John Ralston Saul

With a new Introduction by the author, this “erudite and brilliantly readable book” ( The Observer , London) expertly dissects the political, economic, and social origins of Western civilization to reveal a culture cripplingly enslaved to crude notions of rationality and expertise.With a new introduction by the author, this “erudite and brilliantly readable book” (The Observer, London) astutely dissects the political, economic and social origins of Western civilization to reveal a culture cripplingly enslaved to crude notions of rationality and expertise.The Western world is full of paradoxes. We talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet we’ve never been under more pressure to conform. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about invasive government, yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are deteriorating.All these problems, John Ralston Saul argues, are largely the result of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the past 400 years, our “rational elites” have turned the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts—“Voltaire’s bastards”—whose cult of scientific management is empty of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertain­ment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose ordinary citizens are increasingly excluded from the decision-making process.In this wide-ranging anatomy of modern society and its origins—whose “pages explode with insight, style and intellectual rigor” (Camille Paglia, The Washington Post)—Saul presents a shattering critique of the political, economic and cultural estab­lishments of the West.

In this intellectual tour de force, Saul argues that the West now toils unconsciously in the grip of a stifling "corporatist" structure that serves the needs of business managers and technocrats as it promotes the segmentation of society into competing interest groups and ethnic blocks.

In this startlingly original vision of Canada, renowned thinker John Ralston Saul argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by Aboriginal ideas: Egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all Aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. An obstacle to our progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn't believe in Canada. It's critical we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink its future.

Grand economic theories rarely last more than a few decades and globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism, and its market idolatry, may have seen its best days. Perhaps it is already a spent force, argues John Ralston Saul - the prize-winning author of Voltaire's Bastards, and On Equilibrium, among others - in this groundbreaking new book. The Collapse of Globalism follows globalization from its promising beginnings in the 1970s through to the increasing deregulation in industry, and into the 1990s, when regional economic collapses and concern for the environment and for the rights of workers led to widespread protest and disillusionment. In the wake of globalism's collapse, nationalism of the best and worst sort, Saul demonstrates, shows signs of making a remarkable, unexpected recovery.

Aboriginal peoples of Canada have been making a remarkable comeback from a terrifyingly low point of population, legal respect, and stability. This is a comeback to a position of power, influence, and creativity in Canadian civilization.John Ralston Saul argues that historic moments are always uncomfortable. The events that began late in 2012 with the Idle No More movement were not just a rough patch in Aboriginal relations with the rest of Canada. What is happening today in Aboriginal-white relations is not about guilt, sympathy, or failure, or romanticizing a view of the past. It is about citizens’ rights. It is about rebuilding relationships that were central to the creation of Canada and, equally important, central to its continued existence. Canadians are faced with the potential for those relationships to open up a more creative and accurate way of imagining ourselves, a different narrative for Canada in which we all share obligations as a society.Wide in scope but piercing in detail, The Comeback presents a powerful portrait of modern Aboriginal life in Canada in contrast to the perceived failings, often portrayed in media, that Canadians have become accustomed to. Once again, Saul presents an unfamiliar story of Canada’s past so that we may better understand its present—and imagine a better future.

A long and distinguished tradition of writers have used the form of a satirical dictionary to undermine the received ideas of their day. Voltaire wrote a sharply humorous "Philosophical Dictionary," while Samuel Johnson's dictionary of the English language was derisive and opinionated. These early dictionaries and encyclopedias were really weapons in a struggle for the soul of civilization between forces of humanistic enlightenment and the forces of orthodoxy and dogmatism. Their authors attacked and exposed the half-truths of their day by showing that it was possible to think differently about the social and political arrangements that everyone took for granted.But as John Ralston Saul argues in this decidedly unorthodox book, modern dictionaries have once again been captured by the forces of orthodoxy—albeit this time a rationalist orthodoxy. Our language has become as predictable, fragmented, and rhetorical as it was in the 18th century, divided as it is by special interest groups into dialects of expertise that are hermetically sealed off and inaccessible to citizens. In The Doubter's Companion , a mar­velous subversive contribution to the great 18th century tradition of the humanist dictionary, Saul skewers and discredits the accepted content of common terms like Advertising, Academics, and Air Conditioning (defined as "an efficient means for spreading disease in enclosed public spaces"); Cannibal, Conservative, and Croissant; Dandruff, Death, and Dictionary ("opinions presented as truth in alphabetical order"); and several hundred others, including Biography ("a respectable form of pornography"), Museum ("safe storage for stolen objects"), and Manners ("people are always splendid when they're dead").There is much in this volume that will stimulate, offend, provoke, perplex, and entertain. But Saul deploys these tactics of guerilla lexicography to advance the more serious purpose of reclaiming public language from the stultifying dialects of modern expertise.

