human experience.

A thorough work of contemporary history and a distillation of the complex web of the Iranian Kurdish political world, this biography of Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou depicts the character and passionate action of one of the twentieth century's most exceptional and democratic leaders of a national movement. Carol Prunhuber, who knew Ghassemlou from the early 1980s, shows us the many facets of a humanist leader of magnitude and worldwide scope. From revolution that toppled the Shah to the dark and treacherous alleys of the Cold War, Dreaming Kurdistan revives the Kurdish leader's fated path to assassination in Vienna. We know how, why, and who murdered Ghassemlou-and we stand witness to Austria's raison d'etat, the business interests that put a lid on the investigation, and the response of silent indifference from the international community. Professor of economics in Prague, bon vivant in Paris, clandestine freedom fighter in the Kurdish mountains, stalked by the Shah's secret police, Ghassemlou is ultimately assassinated by the hit men of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Prunhuber takes us, through a murky world of equivocal liaisons, complicities, treachery, and undisguised threats, from Tehran to Vienna. While the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to perturb and defy the West, Dreaming Kurdistan is essential for an understanding of Iran and the Kurds' longing for freedom and democracy.