Ordinary Man Reserve Police Bat & Final Solution in Poland Penguin

Literatura faktu

This detailed and harrowing study of a single group of mostly middle-aged policemen from provincial Germany has achieved classic status among histories of the Holocaust. Far from being demonic and hate-filled sadists, most of the group had no history of anti-semitism or of far right politics. Browning explores the motivation of these men and the horribly familiar mechanisms of man-management and group solidarity that reduced a team of 'ordinary men' into a bestial instrument of madness. It is a book that offers no comfort to those who seek to explain the Holocaust in terms of German exceptionalism, but it is a significant contribution to the history of World War II.

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Second Chance Penguin

Powieści i opowiadania

Holly Macintosh is sitting round her kitchen table with her oldest friends

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Rotters' Club (audio book) Penguin

Powieści i opowiadania

Jonathan Coe's new novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin onto events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Penguin

Powieści i opowiadania

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned. This morning the lockworks rattle strange; it's not a regular visitor at the door. An Escort Man's voice calls down, edgy and impatient, 'Admission, come sign for him,' and the black boys go. Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns towards the day-room door. Most days I'd be out sweeping the hall and see who they're signing in, but this morning, like I explain to you, the Big Nurse put a thousand pounds down me and I can't budge out of the chair. Most days I'm the first one to see the Admission, watch him creep in the door and slide along the wall and stand scared till the black boys come sign for him and take him into the shower room, where they strip him and leave him shivering with the door open while they all three run grinning up and down the halls looking for the Vaseline. 'We need that Vaseline,' they'll tell the Big Nurse, 'for the thermometer.' She looks from one to the other: 'I'm sure you do,' and hands them a jar holds at least a gallon, 'but mind you boys don't group up in there.' Then I see two, maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission, running that thermometer around in the grease till it's coated the size of your finger, crooning,

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Shadow of the Sun Penguin

Literatura faktu

'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'. Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In a study that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained meditation on the mosaic of peoples and practises we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itself as it struggles to escape from foreign domination, from the intoxications of freedom, from war and from politics as theft. The Beginning: Collision, Ghana 1958 More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold, wind, darkness. But here, from the morning

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Third Reich in Power Penguin

