Synopses & Reviews
The route to any coherent understanding of our time runs through the issues addressed in this collection of essays: the political meaning of Islam, the relation of the West to the Islamic world, the new form of imperialism signaled by the Soviet and U.S. occupations of Afghanistan, the intractable conflict over Palestine. In confronting these inescapable issues, global power is being reshaped and the ends for which it will be used are being decided.
This volume brings together Gilbert Achcar's major writings on these issues over the past decades. The essays collected in Eastern Cauldron describe and explain the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, the fate of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, and above all the Palestinian conflictin which the regional stakes are so dramatically embodied and contested. Achcar analyzes the social bases, strategies and tactics of PLO, Hezbollah, Israel and the United States from the establishment of the state of Israel to the second Intifada. He pinpoints the contradictions of the Israeli stateseeking at the same time to be Jewish and yet democraticand the impact of these contradictions on all parties to the conflict.
Eastern Cauldron is primarily aimed at producing a better understanding of the conflicts of the region. Achcar's work is informed by strong moral and political commitments but is never limited to polemic. His work demonstrates the immense capacities of Marxism to illuminate economic, political, and ideological developments without losing sight of their concrete singularity and their complex interconnection. His analyses are supple and inventive, and consistently informed by reflection on rival traditions of political thought and a deep knowledge of the region.
Synopsis
Throughout his life, Walt Whitman continually revised and re-released
Leaves of Grass. He added and deleted words, emended lines, divided poems, dropped and created titles, and shifted the order of poems.
Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems includes all the variants that Whitman ever published, from the collection's first appearance in 1855 through the posthumous "Old Age Echoes" annex printed in 1897. Each edition was unique, with its own character and emphasis, and the
Textual Variorum enables scholars to follow the development of both the individual poems and the work as a whole.
Volume I contains introductory material, including a chronology of the poems and a summary of all the editions and annexes, along with the poems from 1855 and 1856. Volume II includes the poems from 1860 through 1867, including the first appearance of "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! my Captain!" Volume III features the poems 1870-1891, plus the "Old Ages Annex" and an index to the three-volume set.
About the Author
Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon and now teaches politics and international relations at the University of ParisVIII. He is a frequent contributor to
Le Monde Diplomatique and the author of
The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (Monthly Review Press, 2002).
Harold W. Blodgett was Professor of English at Union College.
Arthur Golden was Professor of English at City College at the City Univers
William White was Professor and Director of the Journalism Program at Oakland University.