Media Capture How Money, Digital Platforms, and Governments Control the News Edited by Anya Schiffrin

 Media Capture

How Money, Digital Platforms, and Governments Control the News Edited by Anya Schiffrin is a new book by Columbia University Press.

This book on journalism offers a very important mirror on the state of this profession seen through the lenses of situations, people, governments, that are keeping information, news, "captured."

The internet that, at first was seen positively because could, theoretically, facilitate the arrival of news has meant, with the time, misinformation, hate, news manipulated or invented for trying to deviate from the reality the minds of people, (see at the voice Covid-19), while the common newmsagazines and magazines started to develop a profound, real crisis because people preferred the net for being informed,using discutible channels sometimes and avoiding the real magazine, newsmagazine, more expensive.

Of course media has been captured before the advent of the net by moguls, people who invested in the news, but that at the same time removed oxygen to the media that they controlled or that they are still controlling.

This book tells the fragility of journalism, analyzing the state of news in several countries, but also reading what it is going on in social medias, taking in consideration giants like Google, Facebook, but also blogs and their death, because of the advent of social medias and still unclear characters; problems of independence and freedom of telling.

This book reveals the fragilities of a profession in high sea, offering a base of discussion for trying to return to see the light after this long tunnel of obscurity.

Highly recommended book.

I thank Columbia for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

The Belle Epoque A Cultural History, Paris and Beyond by Dominique Kalifa

 The Belle Epoque

A Cultural History, Paris and Beyond by Dominique Kalifa is an exciting new book published by Columbia Press. 

The topic, no sure for you, is one of my favorite ones: the Belle Epoque, a cultural moment experienced in Paris, pretty fertile, where richness became more extended, and where there was the possibility for everyone of enjoying the beauty of a capital like Paris: Paris became a city democratically great for rich and poor, and if you were an artist, someone creative, the best place you could live in. 

Started historically in 1889, when there were also the celebrations for the first centenary of the French Revolution, this one was an historical moment pretty happy and creative.

Paris: still without cars, where people tended to cultivate plants of every sorta and where there was a genuine friendship; where the Moulin Rouge, created that years, had a completely different touch; a calm plenty of expectations but, also, a city that lived in perfect harmony with the rest of the world. 

The Exposition of 1900 counted more than 50 million of visitors; 1900 meant for France a new re-start after the Dreyfus affair.

Someone wrote somewhere that also when people were poor was possible to live in a city like Paris; Paris was at that time the place where everyone would have wanted to be; a place plenty of expectations with a positivistic approach; Paris was looking directly to the future; there was the perception of the future; a future, and a century, the XXth one that had to be without wars, but that, differently, was in war most of the time, with horrible conclusions.

The expression Belle Epoque, that it is now commonly used for characterizing, not only in France, but also in other countries, a stellar, pacific moment of a certain country, (another expression could be Gilded Age) has been created only later. 

No one in France, tried to define the end of the XIX century or the beginning of 1900. People continued to live without the perception that this one was an exceptional historical moment. 

Writers published remarkable books, I name Proust for everyone and there was an immense cultural fertility.

But...When the Belle Epoque ended?

It is difficult to define the end of a good historical period, but everyone mark a psychological date: the 1914 and the entrance in war: that year meant the end of the lightness breathed since there: the horror of the war, with its heaviness, replaced the past years, the pandemic flu and what had been seen by people, made a difference in negative.

The moments immediately after the first world war for sure were not conceived by people like a state of a new pre-war, but were lived with more uncertainty because the world wasn't in a great state and things were becoming every day more difficult and unpleasant. The enchantment experienced at the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth century was over. People grew up mentally, there was great sufferance and nothing was anymore like before: that state of beatitude and innocence experienced before was over. Forever.

Then, when time passed by, when the horror of two world wars and a pandemic flu changed the world, someone defined the period lived in Paris before these devastastating experiences calling it La Belle Epoque: being an attractive topic, people who lived during that years published a lot of memoirs on the topic: there was also who wrote that the Belle Epoque was an hypocrital moment in the history of France, plenty of contradictions.

