![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > From 1900
It's 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvik Vaculik has writer's block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powerful novel, The Guinea Pigs, and it was in 1968 that he wrote his anti-regime manifesto, Two Thousand Words, which the Soviet Union used as a pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. On the advice of his friend, the poet and surrealist painter Jiri Kolar, Vaculik begins to keep a diary, "a book about things, people, and events." This marks the beginning of A Czech Dreambook. Fifty-four weeks later, what Vaculik turns out to have written is a unique mixture of diary, dream journal, and outright fiction-an inverted roman a clef in which the author, his family, his mistresses, and the real leaders of the Czech underground play major roles. Undisputedly the most debated novel among the Prague dissident community of the 1980s, it is a work that Vaculik himself described as an amalgam of "hard-boiled documentary" and "magic fiction," while Vaclav Havel called it "a truly profound and perceptive account. . . . A great novel about modern life and the crisis of contemporary humanity." A Czech Dreambook has been hailed as the most important work of Czech literature in the past forty years. And yet it has never before been available in English. Flawlessly translated by Gerald Turner, Vaculik's masterpiece is a brilliant exercise in style, dry humor, and irony-an important portrait of the lives and longings of the dissidents and post-Communist elites.
Police officers are obliged to give an account of every incident they are involved in. But what happened today will never be logged. Because that's what police solidarity means: what happens in the van stays in the van. Well, not always. Not this time. What really happens behind the walls of a police station? To answer this question, investigative journalist Valentin Gendrot put his life on hold for two years and became the first journalist in history to infiltrate the police undetected. Within three months of training to become an officer, he was given a permit to carry a weapon in public. And although he lived in daily fear of being discovered, in his book Gendrot hides nothing. Assigned to work in a tough area of Paris where tensions between the law and locals ran high, Gendrot witnessed police brutality, racism, blunders, and cover-ups. But he also saw the oppressive working conditions that officers endured, and mourned the tragic suicide of a colleague. Asking important questions about who holds institutional power and how we can hold them to account, Cop is a gripping expose of a world never before seen by outsiders.
"Just pick up a copy and set off. You'll be amazed at what you've missed." - Sir Michael Palin MARCH, 2020: A columnist watches as London locks down, facing a conundrum as his weekly deadline for his newspaper diary approaches. With the city shutting up shop and column inches to fill, journalist Dan Carrier takes to the deserted streets of Central London to uncover the forgotten stories the heart of the UK capital holds. Untold London is a consideration and celebration of a city whose famous landmarks and thoroughfares are often taken for granted. Setting out to find lingering evidence of days gone by, Dan reveals unexpected delights, triumphs and tragedies alongside plenty of skulduggery and scandal in the greatest city in the world.
This year's Best American Magazine Writing features outstanding writing on contentious issues including incarceration, policing, sexual assault, labor, technology, and environmental catastrophe. Selections include Paul Ford's ambitious "What Is Code?" (Bloomberg Businessweek), an innovative explanation of how programming works, and "The Really Big One," by Kathryn Schulz (The New Yorker), which exposes just how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is for a major earthquake. Joining them are Meaghan Winter's expose of crisis pregnancy centers (Cosmopolitan) and a chilling story of police prejudice that allowed a serial rapist to run free (the Marshall Project in partnership with ProPublica). Also included is Shane Smith's interview with Barack Obama about mass incarceration (Vice). Other selections demonstrate a range of long-form styles and topics across print and digital publications. The imprisoned hacker and activist Barrett Brown pens hilarious dispatches from behind bars, including a scathing review of Jonathan Franzen's fiction (The Intercept). "The New American Slavery" (Buzzfeed) documents the pervasive exploitation of guest workers, and Luke Mogelson explores the purgatorial fate of an undocumented man sent back to Honduras (New York Times Magazine). Joshua Hammer harrowingly portrays Sierra Leone's worst Ebola ward as even the staff succumb to the disease (Matter). And in "The Friend," Matthew Teague's wife is afflicted with cancer, his friend moves in, and the result is a devastating narrative of relationships and death (Esquire). The collection concludes with Jenny Zhang's "How It Feels," an unconventional meditation on the intersection of teenage cruelty and art (Poetry).
