Visar resultat för..."Red Memory"

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKAn indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao's decade of madness.'Very good and very instructive.' MARGARET ATWOOD'Written with an almost painful beauty.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND'Took my breath away.' BARBARA DEMICK'Haunting.' OLIVER BURKEMAN'A masterpiece.' JULIA LOVELLA 13-year-old Red Guard revels in the great adventure, and struggles with her doubts. A silenced composer, facing death, determines to capture the turmoil. An idealistic student becomes the 'corpse master' . . .More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.Red Memory explores the stories of those who are driven to confront the era, fearing or yearning its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2023SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2023A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKAn indelible exploration of the Cultural Revolution and how it shapes China today, Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao's decade of madness.'Very good and very instructive.' MARGARET ATWOOD'Written with an almost painful beauty.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND'Took my breath away.' BARBARA DEMICK'Haunting.' OLIVER BURKEMAN'A masterpiece.' JULIA LOVELLA 13-year-old Red Guard revels in the great adventure, and struggles with her doubts. A silenced composer, facing death, determines to capture the turmoil. An idealistic student becomes the 'corpse master' . . .More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.Red Memory explores the stories of those driven to confront the era, who fear or yearn for its return. What happens to a society when you can no longer trust those closest to you? What happens to the present when the past is buried, exploited or redrawn? And how do you live with yourself when the worst is over?

The extraordinary and riveting story of separated Chinese twins, with one twin seized by the authorities and adopted into America, by the Samuel Johnson-winning author of Nothing to Envy.In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned.Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn't know - and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing - was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin. Under China's one-child policy hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad.Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick's role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China's history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China's one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.

The extraordinary and riveting story of separated Chinese twins, with one twin seized by the authorities and adopted into America, by the Samuel Johnson-winning author of Nothing to Envy.In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned.Their understanding had been that China's brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn't know - and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing - was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin. Under China's one-child policy hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad.Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick's role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China's history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China's one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.

WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world's most repressive states - North Korea. 'A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea' Jung ChangNorth Korea is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; where Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; and where during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country. Includes an updated afterword by the author.'Impossible to put down... Helps restore humanity to some of the world's most oppressed people' Observer

Sexual assault, intimate partner violence, femicide, and violence against 2SLGBTQIA people: gender-based violence, or GBV, has many forms and many victims. The #MeToo movement highlighted the power of speaking up on a global scale, and From Red Dresses to Memory Stones is a necessary investigation of GBV activism in Canada.Nicolette Little interviews numerous activists and explores five anti-violence media projects in detail: the REDress Project and Disposable Red Woman installations, which draw attention to Canada's crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls; the digital memorialization of murdered Ontario women each anniversary of the "Montreal Massacre"; the documentary Slut or Nut, filmed during the lead-up to a rape trial; and the Memory Stones Project, in which beach stones are painted with anti-violence messages, then posted across social media. Little challenges assumptions about GBV and provides insights into citizens' creative, daring, collaborative, and memorializing ways of addressing it – and the discourses that normalize rape culture.Ultimately, this engaging work is about hope, demonstrating that anti-violence activism is a matter of will and can be done in ways that prioritize consent and protect activists' well-being.

This book investigates how films made about the URA since the 1990s have engaged with, reproduced and contested cultural memories of the organisation, discussing how directors have addressed questions of narrativization, trauma, intergenerational connection, and political subjectivity as they engage in the politics of cultural memory on screen.

Memory and Rain is first an evocation of place and mood, of how the exterior landscape affects and shapes the interior landscape. Then the collection goes deeper with an exploration of how the facets of memory—some crystalline and some surreal, some painful in retrospective clarity and some wryly humorous—coalesce into a life that gradually fades with memory’s loss. The collection is bookended by two extended sequences bridged by such pivotal poems as “Photographic Memory,” “The Missing Scene: He Speaks Again to the Ghost of his Father,” and the Pushcart-nominated “Three Fates.” The opening sequence, “Rain in L.A.,” features a speaker literally and figuratively forced inside by a seemingly unending series of storms. His life becomes a series of vignettes of self-examination interwoven with montages of noir films, a soundtrack of jazz and blues, and a running commentary on the quirks and natural splendors of Los Angeles observed with a poet’s eye. “In Memory of Her Memory,” the final crown of poems, deals with the author’s experience of watching his mother descend into the abyss of Alzheimer’s, dead to him even as she is alive. Reflective and ultimately redemptive, Memory and Rain challenges readers to ask themselves what in their lives is of substance and what is “just music in winter air—not even there. It’s not even there.”

Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, it makes a compelling contribution to our understanding of how social movements and activist experiences are publicly remembered and activated for social and environmental justice.

