Kirjahaku

Ever since the Second World War and the Holocaust, historians, psychologists and theologians alike have attempted to explain how a single personality could bring about some of the greatest horrors of the modern era. Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler investigates the meanings and motivations people have attached to Hitler and his disturbing policies - and whether or not he believed his own doctrines - and explores the continuing fascination with the nature of evil. The book also documents the story of the earliest critic of Hitler, the Munich Post in the 1920s and 1930s, and its violent demise.First published in 1998, and using interviews of leading experts such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and Daniel Goldhagen, and discussing the work of many more, Exploring Hitler is a balanced overview of a dark subject.

In this startling book, now in paperback, the bestselling author of Explaining Hitler warns that a nuclear World War III is not only the most massive and imminent threat to existence as we know it, but also one of the most ignored. While Russian aggression grows and North Korean nuclear ambitions increase unabated, tensions continue to escalate between India and Pakistan and in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran remains committed to developing its nuclear program despite international sanctions. No other writer has assembled the extraordinary array of sources and experiences that Ron Rosenbaum calls on to inform his examination of nuclear war. While working from both historical and contemporary perspectives to explore the people and events that could shape the form of a third world war, he suggests humans have never before been so close to annihilation. In this book, Rosenbaum examines both the paranoia and very real set of possibilities that informs our view of nuclear war and asks whether we can "undream" the nightmare.

"Rosenbaum offers a spirited and enjoyable defense of his version of love." --The Wall Street Journal A stirring manifesto on love in the modern age, now available for the first time in paperback: . . . In a work of ambition and brio, legendary journalist Ron Rosenbaum tackles his hardest topic yet: everyone's favorite four-letter word. He begins by investigating the neuroscience of love, arguing that our understanding of love is imperiled by quantification and algorithms, which distill our behavior into mathematical formulas, our personality into brain-chemical categories, and our curiosity into quiz questions. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum posits, is being taken over by numbers. To save it, he turns to literature and pop culture, discussing writing about love from a vast range of sources, including Tolstoy novellas, trailblazing Updike manuscripts, David Foster Wallace and Chrissie Hynde. Part of love's essence is its mystery, says Rosenbaum, and when he eventually finds his own answer to the riddle of love -- a happy ending -- it turns up in a completely unexpected place. In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the uncanny and the persistent, the sublime and the ridiculous: the inexorable power of love.

In the wake of the recent hit biopic, a probing appreciation asks: Do the lyrics of Bob Dylan tell the true story of the ever-changing, ever-radical life and career of the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter? In a dingy windowless bungalow on the Warner Brothers back lot in Hollywood in 1977, in the midst of what may have been the longest interview he ever gave (it stretched over ten days), a chain-smoking Bob Dylan confessed to journalist Ron Rosenbaum that he was troubled by something missing from his music. Dylan -- who was editing a dramatic movie based on his life, even as his life seemed to be falling apart -- told Rosenbaum there was a sound he was after that he'd only come close to on one record so far. The sound, he told Rosenbaum, was of "thin, wild mercury." This is a book that captures the elusive mercurial artist and his work in a way no other has -- a vivid, compelling pursuit of Dylan, successively a hipster folkie, a Greenwich Village sparkplug of a cultural revolution, who plugged into an amplifier to drive away folkie solemnity, then became a countrified crooner, the man who, just months after Rosenbaum's interview, became a fire-breathing, proselytizing Christian . . . before returning to being a non-religious Jew. What was behind it all, Rosenbaum asks, and how can we understand him through his lyrics? Tracing it from Dylan's childhood -- when his father hired a Brooklyn rabbi to come to remote Minnesota to prepare his son for his bar mitzvah -- through the still touring singer's late, often inscrutable lyrics, Rosenbaum probes Dylan's "argument with God," his differentiation between authenticity and sincerity, and his relentless heretical stances. Of course, complicating matters for anyone trying to trace the development of Dylan and his life's work is Dylan's recurrent denial of the continuity of self. (Whenever asked why he doesn't sing the old songs the same way as on the record, Dylan typically responds with an irritated, "That's not me.") Ron Rosenbaum has covered Dylan for almost the entirety of his -- and Dylan's -- career, first as a Village Voice culture reporter in the late 1960s. In this deeply personal and literary appreciation, and as Dylan continues to tour and compose new songs, still refusing to play old songs the old way, Rosenbaum offers a moving and involving portrait of an icon who may have been more constant than it appeared after all.