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Facts are Subversive
Political Writing from a Decade without a Name
Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash’s magnificent new collection of essays, his first for ten years, is a gripping sequence of portraits of the first turbulent decade of the new millennium.
‘During times of universal deceit’, wrote George Orwell, ‘telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ For twenty-five years, Timothy Garton Ash has travelled among truth-tellers and political charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. This book confirms his reputation as our foremost cartographer of the present. Facts are Subversive contains Garton Ash’s eye-witness accounts of the fate of countries, including Serbia, Poland and Ukraine, making the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, and his dispatches from places such as Egypt, Burma and Iran, where that transformation has yet to take place.
It also investigates freedom and its discontents. An encounter with the drug gangs of Sao Paulo raises questions about liberal democracy; a visit to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina shows how quickly civilization can give way to chaos; while an examination of immigration in Europe raises profound questions about the limits of multiculturalism. Facts are Subversive also includes Garton Ash’s reportage on the American presidential election of 2008 and his assessments of what Barack Obama will mean for United States and the world.
This is contemporary history on a scale both panoramic and human: urgent, exhilarating and necessary.
'Garton Ash is, in the most literal sense of the term, contemporary historian. He writes primarily as a witness to the events he is treating, and not just as an outside witness, but as an inside one as well... Yet the sense of the historic dimension of the events in question is never lost and the quality of the writing places it squarely in the category of good literature.' George F. Kennan, New York Review of Books
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Hardback
Published July 2009
496 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84887 089 5
RRP: £25.00