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The remarkable (and occasionally ridiculous) stories of 48 nations that fell off the map.
Countries are just daft stories we tell each other. They're all equally implausible once you get up close.
Countries die. Sometimes it's murder, sometimes it's by accident, and sometimes it's because they were so ludicrous they didn't deserve to exist in the first place. This is an atlas of 48 nations that fell off the map. Their causes of death range from the implausible (jerky prices) to the unfortunate (too evil) to the downright bizarre (the flip of a coin). The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book refuses to do so, because these dead nations are so ridiculous that it's impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff.
★ This book is a sparkling gem.--Booklist (Starred Review)
Perfect for fans of Atlas Obscura.--Publishers Weekly
From France's leading Jewish intellectual, an intimate yet universal meditation on October 7, its legacy, and the way forward
Devastated by the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Delphine Horvilleur sees her world shatter. As a rabbi dedicated to supporting and alleviating the suffering of others, she suddenly finds herself in a state of shock, feeling powerless and voiceless.
In this fevered state, she pens this small yet powerful treatise on survival, a slice of self-analysis that reconnects her with her existential foundations. The text unfolds through ten real or imagined conversations: with her pain, her grandparents, Jewish paranoia, her children, Israel, and more.
Horvilleur seamlessly moves between the intimate and the universal, intertwining exegesis of sacred texts with societal analysis. She skillfully balances acknowledging the gravity of her subject with defying it through humor. The result is a book that charts a path from trauma and distress to healing and recovery; from anxiety and doubt to reassurance and wisdom.
Join Andrea Marcolongo, renowned classicist and one of today's most original thinkers on antiquity, for an inspiring journey as she learns to run--and to live--like a Greek.
Why do we run? To what end, all the effort and pain? Wherefore this love of muscle, speed, and sweat? The Greeks were the first to ask these questions, the first to suspend war, work, politics, to enjoy public celebrations of athletic prowess. They invented sport and they were also the first to understand how physical activity connected to our mental well-being.
After a lifetime spent with her head and heart in the books trying to think like a Greek, at a professional and personal crossroads, Andrea Marcolongo set out to learn how to run like a Greek. In doing so, she deepened her understanding of the ancient civilization she has spent decades studying and discovered more about herself than she could ever have dreamed.
In this spirited, generous, and engaging book, Marcolongo shares her erudition and her own journey to understanding that a healthy body is, in more ways than one might guess, a healthy mind.
A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLER
A timely, powerful reflection on our relationship to death and an invitation to accept loss and vulnerability as essential and enriching parts of life, from France's most prominent female rabbi and a leading intellectual.
The New York Times describes Delphine Horvilleur as the rare intellectual to bring religious texts into the public square, and, as one of only five female rabbis in France, unique in that she calls for a plurality of religious voices in interpreting holy texts.
Living with Our Dead is a profoundly humanist, universal, and hopeful book that celebrates life, love, memory, and the power of storytelling to inspire and sustain us.
In this moving book by the leader of France's Liberal Jewish Movement, Delphine Horvilleur recounts eleven stories of loss, mourning, and consolation, collected during the years she has spent caring for the dying and their loved ones.
From Elsa Cayat, the psychologist and Charlie Hebdo columnist killed in the 2015 terrorist attack, to Simone Veil and Marceline Loridan, the girls of Birkenau; from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995, to Myriam, a New Yorker obsessed with planning her own funeral, to the author friend's Ariane and her struggle with terminal illness. In telling these stories and her own relationship to them, Horvilleur addresses death and dying with intelligence, humor, and compassion. Rejecting the contemporary tendency to banish death from our thoughts and discourse, she encourages us to embrace its presence as a fundamental part of life.
What if the rules of modern capitalism were written during the Third Reich?
Reinhard Höhn (1904-2000) was a commander of the SS, one of Nazi Germany's most brilliant legal minds, and an archetype of the fervid technocrats and intellectuals that built the Third Reich. Following Germany's defeat, after a few years in hiding, he emerged in the early 1950s as the founder and director of a renowned management school in Lower Saxony.
