Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

ORT OHNE WIEDERKEHR de Mihrigul Tursun & Andrea Claudia Hoffmann

The first book worldwide by a survivor of the Chinese concentration camps.

ORT OHNE WIEDERKEHR
(A Place of No Return)
by Mihrigul Tursun & Andrea Claudia Hoffmann
Heyne/ Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, February 2022

Human rights organisations and governments speak of a crime against humanity, a « cultural genocide ». Mihrigul Tursun has repeatedly been a victim of Chinese efforts to totally assimilate the Uyghur minority. She experienced the so-called « re-education camps » in their indescribable cruelty, the physical and psychological violence, first hand. In a way that remains unexplained to this day, her young son died while she was imprisoned. Today, despite the threat that has not disappeared even in exile, she has the courage to speak openly about what she experienced and to describe from her own experience what the Uyghur minority in China has to endure. A significant eyewitness account that brings the reader closer to the people behind the news from China.

Uyghur Mihrigul Tursun, born in 1989, was imprisoned several times in the Chinese « re-education camps » of Xinjiang. During her detention, one of her sons died in Chinese custody under unexplained circumstances. On 28 November 2018, Mihrigul Tursun gave her harrowing testimony before the US Congress (Congressional-Executive Commission on China). She described the inhumane conditions and torture methods in the camps. In December 2018, Tursun was awarded the Citizen Power Award.
Andrea C. Hoffmann works in the political editorial department of the news magazine Focus and teaches at various German universities. Her books have been translated into 17 languages worldwide.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Mihrigul_Tursun.jpg

DER MIT DEN WALDTIEREN SPRICHT de Wolfgang Schreil

Special moments, amazing encounters, fascinating animal facts.

DER MIT DEN WALDTIEREN SPRICHT
(The Woodland Animal Whisperer)
by Wolfgang Schreil
Ludwig/Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, August 2021

No one is as at home among wild woodland animals as Wolfgang Schreil: he gets up close and personal with red deer and lynxes, photographs a hunting stoat at ten paces, gets within touching distance of poisonous snakes, and stands among roe deer grazing peacefully by his side. How does he manage to get so unbelievably close to them, to share moments of connectedness that count among the happiest times of his life? For Wolfgang ‘Woid Woife’ Schreil, the woods represent a safe haven and place where we can be truly free. His gripping stories, his priceless knowledge of the animal world and his close-up animal photographs have made him a very special woodland ambassador. His immense passion for life and animals, his faith in the power of love, and his belief that nature’s greatest gifts are revealed to us if we are only patient, are an inspiration for each and every one of us who yearn to be mindful of what really matters.

German stone lifting champion, renowned environmentalist and animal expert – Wolfgang Schreil‘s CV contains many surprises. Yet his extraordinary connection to animals and woodlands has always been a constant in his life. His wisdom and contagious enthusiasm for forests and their inhabitants have inspired and delighted people everywhere; and he is as famous for his stunning close-up photographs of woodland animals as for his trademark green felt hat and hiking stick.

ZWISCHEN DURCHKOMMEN UND UMKOMMEN de Reinhold Messner

« Old-school alpinism is the art of survival in a place not fit for humans » Reinhold Messner

ZWISCHEN DURCHKOMMEN UND UMKOMMEN:
(Meeting the Challenge or Meeting One’s End)
by Reinhold Messner
Ludwig/Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe, October 2021

Old-school mountaineers confront the unknown with courage and self-sufficiency. They go where no one else dares to go, and take unbelievable risks. Ever since man first stood on top of Mont Blanc in 1786, they have continuously pushed the boundaries of the supposedly impossible. Reinhold Messner’s new book is a memorial to those pioneers, a history of traditional mountaineering told through the stories of its most celebrated heroes, often in their own words. Messner’s incisive essays reveal the mental and physical qualities needed to achieve what they did: qualities such as courage and passion, self-reliance in the face of danger, and the ability to focus on important things – and the refusal to use technically sophisticated gear.
In ZWISCHEN DURCHKOMMEN UND UMKOMMEN, Messner pays tribute to the human thirst for adventure and exploration, intimate encounters with nature, and climbing mountains without a safety net or ‘false bottoms’ – and calls on us to keep the legacy alive.

Reinhold Messner, born in 1944, is the most famous mountaineer and adventurer of our time. He was the first person to reach the top of all fourteen eight-thousanders, as well as the first to climb Everest solo and, together with Peter Habeler, the first to do so without supplemental oxygen. He has also crossed the Antarctic, Greenland and the Gobi desert on foot. He gives talks all over the world, is a documentary filmmaker, contributes to major international magazines, and has published countless books which have been translated into numerous languages. His most recent book was the 2019 « Nanga Parbat – Mein Schlüsselberg » (« Nanga Parbat – Paragon and Nemesis »), published by Ludwig.

I’LL TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS NOW de Stephanie Grisham

The explosive tell-all the Trumps don’t want you to read!