For sure in the Belle Epoque there was relaxation, but also dances, parties, people were cheerful, and happy. A state of mind, this one, after a long period of crisis, that was re-created, paradoxically when Paris was occupied by Nazis.

Immediately after the first world war in France the production of movies fell dramatically, and foreign productions, with new emerging actors, like Rodolfo Valentino, became real stars for the people.

Who lived the Belle Epoque missed and missed and missed so badly that years. In the present there were lost friends, there was the perception that the sweetness of life was over forever, because the Belle Epoque incapsulated all together these three elements: a place, a time and a society.

The cinema tried all his best, later, in the 1950s, putting on the big screen an idea of 1900, thanks also to the works of Maupassant, Colette, the stories of Arsène Lupin.

After all paying a tribute at that first decades of the XX century meant also paying a tribute to that infant cinema. Differently, the other decades of the century focused on trasgressions of every sorta: a new conception of the Belle Epoque was borning.

It is the case of Jules et Jim by Francois Truffaut sets in Paris in 1912.

While cinema tried to re-define the role of the Belle Epoque, time passed by and most iconic places known during the Belle Epoque were destroyed for the creation of more spaces for always new citizens.

The myth of the Belle Epoque, although partially "killed" by the immense problematics brought by the two world wars and the exigencies of a city under construction, returned with prepotency thanks to wagons of pictorial books, micro-stories sets in different parts and cities of France, and Brussels Publisher became the specialist of this genre.

The Belle Epoque was splendid and magnificient just for a little portion of people in the proper sense of the word, and not for the masses, but...

But...That one has been a positive period for everyone. 

And what a nostalgia. 

Dorgelès wrote that "The only past that counts is the living past, which is transformed along with us." 

The Belle Epoque, writes Kalifa, "Truly exists because we have needed it;" yes because it was an age of security and writing security we want to add that people lived peacefully and pleasantly well in this world.

This last work by Kalifa is a tribute to a city and its more magnificient historical period. Beautiful, written with heart and competency, this one is a complete portrait of the Belle Epoque: I am sure you'll love so badly, as I did. 

And now some words on Dominque Kalifa. I had also previously read and reviewed Vice, Crime and Poverty always published by Columbia Press. I discovered in the website of Columbia that Kalifa died just a year ago.

In the postcript by Venita Datta: "For those of us who were fond of Dominique Kalifa, our Belle Epoque is located in a Paris of the recent past, in which we share lively conversations with our friend in his graduate seminar at the Sorbonne, in cafés, in his house around the dinner table, and finally in his oeuvre, in which the true history of the Belle Epoque lives on."

Highly recommended book.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

The Little Devil and Other Stories by Alexei Remizov

 The Little Devil

and Other Stories by Alexei Remizov Translated by Antonina W.Bouis and published by Columbia Press is a solid, wonderful, ancestral powerful book of short tales, modern fairy-tales. The short stories in this book, in fact will transport you in other dimensions, in a world populated by magical creatures, powerful forces, several devils, existing independently by men and women and that sometimes make the difference and interact powerfully, with them, the living ones. 

In what way? Let's speak of spells: they can be so powerful that they can change the destiny of entire families. Sometimes people must be careful what they wish for because fate can strongly agree with them, presenting  horrible conditions for everyone as it happened for the protagonists of several stories. 

There is the short story of a blind but happy lady who lost peace because of a man. 

More than people,  houses represents with their silences, their mysteries, their burned candles, their secrets, the centrality of these stories; the power that they have pass through objects, memories, losses and meanings that they have for the community, 

I really enjoyed all these tales so badly; some of them are warm: I think at the story of Petushok and the Cockerel, where you find a warm atmosphere in the house of the old lady, the granny of Petka where everything is planned, also for the after-life; she in fact kept a special dress for her death, a custom common also in my area in the past. 

