The information compiled in the R.R. Hawkins Award-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson documents, in nearly 200 color maps, the paths of Europeans, Africans, merchants, slaves, and human life, showing how and when so many people went from port to port, hub to hub, as the many regions developed and evolved over the history of the slave trade.
In the search for truth, no fact is ever truly useless. Obtaining fact, not factoid, is crucial, because the public usually only hears one tiny facet of any major issue, Timothy Garton Ash argues in Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.
Joan of Arc and Odysseus have more in common than one might think. Not only that, but since the former conversed with saints and the latter with goddesses, today would today recommend them to a shrink. According to Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, both figures exist in literary works that capably demonstrate statecraft.
If a group of a scientist’s colleagues started an entire website to warn the world, especially the scientific community, about “the flaws in his work” before the scientist even published a book, you might be at least a little skeptical when his book was finally published. Howard Friel has finally done what should have been done a decade ago, as he points out, in the publishing house: fact-checking. In The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming, all Friel has to do is comb through the endnotes and compare them with their sources to find gaping holes more terrifying than a velociraptor.
The importance of translation in bringing new books and ideas into English is crucial. Although no one has declared a universal language since Louis XIV, the dominance of English in international commerce, media, and even academia is impossible to ignore. Yet merely an estimated three percent of the hundreds of
Ali Ahmad Said Esber is better known to the Arabic world as Adonis, though he is only beginning his entrance into the Anglo world. Syrian-born and currently living in Paris, Adonis is, and has been for decades, one of the most popular modern poets writing in Arabic. His twenty volumes
Without meaning to, Rika Lesser has assumed the title of sole English translator of Göran Sonnevi’s poetry. She was not even interested in the work until she heard the poems from his own mouth, noting, “[H]earing Sonnevi read aloud utterly changed my view of his work. I would not have
In his semi-autobiographical Cyclops, Croatian author Ranko Marinković relates the experiences of a young man in Zagreb who starves himself in order to avoid combat in World War II.
If you don’t speak French, you’re not going to read the real text, you’re going to have to settle for Anglicized idioms. (The author spoke Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, French, English, and Bulgarian, and then his confession he said he tried to learn Swahili, but who knows, really.) But even
The opening lines of Hédi Kaddour’s poem “New Wine” create the colorful, tangible atmosphere characteristic of his work. Employing surprising descriptions of his everyday world, the narrator of each poem in Kaddour’s collection Treason, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker, pulls the reader into an environment which is both entirely new and familiar.