Новинки Нила Ашерсон

Прекрасно написанное исследование национальности, колониализма, кочевничества и оседлости, которое отсылает нас к истокам цивилизации и прослеживает судьбу купцов Эгейского и Средиземного моря, проскальзывавших через Босфор и торговавших со степными племенами, населявшими бескрайние земли за Черным морем.
Книга британского журналиста, специалиста по Восточной Европе и России Нила Ашерсона о Черном море, впервые изданная в 1995 году, посвящена одному из тех мест Земли, которые справедливо именуются "колыбелью цивилизации". Предметом внимания автора стала богатейшая культурная и политическая история черноморского ареала от древности до наших дней, включая события времен распада СССР.
История Черного моря не закончена, и книга Ашерсона увлекательно описывает ее самые неожиданные и драматические повороты.

"В книге я провожу мысль о том, что Черное море — его народы и прибрежные регионы, его рыба, его воды и его безмерно глубокая история — это единый культурный ландшафт". Ашерсон планомерно и педантично показывает все аспекты формирования этого "культурного ландшафта". От плавания Ясона за золотым руном до самых последних политических, экономических и экологических…

The rediscovery of Scotland's past and a wake-up call about its future, from a leading scholar-journalist

Scotland has a new Parliament and it has North Sea oil, but is it yet an independent, self-sustaining democracy? Is it a true nation? In Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson launches what he calls an imaginative invasion of his native land, searching for the relationships, themes, and fantasies that make up "Scotland."

Beginning with a breathtaking portrait of the country's landscape, and of the way humanity has indelibly marked even its rockiest contours, Ascherson takes us on a journey through Scotland's past, interweaving his historical accounts with a rollicking report on a back-country bus expedition he joined during the 1997 referendum campaign that led to Scotland's first modern Parliament. He asked voters then what kind of country they hoped for, what they feared, and what they expected—questions that animate his book as well.

In his search for a nation, Acherson explores many themes: the slow, hybrid formation of the Scottish people over centuries of successive immigrations; the way their most renowned intellectuals and writers came to hate the national church; the peculiar nature of their diaspora; the coexistence of their search for an "authentic" Scotland with the myths others create; and the Scots' proud sense of true independence. Stone Voices enlightens us about Scotland, about Europe, and about the conditions for freedom that we must all seek today.

With its vast historical canvas, this work is a meditation on Eurasian history from the earliest times to the present. Ascherson evokes the world of Herodotus and Aeshylus; Ovid's place of exile on what is now the coast of Romania; the decline and fall of Byzantium; the mysterious fastnesses of the Christian Goths; the Tatar Khanates; the growth of Russian power across the grasslands, and the centuries of war between the Ottoman and Russian Empires around the Black Sea. The book covers events in the 20th century, such as the terrors of Stalinism and its fascist arch-enemy, striving for mastery of these shores.