Books about Reappraisal from Amazon.com

From one of our greatest historians and public intellectuals, reflections on a twentieth century that is turning into ancient history, when it's not being displaced by myth or forgotten entirely, with unprecedented speed and at great cost

The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a comparably accelerated amnesia. The twentieth century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it. In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with the geographical shifts of emphasis and influence it brings in its wake, has altered the structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. Quite literally, we don't know where we came from.

The results have proved calamitous thus far, with the prospect of far worse. We have lost touch with a century of social thought and socially motivated social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting, and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects the key aspects of the world we have lost in order to remind us how important they still are to us now and to our hopes for the future.

Reappraisals draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of "evil" in the understanding of the European past to the rise and fall of the "state" in public affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage." With his trademark acuity and Žlan, Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it and reveals how many aspects of our history have been sacrificed in the triumph of mythmaking over understanding, collective identity over truth, and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we so vitally need..
Price: $1.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Renowned scholar Stephen Skowronek's insights have fundamentally altered our understanding of the American presidency. His seminal works have identified broad historical patterns in American politics and explained the dynamics at work behind them. His "political time" thesis has been particularly influential, revealing how presidents reckon with the work of their predecessors, situate their power within recent political events, and assert their authority to change things.In this new book, Skowronek revisits his political time thesis and focuses on how it helps us make sense of the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The essays - some of which predate his book "The Politics Presidents Make", some of which followed it, and one of which is wholly original to this volume - make his arguments about the politics of leadership generally accessible while also drawing them forward and highlighting new issues for our times.Skowronek explains the typical political problems that presidents confront in political time, as well as the likely effects of their working through them. This allows him to draw out parallels in the politics of leadership between Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and between James Polk and John Kennedy - and to develop a new and revealing perspective on the leadership of George W. Bush.All along the way, Skowronek considers contemporary innovations in the American political system that bear on the leadership patterns he draws from the more distant past. The impact of the 24-hour news cycle, of a more disciplined and homogeneous Republican party, of conservative advocacy of the "unitary theory" of the executive, and of progressive disillusionment with the presidency - all come under fresh scrutiny.A provocative review of presidential history, Skowronek's book brims with fresh insights and opens a window on the institution of the executive office and the workings of the American political system as a whole. Intellectually satisfying for scholars, it also provides an accessible volume for students and general readers interested in the American presidency..
Price: $27.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A radical reappraisal of homosexuality in Ancient Greece, the first full-scale book on the subject in English since 1978, by a young historian described as 'the best thing to happen to ancient history for decades' (Andrew Roberts, MAIL ON SUNDAY).
Price: $36.57 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This volume contains state-of-the-art essays, offering broad reflections on the Scientific Revolution, by a group of leading scholars actively engaged in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science. Although the volume's thirteen original essays displat a wide variety of methods and approaches, all share the aim of reexamining fundamental assumptions and questioning established interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. Some of the essays deal with questions of method, audience, and social context. Others examine the conceptions of science held by the major figures in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, reconsider the relationship of metaphysics to scientific inquiry, investigate the ideology of scientific openness and its origins, and revise traditional estimates of the place of science within the universities. Still others reconsider the map of scientific knowledge as viewed during these two centuries, and the relationship of occult traditions to other features of the Scientific Revolution..
Price: $44.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Civic Humanism has been one of the most influential concepts in the history of ideas ever since the pioneering work of Hans Baron and J. G. A. Pocock. This book reassesses Renaissance republican thinkers in relation to the medieval and early modern traditions of political thought and proposes new understandings of the evolution of important republican concepts. The distinguished team of American and European political theorists and historians together contribute a distinctive and significant addition to the study of republican political ideology..
Price: $32.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $27.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For this updated edition of her acclaimed work on historians and the writing of history, Gertrude Himmelfarb adds four insightful and provocative essays dealing with changes in the discipline over the past twenty years. In examining the effects of postmodernism, the illusions of cosmopolitanism, A. J. P. Taylor and revisionism, and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history," Himmelfarb enriches her illuminating exploration of the myriad ways--new and old--in which historians make sense of the past..
Price: $9.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]