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“Exquisite. . .Commonwealth is impossible to put down.” — New York Times #1 New York Times Bestseller | NBCC Award Finalist | New York Times Best Book of the Year | USA Today Best Book | TIME Magazine Top 10 Selection | Oprah Favorite Book | New York Magazine Best Book of The Year The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them. When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another. Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.
Assessment of the environmental degradation, rapid population growth, and extreme poverty that threaten global peace and prosperity, with practical solutions based on a new economic paradigm for our crowded planet.
The story of African Americans in the visual arts has closely paralleled their social, political and economic aspirations over the last four hundred years. From enslaved craftspersons to contemporary painters, printmakers and sculptors, they have created a wealth of artistic expression that addresses common experiences, such as exclusion from dominant cultural institutions, and confronts questions of identity and community. This generously illustrated volume gathers works by leading figures from the nineteenth century to the present Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Gordon Parks, Wifredo Lam, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall alongside many others who deserve to be better known, including artists from the African diaspora in South America and the Caribbean. Arranged thematically and accompanied by authoritative texts that provide historical and interpretive context, this book invites readers to share in a rich outpouring of art that meets shared challenges with individual creative responses.
This set of essays critically analyze global citizenship by bringing together leading ideas about citizenship and the commons in this time that both needs and resists a global perspective on issues and relations. Education plays a significant role in how we come to address these issues and this volume will contribute to ensuring that equity, global citizenship, and the common wealth provide platforms from which we might engage in transformational, collective work. The authors address the global significance of debates and struggles about belonging and abjection, solidarity and rejection, identification and othering, as well as love and hate. Global citizenship, as a concept and a practice, is now being met with a dangerous call for insularism and a protracted ethno-nationalism based on global economic imperialism, movements for white supremacy and miscegenation, various forms of religious extremism, and identity politics, but which antithetically, also comes from the anti-globalization movement focused on building strong, sustainable communities. We see a taming of citizens that contributes to the taming of what we understand as the public sphere and the commons, the places of cultural, natural, and intellectual resources that are shared and not privately owned. The work of global citizenship education is distinguishable from the processes of a deadly globalization or destruction of the world that responds to the interlocking issues that make life on the planet precarious for human and non-humans everywhere (albeit an unequal precarity). This book is an invitation into a conversation that explores and makes visible some of the hidden chasms of oppression and inequity in the world. It is meant to provoke both argument and activism as we work to secure common spaces that are broadly life-sustaining. Contributors are: Ali A. Abdi, Sung Kyung Ahn, Chouaib El Bouhali, Xochilt Hernández, Carrie Karsgaard, Marlene McKay, Michael O’Sullivan, Christina Palech, Karen Pashby, Karen J. Pheasant-Neganigwane, Thashika Pillay, Ashley Rerrie, Grace J. Rwiza, Toni Samek, Lynette Shultz, Harry Smaller, Crain Soudien, Derek Tannis, and Irene Friesen Wolfstone.
When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth. Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.” Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.
The ‘Man Bites Dog’ story of over 1,000 high net-worth individuals who rose up to protest the repeal of the estate tax made headlines everywhere last year. Central to the organization of what Newsweek tagged the ‘billionaire backlash’ were two visionaries: Bill Gates, Sr., cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest foundation on earth, and Chuck Collins, cofounder of United for a Fair Economy and Responsible Wealth, and the great-grandson of meat packer Oscar Mayer who gave away his substantial inheritance at the age of twenty-six. Gates and Collins argue that individual wealth is a product not only of hard work and smart choices but of the society that provides the fertile soil for success. They don‘t subscribe to the ‘Great Man’ theory of wealth creation but contend that society‘s investments, such as economic development, education, health care, and property rights protection, all contribute to any individual‘s good fortune. With the repeal proposed by the Bush administration, we might be facing the future that Teddy Roosevelt feared—where huge fortunes amassed and untaxed would evolve into a dangerous and permanent aristocracy. Repeal would drop federal revenues $294 billion in the first 10 years; 27 some $750 billion would be lost in the second decade, not to mention that the U.S. Treasury estimates that charitable contributions would drop by $6 billion a year. But what about all those modest families that would lose the farm? Gates and Collins expose the fallacy of this argument, pointing out that this is largely a myth and that the very same lobbies and politicians who are crying ‘cows’ have opposed other legislation that would actually have helped small farmers. Weaving in personal narratives, history, and plenty of solid economic sense, Gates and Collins make a sound and compelling case for tax reform, not repeal.
Public ownership is more widespread and popular in the United States than is commonly understood. This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the scope and scale of U.S. public ownership, debunking frequent misconceptions about the alleged inefficiency and underperformance of public ownership and arguing that it offers powerful, flexible solutions to current problems of inequality, instability, and unsustainability- explaining why after decades of privatization it is making a comeback, including in the agenda of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in Britain. Hanna offers a vision of deploying new forms of democratized public ownership broadly, across multiple sectors, as a key ingredient of any next system beyond corporate capitalism. This book is a valuable, extensively researched resource that sets out the past record and future possibilities of public ownership at a time when ever more people are searching for answers.
The definitive treasury of Massachusetts's historic quilts, and a tribute to the creative spirit of their makers