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Canada has no better interpreter than prolific writer and thinker John Ralston Saul. Here he argues that Canada did not begin in 1867; indeed, its foundation was laid by two visionary men, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin. The two leaders of Lower and Upper Canada, respectively, worked together after the 1841 Union to lead a reformist movement for responsible government run by elected citizens instead of a colonial governor. But it was during the "Great Ministry" of 1848—51 that the two politicians implemented laws that created a more equitable country. They revamped judicial institutions, created a public education system, made bilingualism official, designed a network of public roads, began a public postal system, and reformed municipal governance. Faced with opposition, and even violence, the two men— polar opposites in temperament—united behind a set of principles and programs that formed modern Canada. Writing with verve and deep conviction, Saul restores these two extraordinary Canadians to rightful prominence.

In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, Saul turns his eye from a reinterpretation of the Western world to an examination of Canada itself. Caught up in crises-political, economic, and social-Canada continues to flounder, unable to solve or even really identify its problems. Instead, we assert absolute differences between we are English or we are French; Natives or Europeans; early immigrants or newly arrived, from the east or from the west. Or we bow to ideologies and deny all differences in the name of nationalism, unity, or equality. In a startling exercise in reorientation, John Ralston Saul makes sense of Canadian myths-real, false, denied-and reconciles them with the reality of today's politics, culture, and economics.

With savage wit, John Ralston Saul creates a world where intrigue, prestige and debauchery span continents and social milieux In Dark Diversions acclaimed author John Ralston Saul stages a black comedy of international proportions that takes the reader from New York to Paris to Morocco to Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s. When he’s not encountering dictators in Third World hot spots, Saul’s narrator moves in privileged circles on both sides of the Atlantic, insinuating himself into the lives of well-to-do aristocrats. Through his exploits we experience a fascinating world of secret lovers, exiled princesses, death by veganism, and religious heresies. The emotional fireworks of these inhabitants of the First World are sharply juxtaposed with the political infighting of the dictators and the corruption, double-dealing, and fawning that attend them. But as he becomes further enmeshed in these worlds, his outsider status grows more Is he a documentarian of privileged foibles and fundamental inequity, or an embodiment of the very “dark diversions” he chronicles?

coleccion FABULA numero 238, primera edicion junio 1988, traduccion de Enric Tremps, 296 paginas, tapa blanda, en buen estado

On a May night in 1968, the plane carrying the French Chief of Staff General Ailleret explodes over the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, killing all aboard except for one. Four years later, writer Charles Stone is drawn irresistibly into the mystery that still surrounds the General's death.

Sent to Hanoi to secure a promise of permits for offshore oil exploration, Martin Laing finds himself trying to unload five billion dollars worth of blacklisted U.S. arms and ammunition abandoned after the Vietnam War