Inne 1

The Third Reich in Power examines how it was possible for a group of ideological obsessives to remould a society famous for its sophistication and complexity into a one-party state directed at war and race hate.  Richard J. Evans shows how the Nazis won over the hearts and minds of German citizens, twisted science, religion and culture, and transformed the economy, education, law and order to achieve total dominance in German politics and society.  Drawing on an extraordinary range of research, blending narrative, description and analysis he creates a picture of a dictatorship consumed by visceral hatreds and ambitions, and driven by war. 'Authoritative history... impressive sweep... This essential book comes as a stark reminder, should we need one, of how much freedom a people is prepared to give away in a political climate dominated by fear.' Daily Telegraph Extract from The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939 by Richard J. Evans Despised minorities were, to be sure, put in the concentration camps; but to focus exclusively on this ignores the much larger number of political and other deviants condemned by the courts and put in state prisons and penitentiaries.  The further in time we get from Nazi Germany, the more difficult it becomes for historians living in democratic political systems and in cultures which respect the rights of the individual to make the leap of imagination necessary to understand people's behaviour in a state such as Nazi Germany, where imprisonment, torture or even death might await anyone who dared to voice the slightest criticism of the regime and its leaders.  Those who approved of such repression were in all likelihood a minority, active supporters and functionaries of the Party like the Block Wardens, and a good number of middle- and upper-class, conservative Germans who thought the best place for Marxists to be was in prison anyway.  Even they, however, knew well enough that they had to be careful about what they said and did, and the dangers of not doing so became abundantly clear once opposition began to spread among these groups too.  The shots that killed Kurt von Schleicher, Herbert von Bose, Edgar Jung, Gustav von Kahr, Erich Klausener and Kurt von Bredow at the beginning of July 1934 were also a warning to upper- and middle-class conservatives to keep their heads down if they did not want them to be blown off. Ordinary conservative citizens like Luise Solmitz, who harboured no thoughts of political activism, may have turned aside from the bleak fact of the regime's willingness to murder its opponents, revealed so starkly in late June and early July 1934, in their relief that the order they craved had been restored; to such people, Röhm's stormtroopers seemed as great a menace as the Reichsbanner or the Red Front-Fighters' League of the Weimar years.  Yet behind closed doors they cannot have been oblivious to the fate of the conservative clique around Vice-Chancellor von Papen.  It was not only the third or so of the population who had been committed to the Marxist left before 1933 that was subject to massive intimidation.  Indeed, scarcely had the murderous violence of the 'Night of the Long Knives' receded, than an even larger minority than the Marxists, that of the German Catholics, began to be prosecuted and imprisoned as they gave vent to their increasingly critical views of the regime in public.  More general still were measures such as the Law on Malicious Gossip, which clamped down on the most trivial expressions of dissent and put people who told jokes about Hitler and Göring in prison.  These were mainly members of the German working class, it is true, but the working class after all made up around half the entire population, and middle- and even upper-class offenders in this respect were brought before the Special Courts as well.  Successful prosecutions under this law were a further instrument of mass intimidation, adding to the general climate of fear and helping to create the spiral of silence in which the regime could commit ever greater crimes without fear of public censure or opposition. The truth is that far from Nazi terror being levelled exclusively against small and despised minorities, the threat of arrest, prosecution and incarceration in increasingly brutal and violent conditions loomed over everyone in the Third Reich, even, as we have seen in the cases brought before the Special Courts, over members of the Nazi Party itself.  The regime intimidated Germans into acquiescence, visiting a whole range of sanctions upon those who dared to oppose it, systematically disorienting people, and depriving them of their traditional social and cultural milieux, such as the pub or the club or the voluntary association, above all where these could be seen as a potential source of resistance, as in the case of the labour movement.  Fear and terror were integral parts of the Nazis' armoury of political weapons from the very beginning.  The state and the Party could use them because within a few months of Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor, they had systematically deprived all Germans of virtually every basic human and civil right they had enjoyed under the Weimar Republic.  The law was no protection against the state if the state or any of its agencies suspected that a citizen was disinclined to demonstrate approval of its policies and purposes.  On the contrary, vast numbers of new, often draconian laws were decreed that gave the police, the Gestapo and the SS a virtual carte blanche to deal with anyone suspected of deviating from the norms of human behaviour laid down by the Third Reich for its citizens.  In this situation, it was not surprising that ordinary people and lower-level officials of the Nazi Party began to reinforce the atmosphere of pervasive terror and intimidation by sending their own unsolicited denunciations of deviants to the Gestapo. At the same time, the Gestapo was only one part of a much wider net of surveillance, terror and persecution cast by the Nazi regime over German society in the 1930s; others included the SA and SS, the Criminal Police, the prison service, the social services and employment offices, the medical profession, health centres and hospitals, the Hitler Youth, the Block Wardens and even apparently politically neutral organizations like tax offices, the railway and the post office.  All of these furnished information about deviants and dissidents to the Gestapo, the courts and the prosecution service, forming a polymorphous, uncoordinated but pervasive system of control in which the Gestapo was merely one institution among many.  Everything that happened in the Third Reich took place in this pervasive atmosphere of fear and terror, which never slackened and indeed became far more intense towards the end.  'Do you know what fear is?' an elderly worker asked an interviewer some years after it was all over:  'No. The Third Reich was fear.'  Yet terrorism was only one of the Third Reich's techniques of rule.  For the Nazis did not just seek to batter the population into passive, sullen acquiescence.  They also wanted to rouse it into positive, enthusiastic endorsement of their ideals and their policies, to change people's minds and spirits and to create a new German culture that would reflect their values alone.  This meant propaganda, and here too, as we shall now see, they went to unprecedented lengths to achieve their aims.

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White Death Penguin

Kryminał, sensacja, thriller, horror

When a confrontation between a radical enivironmental group and a Danish cruiser off the Faroe Islands sinks a ship, trapping her crew beneath the waves, Kurt Austin of NUMA is immediately called to the rescue. Investigating the collision, Austin uncovers a trail of sabotage that leads to a sinister multinational corporation seeking control of the waves. When he is almost killed for his trouble, Austin knows that this is one organization that will let nothing stand in its way. But with an environmental disaster underway, the clock is ticking for Austin and the NUMA team ...Filled with heart-stopping adventure and endless imagination, White Death is an exceptional thriller from a writer at the height of his powers.

