This is the story of an American dynasty: the father, who built the fortune, the son who cleansed the name, the brothers who manipulated both the name and the fortune to their own ends, and the cousins who often wish they had inherited neither. Cast against the backdrop of America’s history is a spectacular array of characters: a bigamist, a robber baron, a philanthropist, a world-weary cynic, a drifting divorcee, polluters, environmentalists, art lovers and money manipulators.“[An...

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation.Each book is translated b...

The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys.An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyaltie...

While Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, the reproduction of inequality and the rise of the modern state is well known, his writings on the phenomena of internationalization and imperialism have received much less attention. Bourdieu’s analyses of the international circulation of ideas and the imperialisms of the universal – where two political powers, such as the United States and France, clash on matters of cultural legitimacy – generated multiple research programmes on topics rangi...

Has the revolution that led from the economy of the gift, characteristic of most precapitalist societies, to the economy of modern societies been accomplished in all spheres of life, as tacitly assumed by those who claim to apply the model of the profit-optimizing agent to every practice – to art, to education and even to marriage, seen as an exchange of economic services of production and reproduction? And is it totally accomplished even at the heart of the sphere most directly concerned ...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and eventually leads his fellow-miners in a strike protesting against pay-cuts - a strike which becomes a lo...

How does an ordinary person become a hero? It happens in a split second, a moment of focus and clarity, when a choice is made. Here are the gripping accounts of Medal of Honor recipients who demonstrated guts and selflessness on the battlefield and confronted life-threatening danger to make a difference. There are the stories of George Sakato and Vernon Baker—both of whom overcame racial discrimination to enlist in the army during World War II (Sakato was a second-generation Japanese Ameri...

This slim volume contains four little-known texts by Pierre Bourdieu on the question of reflexivity, which was a key theme in his work.For Bourdieu, reflexivity was not an exercise in introspection but rather a way of applying the tools of sociology to itself. The aim is to make explicit and control the effects of the presuppositions, standpoints and dispositions that the researcher brings to the conduct of social science research. Bourdieu advocates an attitude of epistemological ...

A key feature of those who work for the state, in the legal system and in public services is that they claim to be putting their own personal interests aside and working in a disinterested fashion, for the public good. But is disinterested behaviour possible? Can law be treated as a set of universal rules that are independent of particular interests, or is this mere ideology? Is the state bureaucracy a universal class, as Hegel thought, or a structure that serves the interests of the domin...

'What holds sway over this country without morals, beliefs, or feelings? Gold and pleasure.' Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them is the dominant theme in the three short works collected in this volume. In Sarrasine an impetuous young sculptor falls in love with a diva of the Roman stage, but rapture turns to rage when he discovers the reality behind the seductiveness of the singer's voice. The ageing artist in Th...

“What’s the point of being Irish anyway if you don’t think the world will break your heart?” asks Jack Kennedy. He is spellbound by a song about Ireland’s neverland of dreams: “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?”No one better knew the real JFK’s dreams and passions than Lem Billings, a prep-school roommate who made himself “sidekick everlasting.” The late Peter Collier had the great fortune to obtain oral histories from Billings himself, and they became the basis for a vivid biographi...

In The Fords: An American Epic, Peter Collier and David Horowitz tell the riveting story of three generations of Fords, a dramatic story of conflict between fathers and sons played out against the backdrop of America’s greatest industrial empire.The story begins with the first Henry Ford, the mechanical wizard, tinkerer and “mad genius” who drove the automobile into the heart of American life and conquered the world with it. An American Original, by the end of his life he ...