Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.
Pivoting on two world wars, intense political change has dramatically affected Germany's economic structure and development. This book traces the logic and the peculiarities of German economic development through the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, and Federal Republic. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the period, the book also assesses controversial issues, such as the origins of the Great Depression, the primacy of politics or economics in the decision to invade Poland, and the future risks to the Weltmeister economy of the Federal Republic oppressed by unemployment, the huge debts of some of its trading partners, and the possibility of worldwide protectionism.
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Book Description
Conceived and written as a history of the modern world rather than a truncated Western Civilization book, this text is one of the most highly praised history texts ever published. It has been adopted at more than 1000 schools and has been translated into six languages. Lloyd Kramer joins the author team for this ninth edition that includes two new color inserts highlighting fine art, additional pedagogy to guide students through challenging material, and full, up-to-date inclusion of current events. Now packaged with PowerWeb, a dynamic course-specific rather than book-specific supplement that engages your students in three levels of resource materials and provides a true avenue to extending learning about a subject, A History of the Modern World is a necessity in any world history course.
Customer Reviews:
A History of the Modern World (9th Edition)- textbook of doom.......2006-11-14
After many years of textbooks in both public and private school I have always hoped that one day a textbook that was interesting to read would be assigned. Some textbooks have succeeded, A History of the Modern World has a bit of work to do. The pages are tightly pact with tiny print and the occational pictures. The pages are hard to read with the print size and single spacing. (I have to take breaks often to rest my eyes.)
If you are planning on reading this book cover to cover you will get a ton of information. I advise taking good notes with page numbers, otherwise you will not easily find the information again. Althought there is a lot of good information, the index and table of contents makes for difficult referencing, (definitely a book you will want to tab with sticky-notes.) On the insides of the covers there are world maps for reference, but unfortunately the publishers did not take into consideration that the binding would effect the images (this included images inside the pages too) and there are countries that are either not on the map, not labeled, or the labeling method was difficult to determine to which country the name goes to.
For the student that carries multiple books, you will dread the weight on this one. This book weighs around 5 lbs and has the standard size of a hardback novel and is about 1.5 inches thick.
Verbose and useless.......2006-09-10
This book has no idea what should be prioritized and what shouldn't. Also, the narrative is a rambling mess.
Ex: They spend 10 excruciating pages on Stalin's agricultural and industrial reforms, but contrive to cover the entire holocaust in all of 10 LINES! 'Nuff said!
I got a 5 on the AP exam quite comforably, but no thanks to this ridiculous book.
Outstanding overview of modern history.......2006-07-12
I am not exceptionally scholarly, although I would have to say that it takes some scholarly motivation to read over 1000 pages of dense historical writing in one's free time. Yet I found this book, which is often used as a textbook, very easy to read. It doesn't quite read like fiction as some lively historical accounts can, but that would be a difficult task given this broad a subject.
Palmer leaves very few questions unanswered. He adds a good amount of political commentary and speculation to keep it interesting and to show the relevance of events to today's world, but not too much that you feel he's biased in any way. He also gives short, informative bios on important individuals so that, even though he doesn't have time to delve deeply into any particular one, you get a feel for the personal motivations of all. His maps are fabulous, perhaps the best feature. They help to visualize the changes over time. Also, when he discusses territories he tends to explain them in terms of today. This is important because with the territories changing hands so often in history, it is difficult to conceptualize how these past kingdoms relate to the modern nations of Europe. He also is very clear in distinguishing between the natives and the conquering groups, including language differences. This is crucial to understand today, as nationalism movements flourish again after the breakup of the stabilizing and static bipolar international system (i.e. the breakup of the Soviet Union). Palmer's book is very good for this purpose.
I highly recommend it to anyone looking to brush up on their knowledge of history (who has some time on their hands). It's really an excellent book! I plan to use it as my history bible and reference it often. I will also use it as a jumping-off point for further reading. At the end of the book, Palmer includes a comprehensive, 91-page "suggestions for further reading" covering every topic he discusses for further reading/research. It is a goldmine of reading material!
