Keynes -Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist

Keynes
The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist
Peter Clarke

Bloomsbury
ISBN: 9781408803851
September 2009
Hardback 224 pages
Price: £16.99 Sp.Price :1099.00

In the midst of our current economic crisis, we peer anxiously over the precipice into an uncertain future, and try to put things in perspective by looking to the past. One name above all keeps on cropping up; often there is a grainy picture of a tall man with thinning hair and a heavy moustache, a half-familiar figure from a former era of worldwide economic depression – an era that closed when the Second World War peremptorily intervened.
The name of John Maynard Keynes first came to public attention on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1920s, when the depression in Britain engaged his attention, with the argument that unemployment needed a radical remedy. This was a direct attack on the orthodoxy of the free-market doctrines of the day, with their reliance on the self-acting mechanisms of the Gold Standard and Free Trade to do the trick – in the long run. No, said Keynes, coining one of his most famous phrases: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’
It is a measure of Keynes’s apotheosis that it was President Nixon who said in 1971 that ‘we are all Keynesians now’, but slowly the name of Keynes lost its gilt; his thinking was dismissed as ‘depression economics’, irrelevant in a booming economic world.

And then came the great meltdown of 2008.

Incomprehensibly the market forces, on which the rising generation had been taught to rely, failed to deliver the goods, failed to offer self-correction and failed to cope with a self-inflicted crisis of confidence. For thirty years Keynes’s reputation had languished; in thirty days the defunct economist was rediscovered and rehabilitated.
Engaging and authoratitive, Keynes explores the often misunderstood man in the context of his own life and times – the impact of his homosexuality and his later marriage to ballerina Lydia Lopokova – and questions the relevence and significance of his groundbreaking ideas today.
Peter Clarke was formerly Professor of Modern British history and Master of Trinity Hall at Cambridge. His many books include The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924–1936, and the widely admired final volume of the Penguin History of Britain, Hope and Glory, Britain 1900–2000. He lives with his wife, the Canadian writer Maria Tippett, in Suffolk, England, and Pender Island, British Columbia.

Makhmalbaf - The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker

Mohsen Makhmalbaf at Large
The Making of a Rebel Filmmaker
Hamid Dabashi

I.B.Tauris
ISBN :9781845115326
Paperback 272 Pages
Price :£16.99

The name of Mohsen Makhmalbaf is almost synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and over the last quarter of a century, his career as filmmaker and writer has reflected the tumultuous history of his homeland and the fate of its neighbours. Hamid Dabashi draws from his friendship with Makhmalbaf, as well as his direct involvement with Makhmalbaf's films and thought, to give us this deeply engaging book on the tumultuous life and spectacular career of a great filmmaker. This is also the account of Makhmalbaf's transformation, from committed Muslim revolutionary, who was jailed for his part in the revolution, into an artistic humanist of great energy and elegance. His films, including "The Peddler" and "The Time for Love", "Salaam Cinema", "Gabbeh", "Silence" and "Kandahar", confound conventional genres and are always surprising. They represent his own journey and take part in it, in ways that Dabashi explores with great insight. Makhmalbaf's cinematic career started in Iran and has since expanded into Turkey, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and into Europe. Dabashi uncovers how, moving across boundaries, Makhmalbaf's creative genius can illuminate our contemporary world. And this book is in part the story of a friendship. As Mohsen Makhmalbaf writes in its Preface: 'Hamid Dabashi - this pious atheist friend of mine, the man who loves cinema and hates art, this political activist who abhors politics, this thinking, pondering, critical intellect...I have learned much from him. Perhaps he too, has learned from me. The times he and I have spent together have been occasions of discovery and illumination.'

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, New York. His acclaimed books include 'Dream of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema', and 'Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future'.

Che - A Memoir by Fidel Castro

Che
A Memoir
Fidel Castro

Leftword Books
978-81-87496-87-8
Paperback 237 Pages
Price: Rs 350.00

"For me, it has always been hard to accept the idea that Che is dead. I dream of him often, that I have spoken to him, that he is alive."
- Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro writes with great candor and emotion about a historic revolutionary partnership that changed the face of Cuba and Latin America. Fidel creates a vivid portrait of Che Guevara- the man, the revolutionary, and the intellectual - revealing much about his own inimitable determination and character.
This new edition of a unique political memoir includes Fidel's speech on the return of Che's remains to Cuba 30 years after his assasination in Bolivia in 1967, and provides a frank assessment of the Bolivian mission.

Simone de Beauvoir - The Making of an Intellectual Woman

Simone de Beauvoir
The Making of an Intellectual Woman
Toril Moi

Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN13: 9780199238712
Hard Back 368 pages
Price:$59.95

In Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman , Toril Moi shows how Simone de Beauvoir became the leading feminist thinker and emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century. Blending biography with literary criticism, feminist theory, and historical and social analysis, this book provides a completely original analysis of Beauvoir's education and formation as an intellectual.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir shows that we constantly make something of what the world tries to make of us. By reconstructing the social and political world in which Beauvoir became the author of The Second Sex , and by showing how Beauvoir reacted to the pressures of that world, Moi applies Beauvoir's ideas to Beauvoir's own life.
Ranging from an investigation of French educational institutions to reflections on the relationship between freedom and flirtation, this book uncovers the conflicts and difficulties of an intellectual woman in the middle of the twentieth century. Through her analysis of Beauvoir's life and work Moi shows how difficult it was - and still is - for women to be taken seriously as intellectuals. Two major chapters on The Second Sex provide a theoretical and a political analysis of that epochal text. The last chapter turns to Beauvoir's love life, her depressions and her fear of ageing.
In a major new introduction, Moi discusses Beauvoir's letters to her lovers Jacques-Laurent Bost and Nelson Algren, as well as her recently published student diaries from 1926/27.

Toril Moi was born and raised in Norway, and worked in England in the 1980s, before moving to Duke University in 1989, where she is now the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. She is the author of numerous influential books on feminist theory. Her study of Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism was published to wide critical acclaim in 2006.