Kirjahaku

At times of global crisis, Jonathan Schell's writings have always presented nuanced and influential alternatives to conventional thinking. The moral clarity of his reportage first entered the public consciousness with his dispatches for The New Yorker on Vietnam. These seminal articles became The Village of Ben Suc (1967), a searing account that predicted the failure of Pentagon politics. Over the subsequent decades, Schell's varied and consistently prescient articles have articulated the now commonly held notion that image has replaced substance in politics provided (in Fate of the Earth) an apocalyptic vision of nuclear war that revitalized the disarmament movement and more recently, charted the rise of "the other superpower",the international peace movement that transcends country, class, and religion. As America finds itself at a crucial juncture both domestically and internationally, The Jonathan Schell Reader is vital reading for those who wish to better understand the history they have come from and the direction they should be heading toward. This book provides a landmark collection that spans the career of one of the leading thinkers and authors of our time.

"This book mounts perhaps the most impressive argument ever made that there exists a viable and desirable alternative to the continued reliance on war." -The New York Times At times of global crisis, Jonathan Schell's writings have offered important alternatives to conventional thinking. Now, as conflict escalates around the world, Schell gives us an impassioned, provocative book that points the way out of the unparalleled devastation of the twentieth century toward another, more peaceful path. Tracing the expansion of violence to its culmination in nuclear stalemate, Schell uncovers a simultaneous but little-noted history of nonviolent action at every level of political life. His investigation ranges from the revolutions of America, France, and Russia, to the people's wars of China and Vietnam, to the great nonviolent events of modern times-including Gandhi's independence movement in India and the explosion of civic activity that brought about the surprising collapse of the Soviet Union. Suggesting foundations of an entirely new kind on which to construct an enduring peace, The Unconquerable World is a bold book of sweeping significance.

In this work, Jonathan Schell, the author of The Fate of the Earth, proposes that the defining characteristic of the twentieth century was the uncontrolled acceleration of humankind's capacity for self-destruction, manifested in 'policies of extermination', which culminated in the construction of the species-threatening nuclear arsenals of the Cold War."Schell examines the legacy this leaves for the new millennium: the more than 30,000 nuclear weapons that remain in existence, the crisis of nuclear arms control that has arisen with the unraveling of the ABM treaty, the stalemate of the START talks, the attractive illusion of missile defense, the arrival of nuclear weapons in South-Asia, and the threat of their spread to East Asia and the Middle East. Schell suggests that the world now faces a difficult but inescapable choice between the abolition of all nuclear weapons and their rapid proliferation as nuclear technology and materials seep around the world.