Archives de catégorie : Current Issues

KAPUT de Wolfgang Münchau

The story of the rise and decline of a huge industrial giant, and of how and why it happened.

KAPUT:
The End of the German Miracle
by Wolfgang Münchau
Swift Press UK, November 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

Until recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success. Angela Merkel was widely seen as the true ‘leader of the free world’, and Germany’s export-driven economic model seemed to deliver prosperity. But recent events – from Germany’s dependence on Russian gas to its car industry’s delays in the race to electric – have undermined this view.

In KAPUT, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany’s economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades. The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country’s industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China – and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe’s biggest economy.

Wolfgang Münchau is a journalist and commentator who focuses on the European economy and the European Union. He is director of leading news service Eurointelligence and a columnist for the New Statesman.

DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE de Barbara Demick

The heartrending story of twin sisters torn apart by China’s one-child policy and the rise of international adoption—from the author of the National Book Award finalist Nothing to Envy.

DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE:
From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
by Barbara Demick
Penguin Random House, May 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

On a warm day in September 2000, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut nestled in bamboo behind her brother’s rural home in China’s Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her young family but also not her first children. Hidden in the hut, they were born under the shadow of China’s notorious one-child policy. Fearing the ire of family planning officials, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in late 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away from her aunt’s care. The family worried they would never see her again, but they didn’t imagine she could be sent to the United States. She might as well have been sent to another world.

Following her stories written as the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Demick, author of National Book Award finalist Nothing to Envy, embarks on a journey that encompasses the origins, shocking cruelty, and long term impact of China’s one-child rule; the rise of international adoption and the religious currents that buoyed it; and the exceedingly rare phenomenon of twin separation. Today, Esther—formerly Fangfang—is a photographer in Texas, and Demick brings to vivid life the Christian family that felt called to adopt her, having no idea that she was kidnapped. Through Demick’s indefatigable reporting and the activist work to find these lost children, will these two long-lost sisters finally find each other, and if they do, will they feel whole again?

A remarkable window into the volatile, constantly changing China of the last half century and the long-reaching legacy of the country’s most infamous law, DAUGHTERS OF THE BAMBOO GROVE is also the moving story of two sisters torn apart by the forces of history and brought together again by their families’ determination and one reporter’s dogged work.

Barbara Demick is author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea; Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, and Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, published by Random House in July 2020. She was bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul, and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Elena Kostioutchenko remporte le Pushkin House Book Prize 2024

Photo credit: Rocio Chacon

Elena Kostioutchenko s’est vu décerner le Pushkin House Book Prize 2024, qui lui a été remis à Londres le 14 juin dernier en présence de l’une de ses traductrices et de son éditeur britannique.

La Pushkin House est un espace artistique, culturel et social situé à Londres qui explore, remet en question et débat de la culture et de l’identité russes aujourd’hui. Le Pushkin House Book Prize a été créé en 2013 afin de récompenser et d’attirer l’attention sur les ouvrages de non-fiction provenant de Russie ou portant sur ce pays, écrits ou traduits en anglais. Les sujets des livres sélectionnés ne concernent pas seulement la vie et la culture à l’intérieur des frontières de l’actuelle Fédération de Russie, mais aussi l’expérience de ceux dont les terres natales ont été affectées par l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique.

Les éditions Noir sur blanc ont publié l’édition française, intitulée RUSSIE, MON PAYS BIEN-AIME, en février 2024 dans une traduction d’Emma Lavigne et Anne-Marie Tatsis-Botton.

« Être journaliste, c’est dire la vérité. Avec Mon pays bien-aimé, Elena Kostioutchenko documente son pays, tel qu’il est vécu par celles et ceux qu’il efface systématiquement, par exemple les filles de la campagne recrutées comme travailleuses du sexe, les personnes queer des provinces éloignées, les patientes et les médecins d’une maternité ukrainienne – et les journalistes, dont elle fait partie.
Cet ouvrage est le portrait singulier d’une nation, et celui d’une jeune femme qui refuse de garder le silence. En mars 2022, alors qu’elle est reporter pour Novaïa Gazeta, l’un des derniers journaux russes indépendants, Kostioutchenko se rend en Ukraine pour couvrir la guerre. Elle se donne pour mission d’informer les Russes sur les horreurs que Poutine commet en leur nom. Elle sait dès le début que si elle retourne dans son pays, elle risque d’être condamnée à quinze ans de prison, sinon pire. Portée par la conviction que la plus grande forme d’amour et de patriotisme est la critique, elle continue à écrire, nullement découragée, les yeux grand ouverts. »

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN de Pashtana Durrani

From young Afghani activist and Amnesty International Global Youth Ambassador Pashtana Durrani, a deeply inspiring memoir about the power of learning and the value of educators in their many forms – from teachers, mentors, and role models, to fathers, mothers, and any one of us with the drive to stand against ignorance.

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN
My Life in Afghanistan Fighting to Educate Women
by Pashtana Durrani, with Tamara Bralo
Kensington, March 2024
(via The Martell Agency)

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN is the remarkable memoir of Pashtana Durrani, a 23-year-old Afghan woman, who has pursued her passion for educating the “disappearing girls” of the remote, contested rural tribal regions, amidst all the turmoil, violence and oppression that has enveloped her country – and her family — over a generation.

Pashtana Durrani was the first recipient of a grant from Malala’s Fund, and the founder of Learn NGO, an organization that was ruthlessly targeted by the Taliban. She conceived and developed a brilliant program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls and young women in the form of solar-powered tablets preloaded with lessons for grades K-12.

Pashtana escaped from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover and will soon be in the U.S., with a two-year residency at Wellesley College to continue her critical work for girls’ education. Malala wrote one of two letters to the U.S. government to petition for Pashatana’s safe evacuation to the U.S. Pashtana is a highly sought-after expert in the on-going international advocacy struggles, a figure of hope and promise for all those determined not to cede ground in the battle for women’s education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.

Tamara Bralo is an award-winning journalist who worked for BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera English, and spent years covering war zones around the world, including Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Immortal King Rao, a collection of essays exploring how technology has become an inextricable part of modern life.

SEARCHES
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon, March 2025
(via Writers House)

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT sparked a global commotion. Now, anyone could be a novelist. Brands could generate copy and students could pen essays in mere seconds, all thanks to this frighteningly smart algorithm turned ghostwriter that could crank out pages of text at the drop of a prompt. Had writing just been democratized or destroyed?

It was a question that Vauhini Vara—tech journalist, former New Yorker business editor, and prize-winning author of the novel The Immortal King Rao—had long been grappling with. Her own relationship with ChatGPT began in 2021, when, using a beta version, she decided to use the program to attempt to write an essay about the death, two decades earlier, of her older sister. What resulted from the exercise was both a far more moving experience than she imagined, and an essay unlike any she had ever written—one that soon went viral. In the months that followed, it would be aired on the radio by This American Life; anthologized in The Best American Essays; and adapted for the stage.

In that essay, along with the others in this searing yet playful collection, Vara’s experiments with technology double as critiques of it. From Google search data to Amazon reviews to crowdsourced confessionals from both Vara’s peers and anonymous contributors, the raw material of Searches explores what it means to be alive in a world where human communication is inseparable from technology. Like the programs she explores, Vara’s voice is ever-evolving, at once experimental and deeply familiar to anyone who has experienced both wonderment and fear about our technological future, a future that has come to be seen as inevitable.

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and is the secretary of the mentorship collective Periplus.