"Taubman: Gorbachev" ist eine umfassende Biografie über Mikhail Gorbachev, den letzten Führer der Sowjetunion. Geschrieben von William Taubman, beleuchtet das Buch Gorbachevs Aufstieg von einem einfachen Bauernjungen zu einer der einflussreichsten Figuren des 20. Jahrhunderts. Es analysiert seine liberalen Reformen, die als Perestroika und Glasnost bekannt sind, und deren tiefgreifende Auswirkungen auf das sowjetische System und die Weltpolitik. Taubman beschreibt, wie Gorbachev es schaffte, den Kalten Krieg zu beenden und gleichzeitig mit den Herausforderungen umzugehen, die seine Reformen mit sich brachten. Die Biografie bietet einen tiefen Einblick in Gorbachevs komplexe Persönlichkeit und die Widersprüche, die ihn umgaben. Sie stellt die Frage, ob er ein grosser Führer war oder ob seine Schwächen und die unnachgiebigen Kräfte, mit denen er konfrontiert war, zu seinem Fall führten. Diese detaillierte Analyse ist sowohl für Geschichtsinteressierte als auch für Leser, die sich mit politischen Führungsstilen auseinandersetzen möchten, von Bedeutung.

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Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ryunosuke Akutagawa created disturbing stories out of Japan's cultural upheaval. Whether his fictions are set centuries past or close to the present, Akutagawa was a modernist, writing in polished, superbly nuanced prose subtly exposing human needs and flaws. "In a Grove," which was the basis for Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon, tells the chilling story of the killing of a samurai through the testimony of witnesses, including the spirit of the murdered man. The fable-like "Yam Gruel" is an account of desire and humiliation, but one in which the reader's sympathy is thoroughly unsettled. And in "The Martyr," a beloved orphan raised by Jesuit priests is exiled when he refuses to admit that he made a local girl pregnant. He regains their love and respect only at the price of his life. All six tales in the collection show Akutagawa as a master storyteller and an exciting voice of modern Japanese literature.

Since its return to the London stage in 1740, As You Like It has delighted theatergoers, readers, and critics. Its heroine, Rosalind, is one of Shakespeare's greatest characters. The play's Forest of Arden setting and its focus on the relationship between natural occurrences and things created by humans (Shakespeare collectively termed these "art") provide us with access to debates in Renaissance England that relate to the ecological issues of our own time. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1623 First Folio text. It is accompanied by a note on the text, eight illustrations, six photographs, and explanatory annotations. "Sources and Contexts" includes, in its entirety, Shakespeare's primary source for the play-Thomas Lodge's popular prose romance Rosalynde (1590). Reading Shakespeare's play with (and against) Lodge's romance reveals striking similarities and fascinating differences, both large and small. An array of other readings focuses on the central areas of gender and ecology and includes works by Michel de Montaigne, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Bastard, George Gascoygne, and William Prynne. A rich "Criticism" section includes twenty-one commentaries on As You Like It spanning four centuries. Contributors include, among others, Mrs. Anna Jameson, Clara Claiborne Park, Jean E. Howard, Marjorie Garber, James Shapiro, Valerie Traub, Jeffrey Masten, and Robert Smallwood. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Originally published under the title Der Gimmick: Gesprochenes Deutsch in Great Britain in 1977 and adopted from the French edition (Flammarion, 1975). What is the Gimmick? Adrienne begins by explaining what the Gimmick is not. It is not a serious scholarly book. It is the answer to your problems in speaking and understanding German-a method of acquiring an international vocabulary. There is a basic vocabulary of words and expressions which is the same in any language. The Gimmicks are expressly designed to supply the essentials, and an internationally valid method of learning them-hence, their great success in every country in which they have appeared.

For thirty years Anne Enright-one of our greatest living novelists (Times)-has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright's career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: She interprets Sophocles' Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland's successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights, and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner, and Angela Carter. This stunning collection unites Enright's cultural criticism, literary, and autobiographical writing for the first time. True to the themes that saturate her award-winning fiction, Attention explores the intersection between the personal and political, the subtleties of bodily autonomy, complex family dynamics, and the challenges of intimacy in crystalline, urgent prose. Here we see Enright grappling with and answering these questions in nonfiction. It is a defining collection from one of our most distinguished literary voices.

In recent years, Google's autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM's Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies-with hardware, software, and networks at their core-will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human. In The Second Machine Age MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee-two thinkers at the forefront of their field-reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds-from lawyers to truck drivers-will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar. Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape. A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.

This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, The Setting Sun probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of Osamu Dazai's novel has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.

Robbie is a 9-year old boy with Asperger's-like traits, a precocious intelligence, a prodigious memory and exquisitely tuned to loss. A gifted young artist, he aims to draw all of the animals in danger of extinction. His father, Theo, is an astrobiologist, consumed with finding signs of life in the cosmos and raising Robbie alone after the tragic death of his wife, Aly. As Robbie's behaviour grows more unmanageable, Theo seeks out an experimental treatment conducted by Dr Martin Currier involving neurofeedback that enables Robbie to pattern his emotional responses on the recorded brainwave activity of his late mother. But as government funding is pulled from the study, Robbie suffers a precipitous decline with heart-breaking consequences. With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, tantalising vision of life beyond it and the ferocious love of a father for his young son, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers' most emotionally powerful novel to date. At its heart is the question: What is the world, at once perilous and imperilled, we've left for our children to inhabit, and can Theo save Robbie from it?

