We live in a modern world of social media, cars, electricity, supermarkets, television, fast food, and Hollywood pop culture, and few Westerners have known anything else. Ireland, however, modernized long after most Western countries; many rural areas lacked electricity or technology even in the 1970s. Within living memory villagers lived much as humans had for centuries, or as the Amish do today; they grew and raised their own food, built their own homes, traded with their neighbours, and spent their evenings making their own music and telling their own stories. 

When Brian Kaller moved to a homestead in rural Ireland, he found that some of his elderly neighbours grew up this way, the last who remember a traditional world. Over the next two decades Kaller interviewed his neighbours and assembled oral histories, archives, diaries and memoirs to create a portrait of their lives that can help illuminate traditional cultures everywhere. 

The Last Who Remember invites the reader on a tour of agrarian life, with each chapter, devoting chapters to childhood, schooling, working, socialising, courting, and dying. He looks at the safe, literate, high-trust society they created, and shows how their self-reliance and close communities sustained them in times of hardship. He compares it to today’s unprecedented levels of unhappiness, mental illness and addiction while surrounded by material goods, and questions what we abandoned when we became modern. 

The Olavo de Carvalho Reader, a far-reaching selection of philosophical essays by the celebrated Brazilian philosopher available for the first time in English, presents indispensable writings that have generated an intellectual revival in Brazil and beyond. Following Carvalho’s definition of philosophy as the “search for unity of knowledge in the unity of consciousness, and vice-versa,” it lays out the historical roots of the current cultural crisis in the West—both in the phenomenon he called “cognitive parallax” and then in the advent of the “revolutionary mind.” Averse to utopian thinking, Carvalho’s analyses are often responses to events that have shaped the history of ideas and their factual consequences. His approach seeks truth and expresses reality as Carvalho sees it, resisting pressure to conform to the collective and reaffirming the power of individual consciousness. In writings from a period of over three decades, this edition introduces the reader to one of the greatest philosophers of our time. 

This monograph is the first modern research study in English to provide history of the Amur Society ( known as Black Dragon Society due to a mistranslation from Japanese to English), its genesis, its members and its activities in historical context from 1901-1945. Using original sources, some consulted for the first time, Dr Jacob discusses the Amur Society as a key driving force in Japan's embrace of national expansion and analyzes the effect of this ultra-nationalist secret society on Japanese history from before the Russo-Japanese War(1901 +) to the bitter defeat of 1945 and the end of colonial empire, military rule and international aggression . The Amur Society was seen by its enemies as an almighty secret society, one which determined the course of Japanese history from the murky background of Japanese civil and military politics. Founded in 1901 the Amur-Society was aimed at stopping the Russian expansionist ambitions in East Asia and preparing Japan for a war against the tsardom. The members of the society followed a double-sided strategy to achieve this goal. In public they rooted for an anti-Russian mood of the Japanese society by starting a propaganda campaign which consisted of pamphlets and public lectures. In secret their members began spying in Korea, Manchuria and even Siberia gathering information would be of value during the upcoming war with Russia. Although the Russo-Japanese War started in 1904/05 and the Japanese troops gained victory after victory, the diplomats were not able to build on these t victories during the negotiations in Portsmouth, NH where Russia - especially Sergej Witte - won the only Russian victory of that conflict. Although the Kokuryûkai( Amur Society) ,due to the conclusion of the war and the Russo-Japanese diplomatic relations in the years after 1905, had lost its raison d'être it still till 1946. During the years after 1905 the society became more engaged in Korean affairs and tried to accelerate a political unification with Korea and the destruction of Korean cultural and poliical elites as well as Christian religious practice . After Uchida Ryôhei (the leader of the society) was not able to influence Ito Hirobumi -g overnor general in Korea - he returned to Japan and the Kokuryûkai involved in influencing Japanese society via newpapers,books as well as propaganda aimed at army leadership. Their new aim was to influence Japan's pan-Asianism and to force it onto a more expansionistic course. During the Shôwa period, the Kokuryûkai tried to establish an ultranationalist mass movement and founded the Greater Japanese Productive Party (Dai-Nippon Seisantô), but even if it was able to recruit a few thousand members it became not influential mass movement but an open conspiracy against democratic, labor and pacifistic organizations. Terrorism was embraced and practiced against the enemy i.e. felow Japanese.The early death of Uchida in 1937 marked a startling decline of the Kokuryûkai's general influence as even more radical ideas took hold as Japan waged war throughout China then Southeast Asia attacking America and Australia in the Pacific and India in South Asia .

Saving Lives is a tribute to the “life savers” during the Vietnam War: the medics, corpsmen, nurses, doctors, and dustoff pilots who not only rescued but tried desperately to repair the estimated 200,000 soldiers, sailors, Marines, and civilians who were sick or wounded during that war. The stories contained in these pages are “in their own words” from interviews conducted many years later with these incredible men and women. Their stories of bravery, sacrifice, and dedication will never be forgotten.

In Plato’s Republic Socrates retells a life-changing conversation he had with none other than the author’s two older brothers. Here, as elsewhere, he carefully listens to what his interlocutors say but also to what they do not say. The gap between these is what motivates his penetrating and challenging questions, and confers upon both questions and answers their dramatic force and significance: talk becomes action.

While translations of Plato can fail to bring across this existential motive, a true retelling will not. Plato’s greatness consists exactly in his ability to depict people thinking and talking within their own horizons, enabling us, in turn, to witness how Socrates listens to them, and for the first time ever to relive this revolutionary conversation in all its greatness. 

The conversation moves upward in a parabola, the path of a projectile fated by gravity to fall after its apex, but at just that moment – the very midpoint of the dialogue – the order of foundation gives way to the order of formation: the conversation surrenders to a hyperbolic inspiration, and reaches a view of our world sub specie aeternitatis.

Ruth Morris’s new book focuses on Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels from 1880 to her death in 1915 and how the portrayal of Jewish characters and Jewish culture shifts throughout this timeframe. By tracing the fortunes of Anglo-Jewry through Braddon’s fiction into the twentieth century, it draws contextually on significant world events such as the Boer War, the beginning of the Zionist movement and the events leading up to the First World War. Each of these events is seen through a Jewish lens in the sense of how they affected Jews in Britain. Morris also discusses them through non-Jewish eyes because Braddon was not Jewish herself and was writing for a predominantly non-Jewish audience. Through a careful reading of the novels, these seemingly incidental references provide a rich narrative of how the Anglo-Jewish community was viewed during a particularly dynamic time in its history.