Friday the 6th of August, after a battle of two years against motor neuron disease ,Tony Judt, celebrated historian and intellectual extraordinaire, passed away. The more frequent readers of Gibburt will know that I greatly admire mr. Judt and as such I could not let his passing go without a small token of my appreciation [...]
The holiday season also hit Gibburt and as such we have not been as active for the last few weeks as we could have been. After the vacation however you can again expect many different discussions and opinions so keep checking in.
For now I would like to draw your attention to the following article from [...]
One of the advantages of writing book reviews for your own blog is that you can choose only to review those books that you like. This definitely applies to the book I would like to talk about today: Postwar, a history of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt.
Tony Judt is a Cambridge trained historian whose [...]
Great bit of poetry by german writer Bertold Brecht. For those of you who would like to read the orginal German version please find it at the end of the post.
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The Solution
by Bertold Brecht
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the [...]
Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel (1830 – 1897), or Antônio Conselheiro (Anthony the Counselor) as he was called, led a turbulent life. He was born from a family of cattle breeders in the Brazilian Northeast and educated by his grandfather, who was a local teacher. He married and settled down but after his wife betrayed him, [...]
Only once I’ve had the pleasure to visit this country of Mediterranean laissez-faire. It wasn’t the wonderful weather that made my hearth ablaze with joy, nor was it the blue sea contrasting with the browns and greens of the hills. Not the old bazaar or the modern tourist towers, not even the ancient and dead [...]
History would have looked different without mr. Joseph Stalin. Several massive events this man can write on his resume, like the Great Purge in the late thirties, during which at least 600,000 people where sentenced to death. And although quite considerable in number, this was just part of Stalin’s great labor: the Gulag camps, deathtraps [...]
Philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—his massive volume Essais (translated literally as “Attempts”) contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written.
Emma Goldman, a political activist who played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, was born 140 years ago in Kovno (now Kaunas). An outspoken writer and lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women’s rights, and social issues, Goldman was imprisoned several times after emigrating to the [...]
Jared Diamond spent most of his career being a scholar of biology and ecology. In his fifties however he started a second career as a writer of popular science books. His most successful book up to date, his 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel, won a Pulitzer price. In 2005 he released his most recent book [...]
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