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us-and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole-and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called "artificial intelligence." They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian's riveting account, we meet the alignment problem's "first-responders," and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they-and we-succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity's biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture-and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

This epic work-named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times-tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826.

Feuer im Maschinenraum der Macht Wir betreten die Flure der US-Ministerien nach der Wahl Donald Trumps zum Präsidenten der USA. Es ist ungewöhnlich still. Trumps Mannschaft, ohnehin spärlich vertreten, hat offenbar wenig Plan, was zu tun ist. Es herrscht vorsätzliche Unwissenheit, denn wer die Konsequenzen seines Handelns nicht kennt, dem fällt es leicht, den "Klimawandel" bedenkenlos zum Unwort deklarieren oder etablierte Forschungsprogramme vom Tisch zu fegen. Alarmstufe Trump! Michael Lewis führt uns in den Maschinenraum der Macht. Er zeigt: Für den kurzfristigen Erfolg wird kollektives Wissen zerstört und jahrzehntelange Regierungserfahrung bewusst ignoriert. Für sein Buch hat er auch mit denen gesprochen, deren Kenntnis und Leidenschaft die Maschinen am Laufen halten. Ihr Signal muss gehört werden, denn es betrifft nicht nur Amerika, sondern die ganze Welt! - Michael Lewis enthüllt Trumps explosiven Cocktail aus vorsätzlicher Ignoranz und Käuflichkeit, der die Zerstörung eines Landes anheizt. - "the fifth risk" jetzt in deutscher Übersetzung

This liberating book shows us that examining our attitudes toward money-earning it, spending it, and giving it away-offers surprising insight into our lives. Through personal stories and practical advice, Lynne Twist asks us to discover our relationship with money, understand how we use it, and by assessing our core human values, align our relationship with it to our desired goals. In doing so, we can transform our lives. The Soul of Money now includes a foreword from Jack Canfield and a new introduction by Lynne Twist, in which she explores the effects of the Great Recession and environmental concerns about our monetary needs and aims.

Muscle tissue powers every heartbeat, blink, jog, jump and goosebump. It is the force behind the most critical bodily functions, including digestion and childbirth, as well as extreme feats of athleticism. We can mould our muscles with exercise and observe the results. In this lively, lucid book, orthopedic surgeon Roy A. Meals takes us on a wide-ranging journey through anatomy, biology, history and health to unlock the mysteries of our muscles. He breaks down the three different types of muscle-smooth, skeletal and cardiac-and explores major advancements in medicine and fitness, including cutting-edge gene-editing research and the science behind popular muscle conditioning strategies. Along the way, he offers insight into the changing aesthetic and cultural conception of muscle, from Michelangelo's David to present-day bodybuilders, and shares fascinating examples of strange muscular maladies and their treatment. Brimming with fun facts and infectious enthusiasm, Muscle sheds light on the astonishing, essential tissue that moves us through life.

Ponyboy unravels in his Paris apartment. Cut to the bar. Cut to the back room. Ponyboy is strung out and struggling. He is falling into the widening chasm between who he is-trans, electrically so-and the blank canvas his girlfriend, Baby, wants him to be. Cut to Berlin. Ponyboy sinks deeper into drugs and falls for Gabriel, all the while pursued by a photographer hungry for the next hot thing. As his relationships crumble, he overdoses. Cut to open sky. In a rehab back home in Iowa, Ponyboy is his mother's son. In precise, atmospheric prose, Eliot Duncan's debut novel lays bare the innate splendor, joy, and ache of becoming one's self.

The Sumerians (Norton Library (Paperback))

Praise for the #1 New York Times best-selling Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: "This book will keep you fascinated with succinct and dynamic explanations of a wide variety of astronomical topics. A winner that every astronomy enthusiast should have on the bookshelf!" - David J. Eicher, Astronomy "Grappling with the scope of the universe...is no simple endeavor, but in this tidy overview, [Tyson] succeeds with seeming effortlessness." - John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle "Tyson's insights are valuable for any leader, teacher, scientist or educator." - Carmine Gallo, Forbes "A great gift for the scientifically inclined (but busy)." - Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune "Lovely book. Last chapter worthy of Carl Sagan himself." - Richard Dawkins

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2026 SHORTLISTED FOR THE NBCC GREGG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION PRIZE In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man who gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or death. They are all in danger of the stake. The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe. Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn also weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.

The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd's son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner's story was lost to time-until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly thirty centuries later. As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn't frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition, and grief. Son of Nobody takes readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, from the classical to the contemporary, from ancient verses to modern footnotes. It is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history, and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live-then, now, always.