Excellent and prompt service.......2006-03-20
The book arrived within a week after I placed the order. As advertised, it was in very good condition. No highlighting or pen/pencil marks on the interior pages. Was a little surprised by the deteriorating binding near the back of the book which is only noticeable if you open the back cover and turn to the last page of the index. Surprised but not upset as this is to be expected in such an old book. Just happy that the pages are in pristine condition and the rest of the book is in pretty good shape.
This is THE text of Modern European History.......2006-01-29
It is difficult to add to what reviewers have already provided. I used this text when I was a classroom AP teacher for a number of reasons. Among those reasons was that while most K-12 textbooks are the product of a committee, (committee- a terrestrial life form having at least six legs and no brain.) this book is largely the work of the late Dr. Robert Roswell Palmer. It was written as if the author felt that the history of Modern Europe was not a collection of chapters but rather a story, a narrative to be read the way one reads a novel. There is a continuity to the writing and an elegance of prose that can only be achieved by a text like this. Dr. Palmer was a wonderful historian and a marvellously accessable teacher who took the time to answer letters personally on his old manual typewriter. His passing is lamented.
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The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Publications of the German Historical Institute)
Jonathan R. Zatlin
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521869560 |
Book Description
There is perhaps nothing so commonplace and yet so mystifying as money. But to European communists, money was clearly an instrument of economic exploitation and spiritual alienation. In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan R. Zatlin explores the East German attempt to create a perfect society by eliminating money and explains the reasons for its failure. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including unpublished communist reports, secret police files, literature, jokes, letters written by ordinary people, and conversations with key German politicians, this book shows how the communist regime undermined the political authority of socialism and created the material conditions for its demise. By exploring both the economic and the cultural function of money, Zatlin challenges traditional approaches to economic planning by offering a novel explanation for the collapse of communism in East Germany and a highly original interpretation of German unification.
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Between State Capitalism And Globalisation: The Collapse Of The East German Economy
Gareth Dale
Manufacturer: Peter Lang Publishing
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ASIN: 0820469912 |
Book Description
In this book, Alfred Mierzejewski describes how the German economy collapsed under Allied bombing in the last year of World War II. He presents a broad-based, original study of German wartime industry and transportation, and of Allied air force planning and intelligence, including the first complete analysis in English of the German National Railway.
The German industrial economy was extraordinarily dependent on the timely, adequate distribution of coal by railroad and inland waterway. The German National Railway in particular was the pivot of the finely balanced armaments production and distribution system created by Albert Speer. But Allied strategists did not immediately recognize this. Only in late 1944, when Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Sir Arthur Tedder built a new strategic consensus, was this vital coal/transport nexus severed. The result was the rapid paralysis of the Nazi war economy.
Mierzejewski measures the economic consequences of the bombing by considering broad indices such as armaments and coal production, railway performance, and weapons deliveries to the armed forces. In addition, he shows how individual companies in each of Germany's major economic regions fared. By drawing on previously unexamined filed of private German manufacturing companies, the Reich Transportation Ministry, and Allied air intelligence agencies, Mierzejewski creates a rare combination of economic analysis and military history that provides new perspectives on the German war economy and Allied air intelligence.
Customer Reviews:
The right thing to bomb.......1999-12-23
Through most of the last half century, the Allied Strategic Air campaign against Germany has been criticized as ineffective. Alfred C. Mierzejewski suggests that this was only true till late 1944. After that, bombing became devastating.
In 1942 and '43, the U.S. and Britain attacked arms factories and housing respectively. The Germans kept fighting and war production kept going up.
In 1944, the Allies increasingly turned to synthetic petroleum plants and the German transportation system. The result was a catastrophic breakdown in all areas of the German war economy.
We'll never know what would have happened if the railyards serving the Ruhr's coal fields had been hit starting in 1940, but Mierzejewski makes a good case that it would have seriously weakened Germany much sooner, and quite possibly ended the war in 1944.
