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Produktbeschreibung

The First 5,000 Years
Erscheinungsjahr: 2011
Von Graeber, David

An important historical work on debt, by a serious academic. Sure to be course adopted and widely read by activists. There is also a strong possibility that the book will break out, given the importance of the topic to the present moment. Before there were coins or paper money, there was debt: Where it came from and how it affects us today.

Approaches the current economic crisis from a historical perspective that goes beyond what is currently in discussion. Graeber covers not only the rise of financial capital (a la Niall Ferguson''s The Ascent of Money, or Liaquat Ahamed''s Lord of Finance) but the origins of virtual money, which Graeber''s ties to the origins of debt itself.
Author is a young articulate academic, who has already been featured in the New York Times, and on Charlie Rose. He also writes for Harper''s and The Nation. "His writings on anthropological theory are outstanding. I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world." (Maurice Bloch, Professor of Anthropology at the LSE and European Professor at the Collège de France)

Kurzbeschreibung

In 1996, in the middle of watching an ill-tempered football match  between England and Germany, Philip Oltermann's parents tell him that  they are going to leave their home city Hamburg behind and move to  London.

A number of worrying questions arise. How would English  schoolboys take to a lanky 16-year-old German? How did they think and do  things differently? What was the secret of the famed British humour?  And were there values that English and German people shared?

In  search of answers, Oltermann interweaves memoir and history, taking ten key Anglo-German encounters from the last 200 years as his starting point. These include: an encounter between Joe Strummer and the Baader Meinhof gang, Helmut Kohl trying to explain the virtues of German cuisine to a sceptical Margaret Thatcher and philosophers Theodor Adorno and A. J. Ayer clashing over jazz.

What emerges is  nothing less than an alternative national story for the two countries:  not one marked by military conflict and diplomatic hostility, but one shaped by dialogue, interaction and genuine fondness.

Kurzbeschreibung

Before there was money, there was debt

Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems?to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There?s not a shred of evidence to support it.

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods?that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like ?guilt,? ?sin,? and ?redemption?) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history?as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.


From the Hardcover edition.

Kurzbeschreibung

Kurzbeschreibung

Produktbeschreibung

This is the First Book of The Series - America Before Columbus.

The story is intriguing, and the fascinating narrative will hold the reader's complete attention.

Most of the inhabitants were wiped out by plagues brought by the Europeans.

You will learn how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press.

If your knowledge of the Native Americans begins and ends with what you learned in school years ago, or with the stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood, you are in for quite a shock.

This is not a book which will please many with an agenda on either the pro-development or pro-environment side, but it will be found invaluable by those who seek a better understanding of the "New World" before the Europeans "discovered" it.

Grab your copy now!

Kurzbeschreibung

It?s the summer of 1879, and Annie Fuller, a young San Francisco widow, is in trouble. Annie?s husband squandered her fortune before committing suicide five years earlier, and one of his creditors is now threatening to take the boardinghouse she owns to pay off a debt.

Annie Fuller also has a secret. She supplements her income by giving domestic and business advice as Madam Sibyl, one of San Francisco?s most exclusive clairvoyants, and one of Madam Sibyl?s clients, Matthew Voss, has died. The police believe his death was suicide brought upon by bankruptcy, but Annie believes Voss has been murdered and that his assets have been stolen.

Nate Dawson has a problem. As the Voss family lawyer, he would love to believe that Matthew Voss didn't leave his grieving family destitute. But that would mean working with Annie Fuller, a woman who alternatively attracts and infuriates him as she shatters every notion he ever had of proper ladylike behavior.

Sparks fly as Anne and Nate pursue the truth about the murder of Matthew Voss in this light-hearted historical mystery set in the foggy gas-lit world of Victorian San Francisco.

Kurzbeschreibung

One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius?a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Produktbeschreibung

This is the Second Book of The Series - America Before Columbus.

The story is intriguing, and the fascinating narrative will hold the reader's complete attention.

Most of the inhabitants were wiped out by plagues brought by the Europeans.

You will learn how "Indians" lived throughout the Americas before 1492 and Columbus, only isolated bits of the story have reached the popular press.

If your knowledge of the Native Americans begins and ends with what you learned in school years ago, or with the stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood, you are in for quite a shock.

This is not a book which will please many with an agenda on either the pro-development or pro-environment side, but it will be found invaluable by those who seek a better understanding of the "New World" before the Europeans "discovered" it.

Grab your copy now!