'An old world is dying; a new world is being born; now is the time of monsters' Antonio Gramschi
Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature - despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back. From one of the most significant thinkers of our day, The Beginning Comes After the End is a culmination of years of activism and offers a unique perspective on our politics and our humanity, to give hope in difficult times and to urgently remind us that the power to change the world is within our reach.
'Bold and brilliant... We all need to read this book. If we want to deal with the rise of fascism and dictatorship, if we want to preserve democracy, human rights , peace and social justice, battered and bruised as they are, we cannot look away. This book does not look away' – Irish Times
'Owen Jones is saying it exactly as it is, with no filter, no limits, and not a drop of fear. He is exposing the inconsistencies in the West that, uncorrected, would ultimately cause its precipitous decline and fall' – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'It is bracing to see what was once the news cycle take its place in the sweep of history, and Jones’s focus on free-market fundamentalism provides a compelling through-line' – Guardian
From the critically acclaimed author of The Establishment, an excoriating take-down of Western hubris – and the book that reveals why we’re really in the state we’re in.
Almost everywhere we turn these days, there’s talk of a West in decline. Our jobs, our values, our past are all under attack, in the face of which we have become immersed in self-loathing, gone weak at the knees: the West needs to be Made Great Again. We know where this toxic narrative comes from: the nationalist, nativist Right. And now it’s gone mainstream.
The thing is, the West is in decline, self-evidently so. But the truth is that it’s not migrants or Muslims or a woke mob which has brought the West to the edge of catastrophe. It’s good, old-fashioned hubris.
In this blistering new book, Owen Jones explores how, amid the triumphalist sugar rush that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West came to believe that its rule, its economic order, its moral values, would endure for ever – and how, over a quarter-century, this brittle self-mythologising narrative collapsed in on itself. From Afghanistan and Iraq, to the economic crash of 2008 and Gaza today, he takes us on a journey to show how the West went from scoring what it believed was its final victory, to being engulfed in an existential crisis of its own making. And how, along the way, it fashioned an ugly new story: that this was the fault of the most vulnerable groups in society, rather than a power-hungry, venal ruling class.
Today, as the Atlantic alliance struggles to hold itself together, The Fall of the West exposes how a generation of Western elites bent on power and self-enrichment at any cost fatally overreached itself, and argues that, if we are to find the solutions to our age of crisis, we must first understand the real reasons for how the West lost it.
Lees meerSolzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile.
This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author.
'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph
'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum
WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON
THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III
Lees meer