I liked the story, the dream of having a cockerel, the disturbing appearance in the scenario of the father of Petka, the tragic end and the positive attitude of a lady who had seen with her eyes a lot and could in her existence cope with immense departures.

In the last tale there is an interrupted love-story: these people, Pyotr and Fevronia de Murom existed as characters and they became saints at some point.

The message of this legend is powerful. A broken love-story meant for the family a curse, because as writes the author "the chains of fate fall apart....Even separated love does not die."

 

Remizo was one of the most known representatives of thr Russian Symbolist movement, and for sure, one of the most excellent russian writers I read till now. A truly pleasant discovery!

Highly recommended reading. 

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

The Nose and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol translated by Susanne Fusso

 The master of nonsense, with solid touches of gothic and a personal fixation, notorious in Russians, for the devil and its interactions with people: this one and much more is Nikolai Gogol, and this one is a book published by Columbia University Press celebrating his short stories.

The Nose and Other

Stories by Nikolai Gogol translated by Susanne Fusso is wonderfully complete. We find the early stories written by the writer, and most of them of the latest part of his existence. I firstly read Gogol when I was 17 and I found him impressive: Gogol is geniality, obscurity, irony, a feat psychologist and a visionary.

When Columbia published this book I immediately asked of reading it.

Gogol is an artist in the creation of nonsense stories but also, as for example in the firs tale The Lost Letter, in instilling in the main protagonist a sensation of freedom and forgetting mixed to the super-natural represented by demoniac presences and sorcery. 

You'll read the tale: there is this man who wanted to write to the empress, but.... he didn't want to send this letter; he decided that he would have personally given the letter to the empress. So he leaves his house and family for the long trip. It happens always that during a trip, it's a metaphor of the existence, we get lost for later re-discovering ourselves.

And it is the same thing that happens to the Cossak. He wanted to give a letter personally written to the empress, but then he meets along his way some friends and with them he has a lot of fun, forgetting the reason why he had abandoned his house for other places. Doing that, one of these friends will confess him that he is the devil...The protagonist will lose the precious letter and will ask to the owner of the tavern where he had drunk with these companions some help...Once rescued what lost, he will goes straight to the point. Like losing and re-finding the compass of the existence, this one is a little powerful tale, involving the other world and in the specific the hell and the powerful existence of every man. 

It's a tale, this one that will let you think a lot.

The Portrait is another short tale written two times by Gogol the first one in 1835, the second in 1842; in this case a painter notices a portrait in a store and buys it. Just...The character portrayed interacts with him!

I loved tremendoudly Rome. There is this prince, who was born in Italy. He didn't know a lot of the rest of the world but then his father sent him abroad for studying and discovering the world. A new reality and endless possibilities are available for the prince, who will fall in love  for Paris for several years. Then Paris became tiring to him and he fell melancholy for Italy. At the same time his father dies...

Italians are portrayed, Gogol lived a lot of time in Rome, perfectly!

People who don't want to fight, as all the time their french cousins do, but that love to enjoy the pleasures of the existence.

Gogole writes: "They know how to separate religion from its hypocritcal practitioners and they haven't been infected by the cold idea of unbelief. ...They are cheerful and endure everything, and only in novels and stories do they cut people's throat in the streets." Another consideration I found interesting was this one: "It was as if European Enlightment had intentionally not touched these people and instilled its cold process of improvement in its breast."

A magnificent, impressive description of Rome follows: "Here there was a luminous, solemn serenity."

Return, (like also in Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano) the thematic of the forgetting when in Rome. Admiring Rome is possible to forget ourselves and the rest of the world close to us, reaching an extreme and beautiful peace.

