The sound of a century

“The 20. Century hear” – Alex Ross, music critic of the “New Yorker”, the subtitle of his book deliberately. One hears, in fact, a whole century: not only the music, but also the war, the noise, the stock market hustle and bustle, the sounds of everyday life. Composers are first and foremost people, they live in their time, and react differently to you. This is what Ross is interested; he seeks not the progress in the history of music, but describes the Next to and Against each other from a nostalgic, avant-garde and other currents. And he pays tribute to the protagonists: Schoenberg, Sibelius, Boulez and the Beatles. That you can find on the Homepage to the book, audio samples, is then already 21. Century. Susanne Kübler

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise. Piper, München 2009. 703 p., CA. 44 Fr. www.therestisnoise.com

How to Europe in the First world war

Trump, Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Salman, Iran and Pakistan: trade wars, frozen, wars, smoldering Fuses lands, political-military muscle games anywhere. So the world looks like in 2018. A hundred years before she was drawn into a war that nobody wanted and left a devastated Europe. Christopher Clark shows how it came to be, and that the war would be to prevent at any time been. He considers the relations of forces in each of the five major players and important middle powers, such as Serbia. He portrays the contours of Empire, told in an exciting, analysed precisely. He comes to the historical truth about this war and its causes, and so close as well-still no one. His truth is complex, it is in this complexity fascinating – and it is very instructive for our time, our conflicts. Martin Ebel

Christopher Clark: The sleepwalkers. Pantheon, 896 p., 30 Fr.

Moscow in the year of the Great terror

history is not only in the Longitudinal but also in cross-section tell. Karl Schlögel has mastered this method. The 70-year-old historian has defined temporally, but also spatially: What sounds like a restriction, it means broadening and deepening. Like under a burning glass, Schlögel presents in “Moscow 1937” as a utopia in Terror turns: In and around the capital were arrested within a year, two million people, over a Million in a labor camp sent to and 700000 murdered. The Great Terror was able to meet each and every one – that Stalin was unpredictable even to his closest followers. Karl Schlögel shows clearly how thin the veneer of civilization is – but also that there is no reason to assume that this had become thicker. Guido Kalberer

Karl Schlögel: Terror and dream. Moscow 1937. Hanser. 811 p.,. 49 Fr. TB. 22 Fr.

educate children? Everything easy!

When I learned that I would father, I got me five famous parents, counselors, and read through them. After that, I knew everything about proper nutrition and how big and heavy babies or small children should be. Also with the cognitive development I studied, to the first school-based aspects. But the more I read, the more nervous I became. To have a child, seemed like a task that could only fail. Then I came across Tom Hodgkinsons “guide for lazy parents”. The educational philosophy of the Englishman sounds banal at first: Let your kids alone. However, behind the coquettish label of “laziness” can refer to a concrete, life-wise tips. Some of them may be utopian. However, even Hodgkinsons funny-relaxed way for stressed-out young parents relaxing as a sleeping night. Philippe doubt

Tom Hodgkinson: a guide for lazy parents. Rowohlt TB, 320 p., approximately 14 Fr.

work Less,consume less

We are shopping for doings still, at Christmas especially: like Crazy. Why do we have to do the written, and with what consequences, has studied the U.S. sociologist Juliet Schor, and (not only) a Survival Guide about it. For personal luck, the reading of your in German published, updated, prosperity book, the promises in the subtitle: is enough “With less work, better life”. Fits. The “New Dream” – this is the organization, which is called Schor in 1997, the means – may be a dream about you and me. Instead of in the professional hamster wheel broken zustrampeln, in order to have more money for things that were not happy with the time better slow down: friends, family, garden care, old stuff to repair, instead of new stuff to buy; read. Quality of life to discover with Juliet Schor. Alexandra Kedves

Juliet B. Schor: True prosperity. Oekom-Verlag. 272 p., approximately 28 Fr.

learn English – and much more – Refugees

the complexity of the German language but it is! And how difficult it is to convey this to Market. Of the future, we will make later, “Christiane Rösinger”, says the report of the songwriter and author, about their work, arrived as a volunteer English teacher in the year 2015, as the Refugees from Syria and other crisis areas in Germany. In the center of the book, two of the big questions of our time are in addition to didactic and pedagogical issues: How can we help those people for whom only the present counts, all right? And what does it actually mean Integration, this “dubious” word, as Resnick noted? How fine and unsentimental Resnick treats these fields, makes her book an important document, but then in the future. Benedikt Sartorius

Christiane Rösinger: the future we make later. S. Fischer, 224 p., CA. 19 Fr.

An antidote to all the conspiracy theories

Since you yourself with his contemporaries around to hit the suspect behind every terrorist attack, the CIA, the question is: What is it become of critical Thinking? Alarmed, the French sociologist Bruno Latour explores in his short Essay, the emergence of conspiracy theories and “reflexhaftem disbelief,” even in the case of secured facts. He has contributed as a science researcher at the end of self, the facts, and excessive mistrust directed towards? According to Bruno Latour, it is in need of new critical instruments, by means of which the things and the thoughts of worry to carry. One such tool is the booklet: So handy that you can have it in any critical Situation. Pascal Blum

Bruno Latour: the misery of the criticism. Diaphane. 64 p., about 12 Fr.

The drug addict leader of the third Reich

Germany’s historians of the Nazi period lighting intensive like no other era. What could Adolf Hitler still New to say? Amazingly, Norman Ohler, not a historian, but a writer and a meticulous Researcher. Ohler is the First to investigate Hitler’s personal physician Theo Morell and his notes in more detail. So he can explain how Hitler’s madness frictions by His Bungling and waste – coke, June, and so on – has been raised, says the drug-related “delusions of loops” of Hitler and other senior Nazi Junkies. And if the author writes about the wrong Trip the last assumption of command of the armed forces, are in reality and not talking and noise in the convincing line since Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip”. Linus Creator

Norman Ohler: The total noise. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 368 p., approximately 28 Fr.

In the heart of darkness

no, not another book about the horrors of history of the Congo, you might think – and can be deceived. Because of this book, the Belgian, David Van Reybrouck definitely belongs in the nonfiction Canon of the 21st century. Century, it tells with stupendous elegance of the bloody history of this country that is as large as Western Europe. Opened Van Reybroucks major historical reportage with a flight over the Delta of the Congo river, which flows out as a rust-brown broth into the sea. And with the encounter with a people of Congo, claims he was born in 1882, shortly before the colonial powers, Africa was divided among themselves. From this amazing encounter, the Van Reybrouck himself has made, he fails as a sovereign narrator the arch over all of the illegal regime to the present day: anyone Who reads this book, know more about Africa and the Congo, feel the strong beat of his dark heart. Andreas Tobler

David Van Reybrouck Congo. Suhrkamp, 783 p., about 23 Fr. (editor-in-Tamedia)

Created: 16.12.2018, 18:55 PM