This is a very good study, well worth reading and thinking about. I recommend it to all my fellow armchair strategists.
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Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 19451955: The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community
John Gillingham
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 052152430X |
Book Description
This is the first large-scale historical investigation of the critical first stage of European integration, the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). John Gillingham discusses the thirty year Franco-German struggle for heavy industry mastery in Western Europe, describes the dreams and schemes of Jean Monnet, who designed the heavy industry pool, reveals the American vision that inspired his work, and discloses how his transatlantic partners used their great authority to assure its completion. Gillingham also lays bare the operating mechanisms of the coal-steel pool, showing that contrary to the hopes of Monnet and his supporters, the ECSC restored rather than reformed the European economy, leaving as a legacy not a detrustified industry, but one still dominated by the giant producers of the Ruhr.
Book Description
After the devastation of World War II, Germany and Japan built national capitalist institutions that were remarkably successful in terms of national reconstruction and international competitiveness. Yet both "miracles" have since faltered, allowing U.S. capital and its institutional forms to establish global dominance. National varieties of capitalism are now under intense pressure to converge to the U.S. model. Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck have gathered an international group of authors to examine the likelihood of convergence—to determine whether the global forces of Anglo-American capitalism will give rise to a single, homogeneous capitalist system. The chapters in this volume approach this question from five directions: international integration, technological innovation, labor relations and production systems, financial regimes and corporate governance, and domestic politics.
In their introduction, Yamamura and Streeck summarize the crises of performance and confidence that have beset German and Japanese capitalism and revived the question of competitive convergence. The editors ask whether the two countries, confronted with the political and economic exigencies of technological revolution and economic internationalization, must abandon their distinctive institutions and the competitive advantages these have yielded in the past, or whether they can adapt and retain such institutions, thereby preserving the social cohesion and economic competitiveness of their societies.
Customer Reviews:
Important book.......2005-08-16
Very interesting collection of essays, highly recommended if one wants to understand more on what is currently happening in Germany and Japan (i.e. important changes that will inject new dynamism in these two "fallen angels").
Book Description
The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.
In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.
Download Description
The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.
Customer Reviews:
A stellar performance.......2005-02-13
This book is unusual in many ways. Firstly, it dares to compare Simonides of Keos, a Greek poet of the 5th century BC, and Paul Celan, a 20th century poet who wrote in German. Secondly, it dares to apply economic ideas, in particular those of Karl Marx, to explain poetry.
What connects Simonides and Celan? They share a sense of alienation and an acute awareness of the limits of what "is;" and they are both masters of composition and language. Anne Carson points out that she chose to look at two men at the same time because the attention devoted to one enhances the attention devoted to the other: "Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky." (viii)
A particularly fascinating aspect of both poets' work is their preoccupation with nothingness and negation. "Negation links the mentalities of Simonides and Celan. Words for 'no,' 'not,' 'never,' 'nowhere,' 'nobody,' 'nothing,' dominate their poems and create bottomless places for reading." (9) It is exactly these bottomless places in their poems, invisible to the cursory reader, that Anne Carson knows to locate.
Anne Carson divides the book into four chapters. In the first chapter, "Alienation," Carson uses analogies from the sphere of economics most extensively. She explains how the changing economic situation of poets in the fifth century BC accounts for the fact that Simonides was considered the stingiest person of his time (in addition to being one of the smartest). The "economy" in the title of the book refers to the actual life of the poet as a recipient of gifts and money, and to the act of composing poetry. The "unlost" in the title is a more complex idea and hints at the themes of negation and nothingness explored in the other three chapters.
In chapter two, "Visibles Invisibles," Carson discusses Simonides' philosophy of art ("the word is a picture of things") and how painting a picture relates to "painting" a poem. "Simonides is Western culture's original literary critic, for he is the first person in our extant tradition to theorize about the nature and function of poetry." (46) Carson goes on to show how Simonides and Celan use grammar to "render a relationship that is ... deeper than the visible surface of the language," (52) and how both poets' "language has the capacity to uncover a world of metaphor that lies inside all our ordinary speech like a mind asleep." (58) She points to the exact locations in the poems where poetic language indicates an invisible "reality" beyond the reality of ordinary speech, where poetry arises from words and the (visible) surface of language reflects a deeper (invisible) truth.
