Search results

"This is a truly illuminating and necessary book. Jeffrey Isaac lucidly explores the moral and political dilemmas of this turbulent fin-de-siecle, East and West. His passionate approach is inspired by a genuine moral vision that sees liberal democracy as an unfinished, continuously beleaguered project. Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, I am sure, would have been in full agreement with his line of reasoning."-Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland, College Park "This will be the first of the many recent books on Hannah Arendt to move beyond exegesis to engage in the kind of thinking about politics that she so valued. The book brings an Arendtian voice back into contemporary politics."-Lisa Disch, author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy "Jeffrey Isaac's new book is essential reading for anyone who seeks to grapple seriously with the challenges confronting progressive democratic aspirations."-Ian Shapiro, Yale University "This book reveals Isaac to be a first-rate essayist, a bold critic who writes about key issues of politics and democracy with learning, style, and power."-Robert A. Dahl, Yale University "Persuaded by Jeffrey Isaac's argument about dark times, I nonetheless found these essays full of light-strong, lively, provocative, and even, despite themselves, encouraging. There can't be a renewal of democratic theory and practice without the kind of critique that Isaac provides."-Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study

"Mama's still alive today." With these words Kamel Daoud begins his brilliant short novel Meursault, contre-enquête, rendered in John Cullen's fine English translation as The Meursault Investigation. Daoud is an Algerian author writing in French, and his novel—announced in its title and very first line—is a creative reworking of Albert Camus's classic 1942 novella L'Étranger (The Stranger). In France the novel has received prestigious literary awards. In the United States it has been reviewed in a range of prominent outlets (including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Nation, and NPR). And in Algeria, its 2013 publication by Éditions Barzakh, a secular, liberal publishing house, thrust it into the middle of a complex cultural war in which critical intellectuals find themselves caught between authoritarian regime elites and Islamist militants.