David Bromwich Livres

Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology.David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics , Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction.

When it first appeared in 1979, Richard Rorty argued that philosophers had developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. The book now stands as a classic of 20th-century philosophy.

"American Breakdown is the brilliant political diary of one of America's leading essayists, David Bromwich, whose work has drawn wide appreciation for its incisive portraits and accurate prognosis. From his analysis of the Cheney-Bush co-presidency, in which foreign policy was reduced to permanent war, and Barack Obama's practice of reconciliation without truth, Bromwich chronicles the emergence of Donald Trump--the demagogue of a culture of corruption from which all traces of political interest and candor have dropped away. An unsparing account of the degradation of American democracy, the book leads off with a new introduction on the prospects for change during the new Democratic Congress"-- Provided by publisher

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.” First published in the U.S. in the anthology collection 'The Two Magics' in 1898, Henry James's novella 'The Turn of the Screw' has been enthralling readers for over a century and shows no sign of losing popularity as new generations continue to discover this chilling masterpiece. The novella's anonymous narrator is a young woman, a parson's daughter, who is engaged as governess to two seemingly innocent children at a remote English country house. What initially seems a idyllic soon turns nightmarish, as she becomes convinced that the children are consorting with a pair of malevolent spirits. These are the ghosts of former employees at Bly: a valet and a previous governess. In life, scandalously, the two of them had been discharged as illicit lovers, and their spectral visitations with the children hint at Satanism and possible sexual abuse. The book amply fulfills its pledge, laid down in the first few pages, that nothing can touch it in terms of sheer “dreadful—dreadfulness.”