Charlie Johnson in the Flames

Charlie Johnson in the Flames
Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 155584653X

In the noted journalist’s acclaimed thriller, a foreign correspondent is determined to avenge a friend’s the brutal murder in the Balkans. A New York Times Notable Book Charlie Johnson is an American journalist working somewhere in the Balkans. As a seasoned correspondent, he’s seen everything. But suddenly he finds himself caught up in the events he’s meant to be witnessing—when the woman sheltering Charlie and his crew is set on fire by a retreating Serbian colonel. As the woman stumbles, burning, down the road, Charlie dashes out of hiding to extinguish the flames. But he’s too late. And when she dies, something snaps inside Charlie. He now realizes he has just one ambition left in life: to find the colonel and kill him. In Charlie Johnson in the Flames, Michael Ignatieff tells a story of striking contemporary relevance that has drawn comparisons to the novels of Graham Greene and Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers.

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry
Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2011-12-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400842840

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state's monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being overambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to reestablish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens. Ignatieff begins by examining the politics of human rights, assessing when it is appropriate to use the fact of human rights abuse to justify intervention in other countries. He then explores the ideas that underpin human rights, warning that human rights must not become an idolatry. In the spirit of Isaiah Berlin, he argues that human rights can command universal assent only if they are designed to protect and enhance the capacity of individuals to lead the lives they wish. By embracing this approach and recognizing that state sovereignty is the best guarantee against chaos, Ignatieff concludes, Western nations will have a better chance of extending the real progress of the past fifty years. Throughout, Ignatieff balances idealism with a sure sense of practical reality earned from his years of travel in zones of war and political turmoil around the globe. Based on the Tanner Lectures that Ignatieff delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2000, the book includes two chapters by Ignatieff, an introduction by Amy Gutmann, comments by four leading scholars--K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher--and a response by Ignatieff.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire
Author: Will Hermes
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2012-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374533547

This title provides a group portrait of some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash and Bob Dylan.

Blood and Belonging

Blood and Belonging
Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 357
Release: 1995-09-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1466819022

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnics strife and civil war in distant countries. Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening of the Cold War's clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties--in places as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics--may be the definitive factor in international relation today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why--and whether--a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

The Burning Soul

The Burning Soul
Author: John Connolly
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439165289

Includes excerpt from The wrath of angels.

The Warrior's Honor

The Warrior's Honor
Author: Michael Ignatieff
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1998-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780805055191

Since the early 1990s, Michael Ignatieff has traveled the world's war zones, from Bosnia to the West Bank, from Afghanistan to central Africa. The Warrior's Honor is a report and a reflection on what he has seen in the places where ethnic war has become a way of life. Ignatieff charts the rise of the new moral interventionists--the relief workers, reporters, delegates, and diplomats who believe that other people's misery is of concern to us all. And he brings us face-to-face with the new ethnic warriors--the warlords, gunmen, and paramilitaries--who have escalated postmodern war to an unprecedented level of savagery. Hard-hitting and passionate, The Warrior's Honor is a profound and searching exploration of the perils and obligations of moral citizenship in a world scarred by war and genocide.

Double Vision

Double Vision
Author: Pat Barker
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2004-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429923202

Double Vision from Pat Barker, a gripping novel about the effects of violence on the journalists and artists who have dedicated themselves to representing it In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, reeling from the effects of reporting from New York City, two British journalists, a writer, Stephen Sharkey, and a photographer, Ben Frobisher, part ways. Stephen, facing the almost simultaneous discovery that his wife is having an affair, returns to England shattered; he divorces and quits his job. Ben returns to his vocation. He follows the war on terror to Afghanistan and is killed. Stephen retreats to a cottage in the country to write a book about violence, and what he sees as the reporting journalist's or photographer's complicity in it; it is a book that will build in large part on Ben's writing and photography. Ben's widow, Kate, a sculptor, lives nearby, and as she and Stephen learn about each other their world speedily shrinks, in pleasing but also disturbing ways; Stephen's maid, with whom he has begun an affair, was once lovers with Kate's new studio assistant, an odd local man named Peter. As these connections become clear, Peter's strange behavior around Stephen and Kate begins to take on threatening implications. The sinister events that take place in this small town, so far from the theaters of war Stephen has retreated from, will force him to act instinctively, violently, and to face his most painful revelations about himself.

A Culture of Rights

A Culture of Rights
Author: Benjamin Authers
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1442625791

In A Culture of Rights, Benjamin Authers reads novels by authors including Joy Kogawa, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Jeanette Armstrong alongside Canadian legal texts and constitutional rights cases.

Represented Reporters

Represented Reporters
Author: Barbara Korte
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2015-07-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839410622

War correspondents are prominent actors in the media world. They took hold in the cultural imaginary soon after their profession had been created in the mid-19th century. With a particular focus on Britain, this study investigates the representation of war correspondents from Victorian times to the present, in memoirs, novels and films. Such representations react to prevailing notions that exist about war reporters and participate in their further construction. With its cultural approach, this book complements studies of war correspondents in media and communication studies, history and ethnology.

Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff
Author: Derrick O'Keefe
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2014-04-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1781689512

One of the most influential intellectuals in the English-speaking world, Michael Ignatieff's story is generally understood to be that of an ambitious, accomplished progressive politician and writer, whose work and thought fit within an enlightened political tradition valuing human rights and diversity. Here, journalist Derrick O'Keefe argues otherwise. In this scrupulous assessment of Ignatieff's life and politics, he reveals that Ignatieff's human rights discourse has served to mask his identification with political and economic elites. Tracing the course of his career over the last thirty years, from his involvement with the battles between Thatcher and the coal miners in the 1980s to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel's 2009 invasion of Gaza, O'Keefe proposes that Ignatieff and his political tradition have in fact stood in opposition to the extension of democracy and the pursuit of economic equality. Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? is a timely assessment of the Ignatieff phenomenon, and of what it tells us about the politics of the English-speaking West today. About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.