{"title":"Books by David Rieff","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780300227109","title":"In Praise of Forgetting – Historical Memory and Its Ironies","description":"A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana’s celebrated phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget.      Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times—the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9\/11—Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56233222308213,"sku":"9780300227109","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300227109_11208ecb-c524-4f3a-9add-a094c2b4b4df.jpg?v=1786012178"},{"product_id":"9781847080752","title":"Swimming In A  Sea Of Death","description":"In spring 2004, Susan Sontag was diagnosed with the incurable blood cancer. She had a huge appetite for experience, and a wild, extravagant desire to live. Rieff writes movingly about being by her side during that last year and at her death, and about his own contradictory emotions: his guilt both for not consoling her enough, and for somehow colluding with her in her belief that she could beat the disease. Drawing on Sontag's journals and letters, which Rieff read after her death, and on the writings about the deaths of other great thinkers, \u003ci\u003eSwimming in a Sea of Death\u003c\/i\u003e provides a vivid portrait of Sontag in the last year of her life and a haunting meditation on mortality.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307816857973,"sku":"9781847080752","price":7.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781847080752_47ec00ee-7494-456e-b803-22ee4bf181fa.jpg?v=1786029652"},{"product_id":"9781681374949","title":"Divorcing","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eNow back in print for the first time since 1969, a\u003c\/b\u003e stunning novel about childhood, marriage, and divorce by one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDream and reality overlap in \u003ci\u003eDivorcing\u003c\/i\u003e, a book in which divorce is not just a question of a broken marriage but names a rift that runs right through the inner and outer worlds of Sophie Blind, its brilliant but desperate protagonist. Can the rift be mended? Perhaps in the form of a novel, one that goes back from present-day New York to Sophie’s childhood in pre–World War II Budapest, that revisits the divorce between her Freudian father and her fickle mother, and finds a place for a host of further tensions and contradictions in her present life. The question that haunts \u003ci\u003eDivorcing\u003c\/i\u003e, however, is whether any novel can be fleet and bitter and true and light enough to gather up all the darkness of a given life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSusan Taubes’s startlingly original novel was published in 1969 but largely ignored at the time; after the author’s tragic early death, it was forgotten. Its republication presents a chance to discover a splintered, glancing, caustic, and lyrical work by a dazzlingly intense and inventive writer.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312749752693,"sku":"9781681374949","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681374949_1c3e1e12-b227-4716-8090-371d5950da8a.jpg?v=1786024542"},{"product_id":"9781912475384","title":"Desire and Fate","description":"“Ours is an ill-mannered society that wears those bad manners as a badge not just of its moral rectitude but of its millenarian ethical ambitions. At the same time, in no society in recent memory have people been so easily affronted.”At a time when political writing and cultural criticism have come to be dominated by an insipid and unthinking moralism, David Rieff’s essays offer a bracing antidote. As well as being one of the English-speaking world’s most perceptive commentators on global politics, Rieff has in recent years been one of its most courageous and outspoken critics of the pathologies of identity politics—in particular, its grossly simplistic understanding of what it means to belong to a culture or a community, its fundamental failure to grasp the real value of the creative arts, and its increasing disregard for due process and freedom of expression.   The essays that appear in Desire and Fate serve both as a crucial record of and a fierce protest against these developments. Covering topics as diverse as censorship in contemporary publishing, the cultural ubiquity of the notion of trauma, and the future of democracy on a global level, they are all characterised by an incisive intelligence and a refreshing lack of wishful thinking. Together they confirm Rieff’s status as an indispensable writer and thinker.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313152405877,"sku":"9781912475384","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781912475384_1d8ffeb7-4f63-4e3c-a32f-c9e6b787ec53.jpg?v=1786030309"},{"product_id":"robert-oppenheimer","title":"Robert Oppenheimer","description":"An original perspective on the father of the atomic bomb, shedding new light on Oppenheimer’s personality and psychologyBoth to his contemporaries and to posterity J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) has gone down in history as the “father” of the atomic bomb. He was a brilliant theoretical physicist, who, as a teacher, was the central figure in the development of theoretical physics in the United States. During World War II Oppenheimer served as the scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designed and tested. Oppenheimer’s meteoric rise continued after the war, when he became principal scientific advisor to the US Atomic Energy Commission, which in effect made him the US government’s chief scientist. But his fall was equally meteoric, when he became the best known victim of the Red Scare of the early Cold War period and was stripped of his security clearances and excluded from any policymaking role.   The public’s fascination with Oppenheimer, both as the indispensable figure in the creation of the atomic age and as the liberal martyr to the political excesses of that age, remains extremely strong, and is reflected both in the biographies of him that have appeared and in artistic renderings of his life including an opera and, most recently, the acclaimed 2023 biopic Oppenheimer. In this biography, David Rieff offers a fresh perspective, focusing on Oppenheimer’s personality and psychology, above all his closed down nature as a person that so puzzled and fascinated his contemporaries. To do this, Rieff pays particular attention to the traumatic character of Oppenheimer’s childhood, and to his extremely ambivalent relation to his Jewishness, an ambivalence that partly explains Oppenheimer’s affinity for the universalist promise of science.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499242627445,"sku":"9780300180466","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300180466.jpg?v=1792424530"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-david-rieff.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}