The Nose is for sure the most hilarious story of this book! So, one day a man finds a nose somewhere...He is scared to death. This nose must be of someone else. It is perfect, absolutely uncut and the fact that he fell down from a face, or maybe just...run away from a face represents obviously reason of curiosity. Anyway, once the nose is set free, somewhere else there is the desperate owner of the nose, who, once awoken, discovered the tremendous news: oh Gosh! The nose disappeared, as for magic and at its place there was...Nothing. Panic, panic! This man has many connections, she loves to spend time with several women. How can they appreciate a noseless man?

Plus: his work: how could it be possible to work in that state? 

The Nose at the same time starts to do the same work of his own! Having fun, visiting churches and so on. The nose-owner desperate and covering his face for not let show the non-existence of the nose, once will ask help also at the reporter of a newsroom for an ad: he was searching for his nose! causing the hilarity and skepticism of the people who didn't want to put this ad in the paper.

There is a good end for this adorable masterpiece!

Other short stories are the Overcoat,  The Carriage, Diary of a Madman, Nevsky Avenue and Viy.

Beautiful readings !

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov

 The most sunniest, funniest book I have read this year! City Folk and Country Folk

by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov excellently well, is a book that you must absolutely read!!! because it will bring you a lot of laughs, smiles, thanks to these incredibly funny protagonists. Written in 1861, it is perfect, to my point of view, if not yet done before, for an adaptation in different mediums, theather the best one.

Nastasya Ivanovna is a noblewoman of the countryside. She lives in Snetki, she is 55 years, widow, with a girl, Olenka of 17 and an aunt, her guest from several time from Moscow, Anna Ilinishna, never married, close to her 50s, fixated with religious icons of the most diversified saints, praying all the time and seeing devil in every person she meets. She is snob and she has strong opinions of every person and situation. Although these weird behaviors of Anna, the three of them stay well together. But a hurricane arrives in their existence and everything will change. 

A man of the city, Ovcharov, one day is walking along that territory. Nastasya is a lady absolutey opened and cordial and when she spots him, thinking also at her daughter of 17 years, why not invite this gentleman that she is remembering very well and with positivity, for a tea?

Ovcharov was an habituée of this family, and he is pleased to see Nastasya again, accepting with joy the invite, asking news of the other people who lived in the area. Nastasya is thrilled of telling, although the idea of a potential love- story of her daughter with this man of 40 years so unhealthy and physically destroyed is excluded. Some women, she thinks, are in love for this kind of emaciated man, but this one is not the case of Olenka.

Imagine now that in the middle of an innocent conversation like this one is, this man, Ovcharov asks of staying in the property of Nastasya, in the bathhouse, all summer, because he wants to recuperate some health, specifying what he needs and asking how much he must pays to her.

Nastasya, although a bit embarassed at first by this request, is also joyous, because she remembers this man: she wouldn't want any money but she is forced to accept it. 

After all these two ladies are happy; there is someone else, a discreet presence in their territory; but the worst must yet to come with the arrival in the room of Anna Ilinishna. Anna doesn't see with favor the presence of a man in their propriety. He is like a devil, she specifies Anna. "You are a widow, you daughter is just 17 years." 

The character of Olenka is wonderfully ingenuous and genuine. She tells everything she has in her mind and remembers to her mother that, after all, in a city, with a situation like this one no one would have complained. So, why starting in a countryside?

At first, all the people will stay at their place: Ovcharov, pretty snob, will avoid the presence of the ladies and the ladies, although living this situation conflictually (oh: they had of course servants putting them all in connection for food and other necessities) will decide that maybe it's better to stay isolated for avoid any kind of talk.

One day it happened that Olenka spots Ovcharov while he is walking, and Ovcharov starts a long conversation with her. Ovcharov is shocked and irritated by the frank and sometimes not appropriate conversation of Olenka, in grade of revealing what it is going on in their house. There is a big conflict between Nastasya and Anna. This last one doesn't want to eat anymore with them because of him!

Ovcharov will continue to see Olenka. He tried to give her something to read, thinking that the girl doesn't have a lot of culture; one day he will write a piece about women and their conditions who will share with her; Olenka will read this piece to Anna and Nastasya; Anna continues to remark how that man is just laughing at them all.

