Crowded With Genius

James Buchan

HarperCollins, Publishers

A Parish Of Rich Women

Upon his return home from Palestine, Adam Murray feels alienated from British society, but another trip to Palestine convinces him the two societies are much alike

A Parish of Rich Women

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Hamish Hamilton, London

Novelist Buchan, a former correspondent for the Financial Times, traces the meaning of money since its beginning. He discusses money in its various formats, emphasizing that money itself is not just an object but "an outcome of a vast mountain of social arrangements." Various scenarios depict the role of money in love, war, religion, and other areas of human culture. Buchan uses many historical and literary works to clarify the perception of money throughout the ages, relying on Aristotle, Columbus, Shakespeare, John Law, Marx, and Keynes, to name a few, in these stimulating discussions. Although he writes in a scholarly style, Buchan his many suspenseful and intriguing passages.

Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Davy Chadwick

British & Irish

Scribner

Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World

How - in the eighteenth century - did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and smelly town, consisting of just two long streets and 40,000 inhabitants, make such an impression on its age and on ours? So that Voltaire wrote with a dash of malice that 'today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening'? In just 50 years Edinburgh had more impact on our ideas than any town of its size since the Athens of Socrates.

History

World

John Murray

How did a notoriously poor, alcoholic, violent and smelly town, consisting of 40,000 inhabitants, make such an impression on its age and on ours? So that Voltaire wrote, with more than a dash of malice that 'today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening'? The leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment - David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Cullen and James Hutton - transformed the way we treat our perceptions and feelings as well as mechanical processes, sickness and health, trade, money, relations between the sexes, the purposes of existence and government. In just fifty years, Edinburgh produced more philosophical landmarks than a town of its size since the Athens of Socrates. In an account of exceptionally close focus, James Buchan resurrects every aspect of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, and shows how a succession of disasters demolished old systems of thought and behaviour to set Edinburgh's men and women off in strange new directions. Capital of the Mind opens a fascinating window on a glorious time when Edinburgh was the most beautiful and philosophical city in Europe.

Capital of the Mind : How Edinburgh Changed the World

Our Lady Of The Snows (hardcover)

Headline Publishing Group

Gate of Air

Genre Fiction

Quercus

A myth-busting insider's account of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that destroyed US influence in the country and transformed the politics of the Middle East and the world. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was one of the seminal events of our time. It inaugurated more than thirty years of war in the Middle East and fostered an Islamic radicalism that shapes foreign policy in the United States and Europe to this day. Drawing on his lifetime of engagement with Iran, James Buchan explains the history that gave rise to the Revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters displaced the Shah with little diffi-culty. Mystifyingly to outsiders, the people of Iran turned their backs on a successful Westernized government for an amateurish religious regime. Buchan dispels myths about the Iranian Revolution and instead assesses the historical forces to which it responded. He puts the extremism of the Islamic regime in perspective: a truly radical revolution, it can be compared to the French or Russian Revolu-tions. Using recently declassified diplomatic papers and Persian-language news reports, diaries, memoirs, interviews, and theological tracts, Buchan illumi-nates both Khomeini and the Shah. His writing is always clear, dispassionate, and informative.

Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences

Europe

John Murray Publishers, Ltd.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a turning-point in modern history. The destruction of the Iranian monarchy not only upset the political order in the Middle East and brought on a quarter-century of warfare, but introduced a new way to look at history. In Days of God James Buchan lives each moment of the revolution through the eyes of ordinary people as he tries to answer his own troubling question: why did his friends, with their peculiar Iranian dreaminess and charm, act the way they did?

Middle East

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Books by James Buchan