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Princeton University Press

ESSAY

Africa and «the brutish museums»

Amin Maalouf, Block Museum of Art, Dan Hicks, Alice Procter: Leo Afrikaneren, Caravans of Gold – Fragments in Time – Art Culture and Exchanges Across Medieval Saharan Africa, The Brutish Museums, The Whole Picture

Cultural history: It is necessary to relinquish ownership of the colonial loot. The treasures of European museums have been stolen. And what about the Cultural History Museum in Oslo – which is also on the list of museums that have Benin's stolen bronze sculptures?
Dag Herbjørnsrud -
literature

At the top of Hitler's wish list

Despina Stratigakos: Hitler's Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway

BUILT NORWAY: Nazi Germany's plans for Norway were extensive. We were to become part of the Great Germanic Empire. In the years 1940–1945, large parts of Norway were a construction site.
Kjetil Korslund -
literature

Revolution in a social and political vacuum

Walter Armbrust: Martyrs & Tricksters. An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution

EGYPT 10 YEARS AFTER: Walter Armbrust has written about the time after the first eighteen days of the revolution: If one considers the revolution on Tahrir Square in Cairo as a rite of passage, there are several good reasons why it went wrong.
Hans Henrik Fafner -
literature

Religious notions

Laurence Louër Translated by Ethan Rundell: Sunnis and Shi'a: A Political History

SUNNI AND SJIA: The religious contradictions between the two main directions in Islam are not so great. But in conflicts between countries and groups, they are used for all they are worth.
Kjetil Korslund -
literature

What is freedom without governance?

Cass R. Sunstein: On Freedom

PATERNALISM: Sunstein advocates active social manipulation to help us make wiser choices. In the book On Freedom, he questions whether free choice actually promotes human welfare.
Henning Næs -
literature

Spear tactics and the camouflage of rights

Clifford Bob: Rights as Weapons. Instruments of Conflicts, Tools of Power

: ABUSE OF POWER: Human rights and law in general are a positive value that can, however, end in cynical manipulation. New book perspectives the concept.
Hans Henrik Fafner -
literature

Steinhardt grasped the geology

Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness. How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

GEOLOGY: Everyone can and should learn more from geology, says Marcia Bjornerud. Her well-meaning attempt to bring the subject's insights to life, on the other hand, falls on deaf ears.
Kjetil Korslund -
literature

The misunderstood revolution

Amin Saikal: Iran Rising. The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic

IRAN: Solidly argued status of the Iranian state 40 years after the fall of the shah.
Hans Henrik Fafner -
literature

Forced accuracy

Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero, Fransesco Giavazzi: .Austerity When It Works and When It Doesn't

: In the midst of this era of austerity, three economists believe they have found the explanations for when austerity policies work. However, they deftly bypass the question of who it works for.
Nina Trige Andersen -
literature

Future without utopia?

Martin Rees: On the Future – Prospects for Humanity

: Rees strives as much as the rest of us to separate science from science fiction. He declares himself a technological optimist and a political pessimist, but the role of technology becomes difficult to understand without a credible vision of a better world.
Anders Dunk -
literature

The big thinker is pulled out of the mole bag

Robert Irwin: Ibn Khaldun. An Intellectual Biography

: A new biography of the 1300th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun has recently been published. Is he now getting his renaissance?
Hans Henrik Fafner -
literature

A thought-provoking and certainly probable explanation for the subsequent developments in the Arab world

Fawaz A. Gerges: Making the Arab World. Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East

: Secularists and Islamists played on the same team before the power-hungry and vain president Nasser sowed enmity and strife, claims a new book.
Hans Henrik Fafner -
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Full 100-page MODERN TIMES including the appendix Orientering and Modern Times Review comes out quarterly (March 1, June 1, September 1 and December 1) with international book reviews, essays and comments – in addition to the physical newspaper and PDF, the articles are eventually published online here (see also the monthly newsletter).

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