Anna always more irritated will continue to stay close in her room. Nastasya, a sunny character for sure, will try with the local priest. The local priest, happy to be there, will tell to Nastasya that yes, he will try, but that, to his point of view there is nothing to do with Anna, because she has the habit of speaking with a different kind of clergy, the one of the city, more important, more influential. He won't listen to him. Better it would be calling an eminent man of Church.

It is true. Anna won't listen to the priest.

Oh, the priest knew it, and it didn't live it as a tragedy at all; all the contrary; entertained by that grumpy single woman. 

At the same time Olenka receives the news that there is maybe an available boy for her; she should settle down.

Katerina Petrovna will be the connection with this boy; but maybe there is something unclear between Petrovna and that boy; the lover of the same Petrovna?

Olenka is so brought at the house of Petrovna by Ovcharov and then she will remain there, silent, for once, without expressing any negativity at the idea of marrying Simon for four days.

Then, once returned home, the ladies, mother and daughter, both exasperated for various reasons, with Petrovna, Ovcharov and Anna, that ungrateful aunt, will take several decisions.

What they will proceed to do is just to set themselves free from these intruders, who had put a lot of bad mood in their existence. 

Unique, sunny, funny, light, you'll spend wonderful, wonderful moments reading this book for sure!

For everyone!

Highly recommeneded.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Radio Empire The BBC's Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel by Daniel Ryan Morse

 Radio Empire

The BBC's Eastern Service and the Emergence of the Global Anglophone Novel by Daniel Ryan Morse is a new book by Columbia Press that this time takes in consideration the modernism passing through radio and...literature. 

When was born, the BBC's Eastern Service wanted to be a completely new, different voice, and an answer to the nazi propaganda. 

Soon, it became clear that these programs offered a new way for appreciating culture; poems, novels, important books that marked that years were narrated and literature started to assume a different shape that only radio could present. 

Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, some of the most important, influential writers passed through the radio with their works.

The first attemp of hypermediacity is not a characteristic of our times; this one was a characteristic of modernism, where a big exposure was searched by the various creatives. 

In doing this, literature and books searched a sort of mediation with a medium, radio, completely different; Bowen adapted her latest novels also for being read on radio programs.

The Eastern Service started to broadcast in Hindustani on May 11 1940. The other service, the English-Language Empire Service started officially on dec.1932; the BBC expanded its offering for giving a different voice, trying for stop the fascist propaganda.

You musn't imagine anyway that the first programs on air were for all people, no: they were for the native elite people of India and for students of universities.

The first chapter takes in consideration the last work of James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, considered absolutely one of the most complicated books every written; this book is one of the favorites of actor Johnny Depp; he confesses that brings this book always with him, because it is a wonderful discovery every time.

Read by the same Joyce on air, we will notice the differentiations that this book will bring with it emotionally before and after the last world war. The Wake offers also an important instrument of knowledge about the cultural dynamics of radio broadcasting during the interwar years.

In the second chapter Forster will create many bridges; he will span his action helping authors, speaking of banned books, including the Ulysses by Joyce. 

Forster: protagonist of the program Some Books from 1941-1947 loved to give a lot of space to all the literature published and written in India. Considered "at best a closet modernist" someone added that he was "irritating in his refusal to be great." 

But Forster, more than to becoming great wanted to expand culture, mixing, promoting, presenting new ideas about british and Indian literature to his listeners. Friendly tone, close to people, Forster for sure was one of the most important vehicles of circulation of people, books, culture from the East to the West, from India, to London and vice-versa. 

In Some Books Forster unified and talked largely of what meant modernism and modernity, and how modernity was accellerating in the entire world. He fought fascism with all himself preferring to treat stories where characters were involved in common domestic problems, not political ones, although one day remarked how, sadly, it was more or less impossible to find books in India where there wasn't commixtion between private existences and policy.