An urgent, indispensable guide to why Taiwan matters – for China, the West and everyone’s future'An erudite primer . . . Brown's mission to educate westerners about Taiwan and why it matters is a critical one, which makes this book well worth reading' SUNDAY TIMES • 'Anyone with a care to avoid a third world war – between China and the US – should read this book' JACK STRAW • ‘An authoritative primer to all things Taiwan’ BARBARA DEMICK When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities.Taiwan is now a flourishing democracy and an economic success story: just one of its companies produces over 90 per cent of the semiconductors that power the world’s economy. It is a free and vibrant society. For the United States and the West, the island is a bastion of freedom against China’s assertive presence in the region. And yet China, increasingly bellicose under Xi Jinping, insists Taiwan is part of its territory and must be returned to it. Should China blockade the island and mount an invasion, it would set off a chain reaction that would pitch it against the US – escalating a regional war into a global one. Taiwan is thus a geopolitical powder keg.The Taiwan Story helps us understand how and why we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history. With unparalleled access to Taiwan’s political leaders and a deep understanding of the island’s history and culture, Professor Kerry Brown provides a new reading of Taiwan, its twenty-three million people, and how they navigate being caught in this frightening geopolitical standoff. This is the essential book delving into Taiwan’s unique story, buried beneath the headlines, told in an accessible, expert and urgent way.'As Brown shows so compellingly, anyone who thinks the Taiwan problem can be easily solved probably hasn't thought about it for long enough' FINANCIAL TIMES‘Kerry Brown is one of our most perceptive and accurate foreign observers of China’ JOHN SIMPSON‘Written with great knowledge, passion and insight’ MARTIN JACQUES

*WINNER of the BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION****AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER**** A Pulitzer Prize Finalist * A National Book Award Finalist * A Writers' Trust Award Finalist *'No book feels timelier than John Vaillant's Fire Weather . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down' Cal Flyn, The Times'Superb and terrifying . . . it reads with pace and flair and a rich, furious clarity' Katherine Rundell, author of Super-InfiniteA gripping account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and fire's fierce energy.In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth'It reads like a thriller . . . I could not put it down' Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

*WINNER of the BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION****AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER**** A Pulitzer Prize Finalist * A National Book Award Finalist * A Writers' Trust Award Finalist *'No book feels timelier than John Vaillant's Fire Weather . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down' Cal Flyn, The Times'Superb and terrifying . . . it reads with pace and flair and a rich, furious clarity' Katherine Rundell, author of Super-InfiniteA gripping account of this century's most intense urban fire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and fire's fierce energy.In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture and civilization. Yet in our age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in ways never before witnessed by human beings. With masterly prose and cinematic style, Vaillant delves into the intertwined histories of the oil industry and climate science, the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern wildfires, and the lives forever changed by these disasters. Fire Weather is urgent reading for our new century of fire.'A towering achievement; an immense work of research, reflection and imagination' Robert Macfarlane'Astounding on every page. John Vaillant is one of the great poetic chroniclers of the natural world' David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth'It reads like a thriller . . . I could not put it down' Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE A Pulitzer Prize FinalistA National Book Award FinalistA Writers' Trust Award FinalistShortlisted for the Wainwright Conservation PrizeA Guardian Book of the YearA New York Times Book of the Year 'No book feels timelier . . . an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down' Cal Flyn, The Times'Superb and terrifying'Katherine Rundell, Guardian'It reads like a thriller . . . utterly compelling'Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature'Astounding on every page'David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth'A towering achievement . . . extraordinary'Robert Macfarlane, author of UnderlandIn May 2016, a Canadian oil town was overrun by wildfire, turning entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and driving 90,000 people from their homes.Through the gripping story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores our relationship with fire, an energy source that has been our partner in evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping our culture and civilization. Now, in our age of intensifying climate change, its destructive power has been unleashed in ways previously unimaginable.Fire Weather is an astounding account of this century's most intense urban fire, and an urgent examination of humanity's future in an ever-hotter, more flammable world.

An urgent, indispensable guide to why Taiwan matters – for China, the West and everyone’s future'An erudite primer . . . Brown's mission to educate westerners about Taiwan and why it matters is a critical one, which makes this book well worth reading' SUNDAY TIMES • 'Anyone with a care to avoid a third world war – between China and the US – should read this book' JACK STRAW • ‘An authoritative primer to all things Taiwan’ BARBARA DEMICK When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities.Taiwan is now a flourishing democracy and an economic success story: just one of its companies produces over 90 per cent of the semiconductors that power the world’s economy. It is a free and vibrant society. For the United States and the West, the island is a bastion of freedom against China’s assertive presence in the region. And yet China, increasingly bellicose under Xi Jinping, insists Taiwan is part of its territory and must be returned to it. Should China blockade the island and mount an invasion, it would set off a chain reaction that would pitch it against the US – escalating a regional war into a global one. Taiwan is thus a geopolitical powder keg.The Taiwan Story helps us understand how and why we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history. With unparalleled access to Taiwan’s political leaders and a deep understanding of the island’s history and culture, Professor Kerry Brown provides a new reading of Taiwan, its twenty-three million people, and how they navigate being caught in this frightening geopolitical standoff. This is the essential book delving into Taiwan’s unique story, buried beneath the headlines, told in an accessible, expert and urgent way.'As Brown shows so compellingly, anyone who thinks the Taiwan problem can be easily solved probably hasn't thought about it for long enough' FINANCIAL TIMES‘Kerry Brown is one of our most perceptive and accurate foreign observers of China’ JOHN SIMPSON‘Written with great knowledge, passion and insight’ MARTIN JACQUES

When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China's fast-growing southern cities.Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios. Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing.This memoir is a landmark text from China's migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world's second-biggest economy.