Chapter three studies Simonides' epitaphs. "No genre of verse is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph." (73) Epitaphs are inscriptions on graves. Simonides was the most prolific composer of epitaphs in the ancient world, Carson tells us, and set the conventions of the genre. "Tears of Simonides" were the byword for poetry of lament used by Catullus. Epitaphs have two economic aspects: the economics of remuneration and the economics of composition, as the poet has to use his words economically to fit them on the grave-stone. Epitaphs are also related to the visible and the invisible because they connect the living with the dead: "The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here - deny them their nothingness - by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs comes the writing of epitaphs." (85)
Chapter four, "Negation," focuses our attention on the fact that "nothing" needs close thought. "The word lends itself to scary word play, to unanswerable puns, to the sort of reasoning that turns inside out when you stare at it. Simonides and Celan are both poets who enjoy this sort of reasoning and who orient themselves toward reality, more often than not, negatively." (100) Negation is a very powerful tool, and Carson wants our attention for the difference in implied meaning between, say, "Life is suffering" and "Nothing is not painful among men," as Simonides phrased it. Negation is also something uniquely human because a negative is a verbal event, "a peculiarly linguistic resource whose power resides with the user of words."(102) When you say "this is not that" you need to put something present ("this") and something absent ("that") on the screen of your imagination. "The interesting thing about a negative, then, is that it posits a fuller picture of reality than does a positive statement." (102) Carson then shows with examples from Simonides' and Celan's poetry how much beyond the factual these poets can express by not saying "something" but "not nothing."
"Economy of the Unlost" is truly brilliant whenever Anne Carson dissects a poem because she brings to the task both her qualities as scholar of classical Greece and modern poet. I do not always agree with the way she employs metaphors from economics, but I take it that she uses the terms introduced by Karl Marx to point my attention to noteworthy aspects of the poetry even if by today's standards these terms have turned out to be incorrect. When Carson claims, "what is striking in Marx's analysis of the issue is this insight: that to value a piece of work is to price the mortal span," (107) then she and Karl are obviously mistaken. A doodle produced by Bill Gates during a meeting would definitely fetch a higher price than a doodle by yours truly done in the same mortal span of time. But these are quibbles of an economist; they should not detract from my praise of Carson's work.
The bottom line is: this is an outstanding work that brings the best of academic scholarship to the interpretation of poetry. It deserves every of its five stars.
A Sweet Investment.......2002-01-04
I can't say enough good things about these lectures, which mesh Celan, Simonides and Karl Marx with a grace that makes their union seem inevitable. The way Carson folds together money, language and memory reminds me of Ezra Pound without the shouting. Her insights have a math-like clarity ("Eureka! I've got it!") that brings two extreme ends of our history under the same light. You'll never mistake negation and loss for modern inventions after reading this book. The coins have changed since Simonides's time but the economy's remarkably the same. The funny thing is, after Carson's dazzling treatment, lament never looked so good.
An Eccentric Pleasure.......1999-08-15
Like _Eros the Bittersweet_, this is a fine example of Carson's scrupulous and beautifully- written scholarship. And like all of her work, the strangeness of her intensity and consideration is charming and virtuosic. The juxtaposition of Simonides and Celan *works* in spite of the centuries separating their oeuvres; even as she's making connections within the text, one wonders how she's going to pull it off--and then she does. Carson's discussion of poetic economy (both monetary and linguistic)--a topic not often discussed in criticism--illuminates the coinages and clipped syntax of Celan, providing leverage on reading a difficult poet, and will most likely prove to be a useful critical tool for reading other modern poets. Carson couples intellectual density with warm, lyrical prose, yielding a text of intricate research and rewarding insight--a rare and real pleasure for readers of poetry and/or criticism.
Books:
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
- History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
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