The Moldovans

The Moldovans PDF Author: Charles King
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817997938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The first English-language book to present a complete picture of this intriguing East European borderland, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, illuminates the perennial problems of identity politics and cultural change that the country has endured.

The Moldovans

The Moldovans PDF Author: Charles King
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817997938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first English-language book to present a complete picture of this intriguing East European borderland, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, illuminates the perennial problems of identity politics and cultural change that the country has endured.

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis PDF Author: Tony Hawks
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466852275
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
It doesn't take much - "£100 is usually sufficient" - to persuade Tony Hawks to take off on notoriously bizarre and hilarious adventures in response to a bet. And so it is, a pointless argument with a friend concludes in a bet - that Tony can't beat all eleven members of the Moldovan soccer team at tennis. And with the loser of the bet agreeing to strip naked on Balham High Road and sing the Moldovan national anthem, this one was just too good to resist. The ensuing unpredictable and often hilarious adventure sees him being taken in by Moldovan gypsies and narrowly avoid kidnap in Transnistria. It sees him smuggle his way on to the Moldovan National Team coach in Coleraine and witness (almost) divine intervention in the Holy Land. In this inspiring and exceptionally funny book, Tony Hawks has done it again, proving against all odds that there is no reason in the world why you can't do something a bit stupid and prove all of your doubters wrong. Or at least that was the idea....

The Language of the Moldovans

The Language of the Moldovans PDF Author: Matthew H. Ciscel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Who are the Moldovans? The Language of the Moldovans explores this question from the perspective of debates about the languages spoken by the people of this ex-Soviet state. Locating language as a central point of both cohesion and conflict in the region's recent history, the peculiarities of the Moldovans are illustrated by a survey of language attitudes, a series of ethnographic interviews, and extensive observations by the author. The result is an image of an emerging nation that is, at once, similar to the experiences of other ex-Soviet states and uniquely complex. Much of that complexity lies in the population's extensive multilingualism and in uncertainty about the Romanian-ness of the official language. This cross-discipline volume is of great interest to advanced students and researchers of linguistics, political science, and Eastern European studies.

Round Ireland with a Fridge

Round Ireland with a Fridge PDF Author: Tony Hawks
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312274924
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Recounts the author's experiences hitchhiking on a bet all the way around Ireland with a small refrigerator, and shares his impressions of the people and places along the way.

Molvania:A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry

Molvania:A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry PDF Author: R Sitch
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
ISBN: 1742731295
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The funniest book about travel you will ever read: a travel guide to the fictional European republic 'Molvania', birthplace of the polka and whooping cough. The text and design draw on the standard travel guide format and include: background information on the destination, including cultural details, useful phrases, holidays, and calendar of events; accommodation and restaurant listings; activities and excursions; as well as text break-outs, colour photos and maps throughout.

The A to Z of Skateboarding

The A to Z of Skateboarding PDF Author: Tony Hawks
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1783526742
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 125

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Book Description
For more than twenty years, Tony Hawks has been mistaken for Tony Hawk, the American skateboarder. Even though it is abundantly clear on his website that he is an English comedian and author, people still write to him asking the best way to do a kickflip or land a melon. One mischievous day he started writing back in a pompous tone, goading his correspondents for their spelling mistakes and poor grammar, while offering bogus or downright silly advice on how to improve their skateboarding. Featuring entries on parents' pain, disappointment, underachievers, Quorn and the Vatican, this is his A to Z guide to the world of skateboarding, as seen through the eyes of someone who knows absolutely nothing about it.

Gods of the Upper Air

Gods of the Upper Air PDF Author: Charles King
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525432329
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

Russia on the Danube

Russia on the Danube PDF Author: Victor Taki
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 963386383X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
One of the goals of Russia’s Eastern policy was to turn Moldavia and Wallachia, the two Romanian principalities north of the Danube, from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and a springboard for future military operations against Constantinople. Russia on the Danube describes the divergent interests and uneasy cooperation between the Russian officials and the Moldavian and Wallachian nobility in a key period between 1812 and 1834. Victor Taki’s meticulous examination of the plans and memoranda composed by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite underlines the crucial consequences of this encounter. The Moldavian and Wallachian nobility used the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in order to preserve and expand their traditional autonomy. The comprehensive institutional reforms born out of their interaction with the tsar’s officials consolidated territorial statehood on the lower Danube, providing the building blocks of a nation state. The main conclusion of the book is that although Russian policy was driven by self-interest, and despite the Russophobia among a great part of the Romanian intellectuals, this turbulent period significantly contributed to the emergence, several decades later, of modern Romania.

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams PDF Author: Charles King
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393080528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Winner of a National Jewish Book Award "Fascinating.…A humane and tragic survey of a great and tragic subject." —Jan Morris, Literary Review From Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist renegade Vladimir Jabotinsky and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, an astonishing cast of geniuses helped shape Odessa, a legendary haven of cosmopolitan freedom on the Black Sea. Drawing on a wealth of original sources and offering the first detailed account of the destruction of the city's Jewish community during the Second World War, Charles King's Odessa is both history and elegy—a vivid chronicle of a multicultural city and its remarkable resilience over the past two centuries.

The Good Life Elsewhere

The Good Life Elsewhere PDF Author: Vladimir Lorchenkov
Publisher: New Vessel Press
ISBN: 1939931002
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The Good Life Elsewhere is a very funny book. It is also a very sad one. In it, Moldovan writer Vladimir Lorchenkov tells the story of a group of villagers and their tragicomic efforts, against all odds and at any cost, to emigrate from Europe’s most impoverished nation to Italy for work. This is a book with wild imagination and heartbreaking honesty, grim appraisals alongside optimistic commentary about the nature of human striving. The Good Life Elsewhere aims to present the complexity of a new Europe, where allegiances shift but memories are rooted in place. The book integrates small-scale human follies with strategic partnerships, unification plans, and the Soviet legacies that still hang over the former Eastern Bloc. Lorchenkov addresses the vexing question of what to do when many formerly pro-Soviet/pro-Russia countries want to link arms with their West European brethren. In Lorchenkov’s uproarious tale, an Orthodox priest is deserted by his wife for an art-dealing atheist; a mechanic redesigns his tractor for travel by air and sea; thousands of villagers take to the road on a modern-day religious crusade to make it to the promised land of Italy; meanwhile, politicians remain politicians. Like many great satirists from Voltaire to Gogol to Vonnegut, Lorchenkov makes use of the grotesque to both horrify us and help us laugh. It is not often that stories from forgotten countries such as Moldova reach us in the English-speaking world. A country where 25 percent of its population works abroad, where remittances make up nearly 40 percent of the GDP, where alcohol consumption per capita is the highest in the world, and which has the lowest per capita income in all of Europe – this is a country that surely has its problems. But, as Lorchenkov vividly shows, it’s a country whose residents don’t easily give up.