![]() ![]() But it's true that in those years and in those places, the unimaginable total of 14 million innocent human beings, most of them women and children, were shot, gassed or intentionally starved to death. ![]() Snyder's "Bloodlands" label is jarring, a title those beautiful lands and those who now live there do not deserve. The zone is the territory that lies between central Poland and, roughly, the Russian border, covering eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics. The time is between about 1930 – the start of the second Ukraine famine – and 1945. His subject is the deliberate mass murder of civilians – Jewish and non-Jewish – in a particular zone of Europe in a particular time-frame. ![]() He is not writing about the fate of soldiers or bombing victims in the second world war, and neither is he confining himself to the Jewish Holocaust. (Since the fall of communism, archives have continued to open and witnesses – Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian especially – have continued to break silence.) But Snyder's second job was to limit his own scope, by subject and by place. The first was to bring together the enormous mass of fresh research – some of it his own – into Soviet and Nazi killing, and produce something like a final and definitive account. In this book, he seems to have set himself three labours. ![]()
0 Comments
![]() ![]() Considered radical in its day for its true-to-life effects, Chekhovian drama continues to engage contemporary theatre publics due to the freshness of its approach to writing the human condition and to staging the problem of representation itself. Indeed, more than realism or formalism, Chekhov's mosaic approach, an experiment in representation, ushers in stylistic techniques that enable the technical innovation of artists to follow and project well beyond his own moment. (1) Borrowing terms from painting and music, critics have called this play both impressionistic and symphonic, descriptors that point to how Chekhov's writing works in a new way or changes the structures of dramatic storytelling. In an impressionistic polyphony of voices, one hears soundings of desire, outrage, and self-revelation above a basso continuo of longing, loss, and regret. Characters, like well-tuned instruments, echo, harmonize, and clash as they seek meaning in each other's words and gestures. In Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (1900), the domestic scene may appear estranged, both static and understated, but it becomes increasingly familiar the longer one looks. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This term was popularized in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist who shared the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the depleting effects of certain compounds on atmospheric ozone. Kolbert’s book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” is a bridging of the past and present, of scientific history and current research that sheds light on the devastating effects of human activity and the impacts of climate change on global biodiversity, which a number of recent studies have shown.Ĭentral to the book is the notion that industrialization and globalization have ushered in a new epoch, referred to by many as the Anthropocene. Elizabeth Kolbert places this sixth extinction in the context of life’s history, as we know it, which demonstrates the fact that “life is extremely resilient but not infinitely so.” Scientists today conclude that we have entered a sixth mass extinction period, with humans as the driving factor. ![]() The most recent and most familiar of these events occurred 66 million years ago, spelling the demise of the dinosaurs, among others. Over the past 500 million years, dramatic and catastrophic worldwide changes have completely reshaped the order of life.įive major episodes of mass extinction are known to have taken place. Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” is a book about the science and history of extinction and humanity’s role in a rapidly changing world. ![]() |