In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, award winning journalist Meek explores a nation uneasy with itself. In the decades since the twilight of empire, Britain has struggled to find its place, and identity, in the world. This has come to the point of crisis since the 2008 financial crash. Meek meets the farmers and fishermen who wish Britain to turn its back on the world and restore its former glory, and are willing to lose the very support that their industry depends on. He reports on a Cadbury's factory that is to be shut down and moved to Poland in the name of free market economics, exploring the impact on the local community left behind. He charts how the NHS is coping with the twin burdens of austerity and an ageing population. Through his journey he asks what we can recover from the debris of an old nation as we head towards new horizons, and what we must leave behind. There are no easy answers, and what he creates instead is a masterly portrait of an anxious, troubled nation. Instead, he demands that we reconsider the power of the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, a nation's alienated from itself.
Since Britain's 2016 referendum on EU membership, the nation has been profoundly split: one side fantasizing that the referendum will never be acted upon, the other entrenched in questionable assumptions about reclaimed sovereignty and independence. Underlying the cleavage are primal myths, deeper histories, and political folk-legends. James Meek,'the George Orwell of our times', goes in search of the stories and consequences arising out of a nation's alienation from itself. In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, Meek meets farmers and fishermen intent on exiting the EU despite the loss of protections they will incur. He reports on a Cadbury's factory shut down and moved to Poland in the name of free market economics, exploring the impact on the local community left behind. He charts how the NHS is coping with the twin burdens of austerity and an aging population. Dreams of Leaving and Remaining is urgent reporting from one of Britain's finest journalists. James Meek asks what we can recover from the debris of an old nation as we head towards new horizons, and what we must leave behind.There are no easy answers, and what he creates instead is a masterly portrait of an anxious, troubled nation.
Photojournalism and Today's News provides a practical guide for aspiring photojournalists as well as an intelligent look into newsroom culture and its influences on photographic assignments, production, and editing. Written by an award-winning photo editor and director of photography, and based on interviews with more than seventy high-profile journalists, this book appeals to students and young professionals alike. Addresses a wide range of practical issues supported by in-depth examples from the field and critical thinking about photography, journalism, and newsroom culture Examines social and cultural issues and how they are communicated through photojournalism Prepares young journalists to respect their visual journalism colleagues by teaching them how to effectively work together Highlights the expectations of the newsroom and editors
Shortlisted for the 2017 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. 'How much risk is worth taking for so beautiful a prize?' The Magician's Glass by award-winning writer Ed Douglas is a collection of eight recent essays on some of the biggest stories and best-known personalities in the world of climbing. In the title essay, he writes about failure on Annapurna III in 1981, one of the boldest attempts in Himalayan mountaineering on one of the most beautiful lines - a line that remains unclimbed to this day. Douglas writes about bitter controversies, like that surrounding Ueli Steck's disputed solo ascent of the south face of Annapurna, the fate of Toni Egger on Cerro Torre in 1959 - when Cesare Maestri claimed the pair had made the first ascent, and the rise and fall of Slovenian ace Tomaz Humar. There are profiles of two stars of the 1980s: the much-loved German Kurt Albert, the father of the 'redpoint', and the enigmatic rock star Patrick Edlinger, a national hero in his native France who lost his way. In Crazy Wisdom, Douglas offers fresh perspectives on the impact mountaineering has on local communities and the role climbers play in the developing world. The final essay explores the relationship between art and alpinism as a way of understanding why it is that people climb mountains.
An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century. An intellectual call to arms, Francis Wheen's Sunday Times bestseller is one of 2004's most talked about books. In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era - including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer - while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.
The best work of one of Alabama's longest-serving and most beloved
sports journalists.
The written genre of the religious pamphlet stands out as a deeply characteristic form of public communication in the early modern period, not least on account of its inseparable combination of language and images. This study undertakes an analysis of semiotically complex religious pamphlets from the late 16th century, thereby making a contribution to research in linguistic history that is culturally oriented. In the process, it illustrates the opportunities for using frame semantics to analyze both verbal and visual texts.