His writing-style was ironic, humble and as a person Forster fought for other writers and their works, while "remaining  reticent about causing trouble with his own fiction" writes Morse. Forster promoted gay literature and helped writers in writing these books. 

Friendship and culture meant to Forster a powerful interaction with social, political, economic forces.

In the third chapter the story of Anand and his vision of modernization, something he felt impatiently, of literature, but also cities, relationship, seeing anyway changes all around him absolutely unsatisfiying. 

Beautiful and stimulating book this one by Columbia!

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori

Eating Ethically by Jonathan K.Crane

A lot of people are obese because they indulge too much in eating, and food industries are all happy to serve all hours, night and day food for enthusiastic consumers. We eat too much or not at all, cutting out from our diet a lot of foods; if you have Jewish friends, you know that generally pork meat and also other foods are avoided from their diet. The genesis of this interesting, important and educative book Eating Ethically by Jonathan K.Crane published by Columbia University Press was born thanks to an article released in the NYT called Talmud and other diet Food. I found this reading brilliant.

Written with an original perspective this one more than to be a trip through food is a trip through...Eaters and what it means philosophically and religiously eating adding of course, who eaters are.

Not only: what it means eating ethically; eating is seen here as respect for ourselves as you will read.
Too often we are not good eaters remarks mr Crane.
He calls this mental  approach maladaptive eating.

It's a problem. Also in the past gluttony was a problem treated by Aristotle before and St. Benedict of Nursia later. Benedict established rules and guidelines still followed. Two cooked dishes with fresh fruits and vegetables and some bread.
No one of these thinkers, Kant included mentioned, worried, the size of the body of a person; the size, fat or slim, was not important but the danger of a constant abuse of food was considered immoral.

That doesn't mean that if a person is invited somewhere shouldn't eat at all; the importance is the psychological daily approach with food and eating.

The author takes in consideration and I found interesting this section as well what happens in case of condition of deprivation of food in a body, like also what happens in case of a food-addicted body; both these conditions won't bring anything good for the body system.

Our body per decades was seen as a perfect machine compared to a car in needs of fuel for working properly, without any excess. If partially true, as remarks the author we can't classify our body just as a machine because also if we interrupt to introduce food in our body, our body can goes on. For a while.
So food as said by the author is not just our fuel.
"Food becomes our body that consumes and metabolizes it." An expression says: "We are what we eat" and it says all. There is a symbiotic relationship between us and our body and the food we ingest, who we are and what the food we eat let us become with the time. Let me add this.
Spinoza affirms that eating is both "Aesthetics as well as ethics."

There are various fields about eating, pretty interesting as food ethics is. In this case we will see how food is treated before to reach our...mouths. Another one involves diets.

Crane will also tell us what he loved to eat and what he appreciated and he still appreciates and what attracted him when he was a boy. Because going on our tastes changes for a reason or another.

Just in modern age there was consciousness also about the importance of keeping in good condition not just the stomach but also our intestine, the second brain of the organism and the one more stressed when sad facts occur in our existence and we can't find a way for keeping out our mental sadness.

It's important to eat well and it is not difficult after all: everything but with parsimony.
Helped by religion, the author will offer us various explanations about the eating's history seen also under a religious aspect.
One of the finals chapters will involve fats, salt, sweets and another one our relationship about eating and sharing our food with others. Sharing gives us meaning, when a person is starved, but also I would add,in normal conditions memories and good moments to remember and as added by the author, eating together is transformative. Crane adds: "To share a meal means to eat well, and conversely, to eat well  means to share meals."
Beautiful book because Crane has been in grade to give us a personal vision enriching it with philosophic, religious views, giving back to the reader an intelligent dialogue about what it means eating and who eaters are, offering to the readers a diversified meaning of who we are and how we can better ourselves  regarding eating, a common, normal, indispensable, vital daily activity for all men passing through the respect for ourselves, our body and the other ones, remembering to be socials and giving importance to quality and...quantities.


Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori