Published in 1983, this hilarious novel follows the travels and travails of a feckless British professor of linguistics – who, despite his academic discipline, laughably speaks no languages other than English -- as he embarks on an unexpectedly instructive cultural exchange in a fictitious eastern European communist country.
Though set during the cold war, Rates of Exchange seems both timeless and timely in its humorous but barbed criticism of both naïveté and cynicism.
As a college professor, I particularly enjoyed the novel’s brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire of the pretentions of academia and the hypocrisies of communism.
Slaka! Land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor. Slaka! Land whose borders are sometimes here, often further north, and sometimes not at all!
Dr Petworth is on a cultural exchange to the small (and fictional) Eastern European country of Slaka. Pallid and middle-aged, Dr Petworth might appear stuffy, but during his short stay he manages to embroil himself in the thorny thickets of sexual intrigue and love, while still finding time to see the major sites.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983, Rates of Exchange took Bradbury's satirical gifts to a new level.
In this exquisite narrative -- part biography, part memoir, part gift of atonement – Sabar poignantly explores the love, tensions, and misunderstandings between a father and son born into utterly different worlds.
Sabar’s father spent his childhood in a mudbrick home in a small village in northern Iraq, a region inhabited by Jews for 3,000 years. When the Jewish population was forced out of Iraq in 1951, Sabar’s father, barely 13, immigrated to Israel, ultimately becoming a renowned scholar and professor of Aramaic in the U.S. – where his son experienced a middle-class suburban childhood and adolescence in 1970s Los Angeles.
As violence devastates the middle East today, Sabar’s riveting account of his father’s origins and extraordinary achievement also offers the vital reminder that for thousands of years Jews and Arabs lived peacefully and cooperatively side-by-side in that region to their mutual benefit.
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born. Yona's son Ariel grew up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor, dedicating his career to preserving his people's traditions. Ariel wanted nothing to do with…
In this very short, clear, accessible book, Hoffer explains the causes, attractions, and perils of fanatical mass movements. Hoffer identifies individual failure as a potential source of anger and frustration motivating frustrated individuals to band together against a perceived enemy. Reinforcing one another’s rage and grievance, fanatics find comfort in forming part of a like-minded group. They derive self-esteem from attributing their own personal failure to a common foe. And they deceive themselves into viewing violence as a noble and necessary choice.
Though writing more than three quarters of a century ago to explain the devastating rise of Bolshevism and Nazism in the early 20th century, Hoffer brilliantly exposes both the appeal and the dangers of extremist movements and mob violence today.
A must-read for anyone concerned about the trajectory of the US and the world in 2024.
“Its theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly.” —New Yorker
The famous bestseller with “concise insight into what drives the mind of the fanatic and the dynamics of a mass movement” (Wall Street Journal) by the legendary San Francisco longshoreman.
A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences.
As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, Ancient Greek myths provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold for centuries (8th-5th cents. BCE). Tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. They identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation.
Addressing non-specialist readers concerned about the world’s trajectory today, Embattled retells and reinterprets tales drawn directly from ancient Greek texts. These stories initiated a movement toward political and social equality that we in the 21st century have yet to accomplish. They empower us to resist tyrannical impulses in others and in ourselves.