Höhn's story wouldn't be very different from that of many other prominent Nazis if not for the fact that a vast number of Germany's postwar business leaders--more than 600,000 executives--were educated at his management school.
In this fascinating book, Johann Chapoutot, one of France's most brilliant historians, traces the profound links between Nazism and the principles of modern corporate management, our definitions of success, and a concept of personal freedom that masks rigid hierarchical structures of power and control.
One of the most gifted European historians of his generation.--Timothy Snyder, New York Times best-selling author of On Tyranny
A bold call to abandon the myth of endless economic growth and embrace a sustainable, just, and thriving future.
One of the most deeply ingrained beliefs of our age is that perpetual economic growth is the solution to most, if not all, of society's problem. In Slow Down or Die, French economist Timothée Parrique brilliantly challenges this myth, demonstrating how producing more won't solve climate change, poverty, or inequality. In fact, our obsession with growth is accelerating social and ecological collapse.
Parrique argues that we don't need endless growth to prosper; instead, we must radically rethink how our economies are organized. He reveals that the GDP, the standard measure of progress, is blind to human well-being and environmental health, making it a poor--and indeed, dangerous--guide for the future.
This book proposes a different vision, tracing a path toward a post-growth economy where decisions are made collectively and democratically. The goal is not the infinite accumulation of wealth but the creation of a just, equitable, and sustainable society. In this accessible and inspiring work, Parrique invites us to embrace a future of moderation and shared prosperity, proving that slowing down is the key to true progress and equality.
Intellectually engaging and deliciously readable, a stereotype-defying history of how one of the most recognisable symbols of Italian cuisine and national identity is the product of centuries of encounters, dialogue, and exchange.
Is it possible to identify a starting point in history from which everything else unfolds--a single moment that can explain the present and reveal the essence of our identities? According to Massimo Montanari, this is just a myth: by themselves, origins explain very little and historical phenomena can only be understood dynamically--by looking at how events and identities develop and change as a result of encounters and combinations that are often unexpected.
As Montanari shows in this lively, brilliant, and surprising essay, all you need to debunk the origins myth is a plate of spaghetti. By tracing the history of the one of Italy's national dishes--from Asia to America, from Africa to Europe; from the beginning of agriculture to the Middle Ages and up to the 20th century--he shows that in order to understand who we are (our identity) we almost always need to look beyond ourselves to other cultures, peoples, and traditions.
From one of Italy's most renowned historians of religion, an exciting new portrait of one of Christianity's most complex--and most misunderstood--figures: Mary Magdalene
Jesus' favorite and most devoted disciple? A prostitute shunned from her community? A symbol of female leadership and independence? Who really was Mary Magdalene, and how does her story fit within the history of Christianity, and that of female emancipation?
In this meticulously researched, highly engaging book, Adriana Valerio looks at history, art, and literature to show how centuries of misinterpretation and willful distortion--aimed at establishing and preserving gender hierarchies--have stripped this historical figure of her complexity and relevance.
By revealing both the benign and the pernicious misrepresentations of Mary Magdalene, this thought-provoking essay reaffirms the central role played by women in the origins of Christianity and their essential contribution to one of the founding experiences of Western thought and society.
A brilliant meditation on language and life.--Bookriot
For word nerds, language loons, and grammar geeks, an impassioned and informative literary leap into the wonders of the Greek language. Here are nine ways Greek can transform your relationship to time and to those around you, nine reflections on the language of Sappho, Plato, and Thucydides, and its relevance to our lives today, nine chapters that will leave readers with a new passion for a very old language, nine epic reasons to love Greek.
The Ingenious Language is a love song dedicated to the language of history's greatest poets, philosophers, adventurers, lovers, adulterers, and generals. Greek, as Marcolongo explains in her buoyant and entertaining prose, is unsurpassed in its beauty and expressivity, but it can also offer us new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. She takes readers on an astonishing journey, at the end of which, while it may still be Greek to you, you'll have nine reasons to be glad it is.
