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"This extraordinary book . . . is a reminder . . . of the sins of suppression and untruth that have been and can be committed in the name of American journalism . . . One of the last first-person statements from a generation that included Hitler, Nehru, and Mao . . . and Seldes too." --Columbia Journalism Review
The book is the story of a refugee who survived the Nazis and his contributions to the U.S. as a soldier, engineer and citizen. His father interned under Konrad Röntgen when X rays were discovered The author was born in Germany in 1917 during World War I. The story continues with life in the Weimar Republic and under the Nazi regime Though raised Christian, because of his Jewish ancestry, he had to go into hiding and had a harrowing miraculous escape from the Nazis in 1938. During World War II he served in the U .S. Army in Europe as related through his war letters. An Electrical Engineer with Bell Laboratories he contributed to the cutting edge of the technical revolution of our time: Long Distance Communications, the Transistor, Guided Missiles (ICBM’S and Satellite Launchers), Missile Defense, Electromagnetic Nuclear Weapons Effects (EMP) and high speed communications through Millimeter Waveguide. He was granted numerous patents and contributed to technical journals and books. The personal story runs in parallel with the technical story: raising a family, civic affairs, public office, and world travel to Europe, Japan and the Americas. He had a particular interest in Americas civilizations and pre-Columbian archeology.
An intimate look at one majestic hundred-year-old oak tree through four seasons--and the reality of global climate change it reveals. In the life of this one grand oak, we can see for ourselves the results of one hundred years of rapid environmental change. It's leafing out earlier, and dropping its leaves later as the climate warms. Even the inner workings of individual leaves have changed to accommodate more CO2 in our atmosphere. Climate science can seem dense, remote, and abstract. But through the lens of this one tree, it becomes immediate and intimate. In Witness Tree, environmental reporter Lynda V. Mapes takes us through her year living with one red oak at the Harvard Forest. We learn about carbon cycles and leaf physiology, but also experience the seasons as people have for centuries, watching for each new bud, and listening for each new bird and frog call in spring. We savor the cadence of falling autumn leaves, and glory of snow and starry winter nights. Lynda takes us along as she climbs high into the oak's swaying boughs, and scientists core deep into the oak's heartwood, dig into its roots and probe the teeming life of the soil. She brings us eye-level with garter snakes and newts, and alongside the squirrels and jays devouring the oak's acorns. Season by season she reveals the secrets of trees, how they work, and sustain a vast community of lives, including our own. The oak is a living timeline and witness to climate change. While stark in its implications, Witness Tree is a beautiful and lyrical read, rich in detail, sweeps of weather, history, people, and animals. It is a story rooted in hope, beauty, wonder, and the possibility of renewal in people's connection to nature.
In documenting this transformation in American photography, Disappearing Witness forcefully rethinks the history of photography itself.
This study offers fresh readings of milestones in twentieth-century Chinese fiction, film, and drama and argues that they have questioned the faith in historical progress and in the viability of a sphere of free debate.
On a fateful day in the spring of 1954 Robert Jay Lifton, a young American psychiatrist just discharged from service in the Korean War, decided to stay in Hong Kong rather than return home—changing his life plans entirely—so that he could continue work that had enthralled him, interviewing people subjected to Chinese thought reform. He had plunged into uncharted territory in probing the far reaches of the human psyche, as he would repeatedly in the years ahead, and his Hong Kong research provided the first understanding of the insidious process that came to be known as brainwashing. From that day in Hong Kong forward, Lifton has probed into some of the darkest episodes of human history, bearing his unique form of psychological witness to the sources and consequences of collective violence and trauma, as well as to our astonishing capacity for resilience. In this long-awaited memoir, Lifton charts the adventurous and constantly surprising course of his fascinating life journey, a journey that took him from what a friend of his called a “Jewish Huck Finn childhood” in Brooklyn to friendships with many of the most influential intellectuals, writers, and artists of our time—from Erik Erikson, David Riesman, and Margaret Mead, to Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kunitz, Kenzaburo Oe, and Norman Mailer. In his remarkable study of Hiroshima survivors, he explored the human consequences of nuclear weapons, and then went on to uncover dangerous forms of attraction to their power in the spiritual disease he calls nuclearism. During riveting face-to-face interviews with Nazi doctors, he illuminated the reversal of healing and killing in ordinary physicians who had been socialized to Nazi evil. With Vietnam veterans he helped create unprecedented “rap groups” in which much was revealed about what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, helping veterans draw upon their experience for valuable, even prophetic, insights about atrocity and war. As a pioneer in psychohistory, Lifton’s encounters with the consequences of cruelty and destructiveness led him to become a passionate social activist, lending a powerful voice of conscience to the suppressed truths of the Vietnam War and the dangers of nuclear weapons. Written with the warmth of spirit—along with the humor and sense of absurdity—that have made Lifton a beloved friend and teacher to so many, Witness to an Extreme Century is a moving and deeply thought-provoking story of one man’s extraordinary commitment to looking into the abyss of evil in order to help us move beyond it.
The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.
A groundbreaking anthology containing the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness is the first anthology to reveal a tradition that runs through English-language poetry. The 300 poems collected here were composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death. All bear witness to historical events and the irresistibility of their impact. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, this volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. Poetry of Witness argues that such poets are a perennial feature of human history, and it presents the best of that tradition, proving that their work ranks alongside the greatest in the language.
Modern poems deal with genocide, wars, revolutions, the Holocaust, political repression, apartheid, and the democracy movement in China
Historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (1902–1975) was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary political observers. Through an ability to make important connections, he became an authority on Germany in the interwar years and was acquainted with all the German hierarchy, including Hitler and Hindenburg. He was one of the last people to interview Trotsky, writing an important analysis of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1917. As King George VI’s official biographer, he met and interviewed the major leaders of the postwar period, including Churchill, Coolidge, Truman, and members of the British Royal Family. A teacher at the universities of New York, Virginia, and Arizona, he also briefly supervised young Jack Kennedy’s master’s thesis at Harvard. This first biography of Wheeler-Bennett will fascinate anyone interested in the great political figures of world history during the twentieth century.