Book by Saul, John Ralston

On 20 March 2004, John Ralston Saul delivered the inaugural Joseph Howe lecture at King’s College School of Journalism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of Canada’s foremost thinkers on issues of media, politics and society, Saul spoke to the legacy of Joseph Howe, his famous defense in 1835, and of his contributions to a distinctly Canadian position on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. His speech recalls a time when political debate was prioritized in society and covered by the media, and when the democratic foundations of this country were first articulated and then pursued via social reforms. “We’re curious. And we’re actually not in a rush,” says Saul of our current situation. Why then, with the collective level of education and individual life expectancy steadily on the rise, have we not allocated more time to engaging in public debate of ideas and to covering these debates in the media? Why, when the creation of Canada as a country is still remembered as the result of all-night discussions and passionate engagement, have we not chosen to continue discussion simply as a means of maintaining an active, conscious citizenry? Saul applauds the examples of responsible, courageous investigative journalism in evidence today, and urges a wider move away from the results-focused, low-content buzz that comprises so much of mainstream media both in print and on television, and which stands in direct contradiction with participatory democracy and with freedom of the press. Cutting through murky constructs like intellectual-property rights and access to information, he identifies the journalistic challenge of locating shapes in the mass of information and beneath the misleading hype around secrets. In a style that is highly articulate, humorous and emphatic, John Ralston Saul provides a succinct, relevant look at Canadian history, our current whereabouts, and an ambitious rally for participatory democracy and intelligent media for the future.

301pages. in8. Broché.

Une analyse de la société contemporaine et de la responsabilité du citoyen, avec des références à l'histoire.

Canada has no greater interpreter and champion than John Ralston Saul, who for years has been challenging our common notions of Canada. These four books examine our history and myths, our relationships and modern reality, and together brilliantly portray a unique and remarkable country. Reflections of a Siamese TwinIn Reflections of a Siamese Twin , Saul turns his eye to an examination of Canada itself. Caught up in crises—political, economic, and social—Canada continues to flounder, unable to solve or even really identify its problems.Instead, we assert absolute differences between we are English or we are French; Natives or Europeans; early immigrants or newly arrived; from the east or from the west. Or we bow to ideologies and deny all differences in the name of nationalism, unity, or equality. In a startling exercise in reorientation, John Ralston Saul makes sense of Canadian myths—real, false, denied—and reconciles them with the reality of today’s politics, culture, and economics.A Fair CountryIn this startlingly original vision of Canada, John Ralston Saul argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by Aboriginal Egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all Aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. An obstacle to our progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn’t believe in Canada. It is critical that we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink its future. The ComebackHistoric moments are always uncomfortable, Saul writes in this impassioned argument, calling on all of us to embrace and support the comeback of Aboriginal peoples. This, he says, is the great issue of our time—the most important missing piece in the building of Canada. The events that began late in 2012 with the Idle No More movement were not just a rough patch in Aboriginal relations with the rest of Canada. What is happening between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals is not about guilt or sympathy or failure or romanticization of the past. It is about citizens’ rights. It is about rebuilding relationships that were central to the creation of Canada. These relationships are just as important to its continued existence. Wide in scope but piercing in detail, The Comeback presents a powerful portrait of modern Aboriginal life in Canada illustrated by a remarkable selection of letters, speeches, and writings by Aboriginal leaders and thinkers, showcasing the extraordinarily rich, moving, and stable indigenous point of view across the centuries. Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert BaldwinHere, Saul argues that modern Canada did not begin in 1867; rather its foundation was laid years earlier by two visionary men, Louis-Hipplyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin. Opposites in temperament and driven by intense experiences of love and tragedy, together they developed principles and programs that would help unite the country. After the 1841 union, the two leaders of Lower and Upper Canada worked to create a reformist movement for responsible government run by elected citizens instead of a colonial governor. During the “Great Ministry” of 1848 to 1851—despite violent opposition—they set about creating a more equitable nation. They revamped judicial institutions, established a public education system, made bilingualism official, and designed a network of public roads. Writing with verve and deep convictions, Saul restores these two extraordinary Canadians to rightful prominence.

Rayon : SF Editeur : Naturellement Date de parution : 1999 Description : In-8, 448 pages, broché, occasion, très bon état. Envois quotidiens du mardi au samedi. Les commandes sont adressées sous enveloppes bulles. Photos supplémentaires de l'ouvrage sur simple demande. Réponses aux questions dans les 12h00. Librairie Le Piano-Livre. Merci. Référence catalogue X6915. Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks

Barcelona. 21 cm. 253 p. Encuadernación en tapa dura de editorial con sobrecubierta ilustrada. Saul, John Ralston 1947-. Traducción, Antonio Álvarez de la Rosa .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario. 8474542049