No batteries or prior knowledge of Greek required
Highly regarded philosopher and psychoanalyst, Massimo Recalcati has penned a gripping, erudite meditation on suffering, doubt, betrayal, and the potential for renewal that dwells in our most painful moments.
For Recalcati, Jesus's reckoning in the Garden of Gethsemane is at once an instance of human weakness and an encounter with the Divine. It is the story where the Divine and the Human meet most forcefully, first in company, then in solitude, and where agony and doubt mingle with potential rebirth and revitalization.
As the Gospels recount, after the Last Supper, Jesus retreated to a small field just outside the city of Jerusalem: Gethsemane, the olive grove. His prayers are interrupted when Judas arrives with a group of armed men, and kisses him, betraying and abandoning him with a kiss. Jesus is forsaken by his friends and, it seems to him in this moment, by his father, his God. His sin, in Recalcati's view, is like Prometheus to have drawn Divine closer to man.
The Night in Gethsemane is a revelatory, moving, and inspiring meditation by one of Italy's most important thinkers.
Boitani's presentation of the classics is as entertaining and unexpected as it is informative. He invites the reader to discover the timeless beauty and wisdom of ancient literature, highlighting its profound and surprising connections to the present.
With their emphasis on the mutability and fluidity of identity and matter, their examination of the power and position of women in society, and their enduring treatments of force and subjugation, fate and free will, the ethical life, hospitality, love, compassion, and mysticism, the classics play active roles in our lives and can help us refine our opinions and our values.
Ranging from Homer to Tacitus, with Thucydides, Aristotle Sophocles, Cicero, and many others in between, Boitani's A New Sublime is a fresh, inspiring reminder of the enduring importance and beauty of the classics of the Western canon.
From one of Italy's most renowned philosophers and psychoanalysts, an urgent and stirring reflection on violence, morality, and our relationship with the Other
What lies at the foundation of human history and society? According to Massimo Recalcati, it is not love for one's neighbor, as preached by Jesus in the Gospels, but the brutality, jealousy, and violence depicted in the story of Cain and Abel.
As timely as it is brilliant, this essay examines Cain's murderous act through the lens of psychoanalysis, showing how delusions of self-sufficiency and individual perfection lie at the deepest roots of fear and violence in our societies.
True completeness can only be achieved through others--not despite them. This, argues Recalcati, is the lesson of Cain, one that resonates powerfully in our time.
Recalcati explores the most fundamental of questions--for Cain, Abel, and every human being: can we believe in love?--La Stampa
Renowned architect Renzo Piano (the New Whitney Museum, the Pompidou Center, Potsdamer Platz, Cite Internationale, New York Times Building, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, etc.) and his son Carlo, a well-regarded journalist, set sail from Genoa one late Summer day to search for Atlantis, the perfect city, built to harbor a perfect society.
Embarking not only on a life-changing journey but also on series of conversations that are humorous, irreverent, erudite, and always entertaining, Renzo and Carlo travel from Genoa in search of the perfect city, along the way reflecting on their own relationship, on fathers and sons, on the idea of travel itself, and perhaps most notably on architecture, space, and the secret life of forms.
Piano, subject of The Art of Making Buildings and a man who can not only measure land at a glance but also the sea's infinite geometry, returns to the places where he has created his iconic works, mosaic pieces in the infinite, necessary quest for perfection. With his son he sails across the Pacific, along the banks of the Thames and the Seine, reaching as far as Athens, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and Osaka Bay.
In search of beauty, Piano finds only imperfection. And so, all that remains is to sail on, in the company of his son.
A clear-eyed, timely investigation of the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence to individual freedom, social cohesion, and the democratic process--and a radical proposal on how to fight back.
In this sharp, urgent book, philosopher, psychoanalyst, and former resistance fighter Miguel Benasayag warns of the great danger posed by the growing role of big data and algorithms in deciding the contours of individual lives and the direction of the world. From mass surveillance to predictive law enforcement to data-driven social interactions, AI has already colonized most aspects of our lives and determines the decisions of companies, financial markets, and governments.
