New Releases by Michael Ignatieff

Isaiah Berlin war die Stimme einer Generation, der grosse Vordenker des Liberalismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Toleranz, Freiheitsliebe und die Faehigkeit zu persoenlichem Glueck praegen sein Leben und Werk, in dem sich Lust am Denken, Sprachkraft und Weltbuergerschaft verbinden. Einstein nannte ihn einen Schauspieler in Gottes grossem Theater. Doch Isaiah Berlin war mehr als ein brillanter Unterhaltungskuenstler auf der Buehne der grossen Geister. Mit unermuedlichem Eintreten fuer Toleranz und Freiheit hat er den politischen und philosophischen Liberalismus im 20. Jahrhundert entscheidend gepraegt--die politische Theorie, die sich letztlich als einzig tragbare behauptet hat. Die drei rivalisierenden Identitaeten, die Berlin in sich trug--die russische durch seinen Geburtsort Riga, die juedische durch Familie, die britische durch das Exil--verflocht er zu einem einzigartigen Charakter. Er akzeptierte die Gegensaetze seiner Existenz und formte daraus ein wahrhaft liberales Temperament, dem das Streben nach Toleranz und Freiheit ebenso innewohnt wie seinem Werk. "Leben ist die Schoepfung derjenigen, die leben--Schritt fuer Schritt." Dieses Credo enthaelt seine ansteckende Lust am Abenteuer der Erkenntnis ("Denken ist ein Vorstoss ins Unbekannte") und seine unerschoepfliche Lust am Leben. Ignatieff ist es gelungen, Berlins beinahe erotische Beziehung zum Denken und zur Sprache in seiner Biographie einzufangen.

At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into neurological illness are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of familial loyalty. A philosophy professor watches helplessly as his mother sinks into the mysterious depths of an unknown illness. His efforts to understand her gradual deterioration - from innocently misplaced eyeglasses and endlessly repeated anecdotes to a total loss of identity - lead him to reach out to his estranged brother, a neurologist, to learn all he can of the disease. Yet medical science is as powerless as philosophy to help them comprehend what is happening to her and to them, to explain the relation between brain and mind, between memory and selfhood, between heart and soul. The narrator, distrusting the usual explanations for his mother's tragedy, begins, dangerously, to lose his own bearings, as he senses how deeply his family - and life - have been transformed. Yet Scar Tissue affirms the power of true understanding, and at the end: "The owl is calling from the trees. Its hunt is about to begin. The moon hovers over the city and white light streams across the ivied floor of the park. I feel life calling me from this desk. I feel it bid me rise and walk out..".

Jack.

Un essai sur les limites de l'engagement moral des démocraties occidentales face aux conflits et aux guerres ethniques. L'auteur tente d'expliquer la multiplication de celles-ci malgré la fin de la guerre froide et d'une soi-disant paix mondiale. Il secoue notre conscience et nous provoque face aux contradictions qui se cachent sous nos principes, à la faiblesse de nos engagements, à notre division et à notre cynisme pour défendre la liberté des peuples. [SDM].

Since the early 1990s, Michael Ignatieff has traveled the world's war zones, from Bosnia to the West Bank, from Afghanistan to central Africa. The Warrior's Honor is a report and a reflection on what he has seen in the places where ethnic war has become a way of life. Ignatieff charts the rise of the new moral interventionists--the relief workers, reporters, delegates, and diplomats who believe that other people's misery is of concern to us all. And he brings us face-to-face with the new ethnic warriors--the warlords, gunmen, and paramilitaries--who have escalated postmodern war to an unprecedented level of savagery. Hard-hitting and passionate, The Warrior's Honor is a profound and searching exploration of the perils and obligations of moral citizenship in a world scarred by war and genocide.

Simon Norfolk has photographed sites of genocide and war crimes-names that ring like a death knoll for mankind-Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Auschwitz, Dresden, Ukraine, Armenia, Namibia. His photographs are charged with an overwhelming emotional intensity as they document where humans have left their trace. They are an extraordinary record of man's inhumanity to man.

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnics strife and civil war in distant countries. Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening pf the Cold War'd clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage. In "Blood and Belonging," Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties--inplaces as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics--may be the definitive factor in international relation today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why--and whether--a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. "Blood and Belonging" is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

Written to accompany a BBC2 series, this book explores both sides of modern nationalism, one of the most complex and volatile issues of our time. It is a personal odyssey which begins in the nightmare of the former Yugoslavia and ends with the author's return to the disunited United Kingdom. He journeys also to the Ukraine, Quebec and Germany, and in the mountains of Kurdistan he talks to the world's largest stateless people, the Kurds.

This book returns to the historical moment of the creation of the penitentiary in industrializing England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book documents the rise of a new conception of class relations and a new philosophy of punishment. Both were directed at the mind rather than the body, wherein the whip, the brand and the gallows were being replaced by the prison. The ways in which the middle and upper classes tried to forge new methods for controlling the poor and the ways the poor and imprisoned resisted those controls are examined. The author raises questions about the manner in which reform can be used to consolidate the power of the state and about the moral boundaries of authority.