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Stupid White Men Penguin

Polityka

Michael Moore sizes up the new century - and that big, ugly special-interest group that's laying waste to the world as we know it: stupid white men. Whether he's calling for United Nations action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta, calling on African-Americans to place whites-only signs over the entrances of unfriendly businesses, or praying that Jesse Helms will get kissed by a man, Stupid White Men is Mike's Manifesto on Malfeasance and Mediocrity.

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Caravans Penguin

Powieści i opowiadania

A beautiful summer's evening in a Kent field and around their two caravans a group of strawberry pickers celebrates a birthday. But what lies behind the buy-one-get-one-free offers at your supermarket and who picks our strawberries? The Ukrainians: Irina, just off the coach from Kiev, and Andriy, the miner's son from the other Ukraine; the Poles: Tomasz and Yola; two Chinese girls; Emanuel, the round-eyed eighteen-year-old from Malawi. And although he can't pick strawberries, there's also the Dog . . . Hilarious, gritty, moving and slapstick, Two Caravans has all the ingredients that made A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian so successful.

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Bleak House Penguin

Inne 1

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Heart is a Lonley Hunter Penguin

Powieści i opowiadania

Set in the American South, this is the story of a group of people who appear to have little in common except they are all hopelessly lonely. A young girl, a drunken socialist and a black doctor are drawn to a gentle, sympathetic deaf mute, John Singer, whose presence changes their lives.

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Can-cans Cats and Cities of Ash Penguin

Inne 1

One of the great derisive monuments to the imbecilities of the tourist experience, Mark Twain's account of his tour with a group of fellow Americans around the sights of Europe is both hilarious and touching, Twain's exasperation and dismay at the phoney and exploitative being matched by his excitement and pleasure in the genuinely beautiful.

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Reflections in a Golden Eye Penguin

Powieści i opowiadania

In the American Deep South is a fort that contains a group of men and women trapped in a stifling and repetitive existence. The Major and his fragile wife dine and play cards with Captain Penderton and the flamboyant Mrs Penderton watched, at a distance, by Private Williams. Quiet and unfathomable, he is fascinated by the Captain

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Who Will Write Our History Penguin

Historia

In the Autumn of 1940 the Jews of Warsaw were forced into a crowded ghetto, enduring unimaginable conditions until most were killed. Yet, amid this, one man, Emanuel Ringelblum, started an extraordinary clandestine organization dedicated to recording life under Nazi occupation. His aim: to ensure that, if he died, his people's history would still be written. Codenamed Oyneg Shabes, this underground group painstakingly gathered together an archive of some 35,000 documents - letters, poems, photographs, personal testimonies, menus, sketches, songs and official papers - which was buried in tin boxes and milk bottles just before the ghetto was razed to the ground.This secret cache lay deep beneath the rubble for years, long after most of the Oyneg Shabes' members had perished, until one of the few survivors led the way to its secret location. Only now can the story of this incredible historical record, and the people behind it, be fully told. It is a testament to an extraordinary act of defiance in the face of tyranny, and to the triumph of history.

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Polar Shift Penguin

Kryminał, sensacja, thriller, horror

Polar Shift: it is the name for a phenomenon that may have occurred many times in the past. At its weakest, it disorients birds and animals and damages electrical equipment. At its worst, it causes massive eruptions, earthquakes and climatic changes. At its very worst, it would mean the obliteration of all living matter! Sixty years ago, an eccentric Hungarian genius discovered how to artificially trigger such a shift, but then his work disappeared, or so it was thought. Now, the charismatic leader of an anti-globalization group plans to use it to give the world's industrialized nations a small jolt, before reversing the shift back again. The only problem is, it can't be reversed. Once it starts, there is nothing anyone can do. Austin, Zavala and the rest of the NUMA Special Assignments Team have certainly faced dire situations before, but never have they encountered anything like this. This time even they may be too late.

Sklep: Albertus.pl