Structured as a conversation with anthropologist R gis Meyran, The Tyranny of Algorithms rejects the sterile dichotomy that sees the promise of a transhuman future placed in opposition to the desire for a return to a pre-digital past, and examines how societies might meet the unprecedented challenge posed by AI to personal freedom and democratic institutions.
The solution, argues Benasayag, doesn't lie in the systemic rejection of advanced technologies and digital architectures but in the search for new forms of integration with machines that put human needs, bodies, and emotions at the center.
Evocative . . . A paean to the life, cities and food of the Mediterranean . . . His essays . . . reveal a man of deep feeling and humanity (The Guardian).
A short sublime book on the three things dearest to Jean-Claude Izzo's heart: his native Marseilles, the sea in all its splendor, and Mediterranean noir--the literary genre his books helped to found. This collection of writings shows Izzo, author of the acclaimed Marseilles trilogy, at his most contemplative and insightful. His native city, with its food, its flavors, its passionate inhabitants, and its long, long history of commerce and conviviality, constitute the lifeblood that runs through all of Izzo's work.
From the best-selling author of The Ingenious Language comes a meditation on rebuilding, recovery, and renewal that is also a fascinating portrait of antiquity's most complex and surprisingly modern hero.
In times of peace and prosperity, one can turn to Homer to learn valuable life lessons, to experience the thrills and terrors of war, and to read about hair-raising adventures in distant lands. But when things do not go as planned, when we unexpectedly find ourselves at the center of an epoch-defining upheaval, then, writes Andrea Marcolongo, we must look to Virgil's Aeneas for an example of adaptability and resilience.
In Marcolongo's fresh, nuanced portrayal, Virgil's Aeneas emerges as a multiform, deeply human hero, striking in his vulnerability and capacity for empathy. His journey of rebirth and rebuilding, from the ruins of Troy to the shores of Italy, teaches us that when all seems lost, with hope, perseverance, and a little bit of luck, we can seek and find new beginnings.
Marcolongo is today's Montaigne...There is wisdom and grace here to last the ages.--André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
Does the idea of progress still apply to our times? If so, what does progress really mean?
Today, many believe that progress is a word to be avoided, a relic from a past, the dangerous product of an era of intellectual naivety that would be best forgotten. Yet, the idea of progress is rooted in a human impulse that is both profound and essential, a way of interpreting history without which our ability to plan the future, our very identity would be at stake.
Written just before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic--which is now putting its argument to the hardest of tests--this lucid essay explores how science and technology have been, and can still be, a powerful engine for human and humane advancement.
Lire Magazine Best Travel Book
Take four friends, put them on two Ural motorcycles (complete with sidecars), send them off on a 2,500-mile odyssey retracing history's most famous retreat, add what some might consider an excessive amount of Vodka, and you've got Sylvain Tesson's Berezina, a riotous and erudite book that combines travel, history, comradery, and adventure.
The retreat of Napoleon's Grande Arm e from Russia culminated, after a humiliating loss, with the crossing of the River Berezina, a word that henceforth became synonymous with unmitigated disaster for the French and national pride for the Russians. Two hundred years after this battle, Sylvain Tesson and his friends retrace Napoleon's retreat, along the way reflecting on the lessons of history, the meaning of defeat, and the realities of contemporary Europe. A great read for history buffs and for anyone who has ever dreamed of an adventure that is out of the ordinary.
A history of Europe like you've never read before.
For some time now, Europe seems to have forgotten it is the daughter of epics and utopia. It has been drained by its inability to remind its citizens of this. Too distant, disembodied, the concept often arouses nothing more than disillusioned boredom. And yet, the history of Europe is one of constant upheaval. So much fire and death; inventions and art, too. Literature, perhaps, can remind us of this: that the European history is one of muscle, vigour, passion, anger and joy. Words of literature, perhaps, can restore conviction and momentum, which make everything possible, to the heart of the story.
From the industrial revolution through two world wars and to the birth of the European Union, Our Europe sets in free verse the story of 150 years of growth, confrontation, hope, defeat and passion. Our Europe is a heartfelt appeal to bring into being a Europe that celebrates difference, solidarity, and freedom.