A New York Times bestseller. Winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. 'Chilling . . . Reads like a West Coast version of All the President’s Men.' New York Times Book Review The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. In Bad Blood, John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley. Now to be adapted into a film, with Jennifer Lawrence to star.
Dieser Leitfaden gibt Ihnen einen vollstandigen Verstandnisrahmen fur Prasentation und zeigt anhand vieler praktischer Beispiele, wie Prasentation funktioniert und wirkt. Das lasst Sie mit Stress und Auftrittsangst professionell umgehen. Sie erfahren, in welchem Rahmen Sie agieren und werden dadurch in Ihrem Verhalten vor Publikum frei und souveran. Dieses Buch wird Sie verandern, denn Sie optimieren Ihre Personlichkeitswirkung, Ihr sicheres Auftreten, Ihre Prasenz. Und das wird Ihr Publikum Ihnen bereitwillig spiegeln. Es erwartet Sie in diesem Buch ein in sich schlussiges Handlungssystem fur die Arbeit von PrasentatorInnen und ModeratorInnen, mit allem, was man braucht: Fakten, Meinungen, Beispiele, entwickelt aus den langjahrigen und vielfaltigen Erfahrungen der taglichen Praxis des Autors als Sprecher, Moderator, Trainer und Coach."
"Somewhere in the tangle of the subject's burden and the subject's desire is your story."-Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people-from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon's friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon's rich, empathetic accounts-including "My Family's Slave," the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles-many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times-are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon's pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon's respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.
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.
Since its relaunch in 1979, "Granta" magazine has championed the art and craft of reportage - journalism marked by vivid description, a novelist's eye to form and eyewitness reporting that reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This updated edition of "The Granta Book of Reportage" collects a dozen of the finest and most lasting pieces Granta has published. Featuring distinguished writers and reporters: John Simpson, James Fenton, Martha Gellhorn, Germaine Greer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, John le Carre, as well as new talents Elana Lappin, Suketu Mehta and Wendell Steavenson, the book covers some of the signal events of our time: the fall of Saigon, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, and the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq.
The devoted journalists at the Chicago Tribune have been reporting the city's news for 170 years. As a result, the paper has amassed an inimitable, as-it-happened history of its hometown, a city first incorporated in 1837 that rapidly grew to become the third-largest city in the United States. Since 2011, the Chicago Tribune has been mining its vast archive of photos and stories for its weekly feature Chicago Flashback, which deals with the significant people and events that have shaped the city's history and culture from the paper's founding in 1847 to the present day. Now the editors of the Tribune have carefully collected the best, most interesting Chicago Flashback features into a single coffee-table volume. Each story is accompanied by at least one black-and-white image from the paper's fabled photo vault located deep below Michigan Avenue's famed Tribune Tower. Chicago Flashback offers readers a unique perspective on the city's long and colorful history.
In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement in Europe since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who reached land needed food, clothing, medicine and shelter, but the international aid system broke down completely. In a way that no one could have anticipated, volunteers arrived to help. Dana Sachs's compelling eyewitness account weaves together the lives of seven individuals and their families - including a British coal miner's daughter, a Syrian mother of six, and a jill-of-all-trades from New Zealand - who became part of this extraordinary effort. The story of their successes, and failures, is unforgettable and inspiring, and a clarion call for resilience and hope in the face of despair. War had shattered people's lives. This is what happened next.
China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Updated throughout and available in paperback for the first time, The Great Firewall of China draws on James Griffiths' unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. New chapters cover the suppression of information about the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns in response to the exposure of the persecution of Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and the crackdown against the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong.
|
You may like...
Far Out - The Lives of Former Extremists…
Charlotte McDonald-Gibson
Paperback
The President's Keepers - Those Keeping…
Jacques Pauw
Paperback
(74)
Melusi's Everyday Zulu - There Is Umzulu…
Melusi Tshabalala
Paperback
|