I’LL TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS NOW:
What I Saw at the Trump White House
by Stephanie Grisham
BenBella Books, April 2021
(via Javelin)

Stephanie Grisham rose from being a junior press wrangler on the Trump campaign in 2016 to assuming top positions in the administration as White House press secretary and communications director, while at the same time acting as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director and eventually chief of staff. Few members of the Trump inner circle served longer or were as close to the first family as Stephanie Grisham, and few have her unique insight into the turbulent four years of the administration, especially the personalities behind the headlines.
I’LL TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS NOW is a White House memoir like no other, written by someone no longer bound by the codes of spin, denial, and twisted loyalty that the Trump administration imposed on all its members. Here is a brutally honest, frequently funny, and always perceptive look behind the scenes of a White House that was in turmoil from day one.
After an early stint in the White House press office, Grisham moved to the East Wing to work for First Lady Melania Trump. This introduced Grisham to a whole new perspective on Trump World, and she soon became a devoted adviser to the first lady, privy to Melania Trump’s most candid thoughts on every imaginable topic and noteworthy events: Jared and Ivanka, Stormy Daniels, the first lady’s infamous jacket that read “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” and much more.
Grisham’s work for the first lady would lead to her appointment as the White House press secretary in 2019. As one of the few figures in the Trump White House to last all four years, Grisham shares her unfiltered view of the whole experience—from the early days when she was seduced by the glamour and power of Trump World to her quickly ascending career in a frequently toxic, dog-eat-dog workplace, to the pinnacles of her profession, where she soon faced the harshest lessons of flying too close to the sun.
Grisham’s memoir is also a personal reckoning from someone who was a true believer, tracing her dawning awareness of how the administration began to lose sight of its mission—serving the people—in its constant battles with the press and other politicians and, above all, in the unending internal drama that consumed a rowdy cast of advisers, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and the president and first lady themselves. It is a story that ends in tragedy with the events of January 6, 2021, the day on which Grisham was the first administration official to quit, a long-overdue severing of ties with the people who had brought her to the job of a lifetime but at enormous cost. It is an account in which Grisham spares no one, not even herself.
I’LL TAKE YOUR QUESTIONS NOW is not just about politics or the White House. It is about loyalty and family, learning and screwing up, proud moments and monumental regrets, narcissism and humility, love and heartbreak, friendships and loss, and, of course, falling down and trying your damnedest to get back up.

“Salacious and score-settling.” –The Guardian
“Part giddy travelogue, part belated apologia, part petty payback, all personal-therapy session.” –The New York Times

Stephanie Grisham started at the White House on January 20, 2017. She served as White House press secretary and communications director from 2019 to 2020. She also worked as communications director and chief of staff to First Lady Melania Trump. Born in Colorado, Grisham lives in Kansas and Washington, DC.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD d’Erik Hoel

In a sweeping intellectual narrative, award-winning neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel argues there are two fundamental perspectives on reality: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. The intrinsic perspective is that of consciousness and experience, the feelings and sensations that make up your waking world. The extrinsic perspective is that of science, which views the universe as a set of mechanisms and relations.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD:
Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science
by Erik Hoel
Avid Reader, Fall 2023
(via Writers House)

The two perspectives have had an uneasy, sometimes troubled relationship. Throughout history some cultures have emphasized one perspective more than the other, which has radically changed how humans think about and conceptualize our own selves. Technologies and media often implicitly enforce one perspective: for instance, television and movies take the extrinsic perspective, exploring the world of relations and images, while literature and novels take the intrinsic perspective, exploring the world of consciousness.
Hoel offers a whirlwind tour of the two perspectives across the ages, like how the intrinsic perspective is absent from Homeric epics and earlier eras, its historical development and ultimate culmination in the invention of the novel, the separation of the two perspectives by Galileo Galilei when he recommended science remove the observer to focus solely on the extrinsic, and the reintroduction of the intrinsic perspective to science by Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, who proposed a search for the neural correlates of consciousness that continues to this day.
Hoel shows how our picture of reality is incomplete following Galileo’s separation and emphasis on the extrinsic. The ignored intrinsic perspective sheds light on fundamental scientific questions like causation, emergence, how the brain functions, the biological purpose of dreaming, artificial intelligence, and even why humans create art. He reveals how our own culture is becoming more based in the extrinsic perspective over time, neglecting the intrinsic and forgetting the importance of human consciousness, all to its cultural, scientific, and artistic detriment.
Ultimately, the two perspectives have stood apart for too long and must be reunited. To this end Hoel proposes a way to merge the intrinsic and the extrinsic in a radical new theory of consciousness.

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. He is a research assistant professor at Tufts University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the NeuroTechnology Lab, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Hoel is a 2018 Forbes “30 under 30” for his neuroscientific research on consciousness. His first novel, The Revelations, was published in April 2021 by The Overlook Press. He lives in Massachusetts.