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Regarding the Pain of Others
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 2 hrs and 51 mins
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Publisher's summary
Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returned here to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture. How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured - or incited - to violence by the depiction of cruelty?
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity - from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of Blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, and to more contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel, and Palestine, as well as New York City on September 11, 2001.
Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.
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How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust - and features over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.
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Where are the photos?
- By Cassandra on 01-17-22
By: Harald Jähner, and others
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Judgment Before Nuremberg
- The Holocaust in the Ukraine and the First Nazi War Crimes Trial
- By: Greg Dawson
- Narrated by: Gary Dikeos
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
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When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, of Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.
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Don’t Insult Your Audience
- By Michael Richards on 01-21-22
By: Greg Dawson
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Fracture
- Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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When the Great War ended in 1918, the West was broken. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced by both sides. Shell-shocked and traumatized, the West faced a world it no longer recognized: The old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The world hurtled forward on gears and crankshafts, and terrifying new ideologies arose from the wreckage of past belief.
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Lots of good trivia information
- By Jean on 07-23-15
By: Philipp Blom
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Russia
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- By: Gregory Carleton
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
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No nation is a stranger to war, but for Russians war is a central part of who they are. Their "motherland" has been the battlefield where some of the largest armies have clashed, the most savage battles have been fought, the highest death tolls paid. Having prevailed over Mongol hordes and vanquished Napoleon and Hitler, many Russians believe no other nation has sacrificed so much for the world.
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A bit dry and academic
- By Mike From Mesa on 07-16-17
By: Gregory Carleton
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War Without Mercy
- Race and Power in the Pacific War
- By: John W. Dower
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
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War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War - race - while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan."
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War without Mercy
- By rbergen on 05-02-17
By: John W. Dower
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The News
- A User's Manual
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
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Overall
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The news is everywhere. We can’t stop constantly checking it on our computer screens, but what is this doing to our minds? We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton (author of the best-selling The Architecture of Happiness), but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives.
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Quit the news
- By Bett Bollhoefer on 05-16-15
By: Alain de Botton
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The Long Hangover
- Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past
- By: Shaun Walker
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.
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Fascinating and fair book on Putin's Russia
- By MyPublicName on 02-16-18
By: Shaun Walker
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Year Zero
- A History of 1945
- By: Ian Buruma
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
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Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the greatdrama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and anew, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come across Asia and all of continental Europe. It was the greatest global powervacuum in history, and out of the often vicious power struggles thatensued emerged the modern world as we know it.
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Great historical overview
- By marykk on 10-14-13
By: Ian Buruma
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Cultural Amnesia
- Notes in the Margin of My Time
- By: Clive James
- Narrated by: Clive James
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
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The Great Escape
- Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
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The stunning story of the breathtaking journey of nine extraordinary men from Budapest to the New World, what they experienced along their dangerous route, and how they changed America and the world. In a style both personal and historically groundbreaking, acclaimed author Kati Marton (born in Budapest) tells the tale of their youth in Budapest's Golden Age of the early 20th century, their flight, and their lives of extraordinary accomplishment, danger, glamour, and poignancy.
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very interesting, well-narrated
- By D. Littman on 12-17-06
By: Kati Marton
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Against interpretation, like, literally.
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fantastic
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Enthralling. Impossible to remove my headphones.
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Veinticinco años después de Sobre la fotografía, Susan Sontag regresó al estudio de la representación visual de la guerra y la violencia. ¿Cómo nos afecta el espectáculo del sufrimiento ajeno? ¿Nos hemos acostumbrado a la crueldad? Para ello, la autora examina la serie de Goya Los desastres de la guerra, las fotografías de la guerra civil estadounidense y de los campos de concentración nazis, y las horribles imágenes contemporáneas de Bosnia, Sierra Leona, Ruanda, Israel y Palestina, así como de la ciudad de Nueva York el 11 de septiembre de 2001.
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history repeats itself
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
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"I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early 30s. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.
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Performed well. But...
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clear but mispronounced
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Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history.
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finally
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What listeners say about Regarding the Pain of Others
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- WK
- 07-22-19
not very insightful
Many worthwhile thoughts are presented here but nothing particularly original. Sontag presents a somewhat obvious and cynical case for our relationship with war and war photography; and how it distorts, fictionalizes, romanticizes and detaches us from the suffering of others. The tired implication of war belonging solely in the domain of men and boys is almost laughable at times. But it's short and well written.
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- Anonymous User
- 05-06-19
The reading was way too fast, not pleasant
Intersting,
Still thinking about it.
Don't know if I like it or disappointed that it felt like a mirror of history events throght a lens with no filter or a conclusion.
The reading was way too fast and not pleasant.
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- Crazy cat lady
- 03-10-19
Dope read.
This was a dope read. a nice juxtaposition with Bourdieu's work. Really dug her use of Ernst Junger, too.
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- Isabel
- 12-16-20
Profound analys on war photographs
As someone else wrote, this audiobook is trash if listened at "normal speed" I had to listen to it at 0.8x and it surprisingly worked marvels. The story is really good, however it is not the kind of literature I enjoy.
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- Vandra
- 02-16-12
Terrible recording
How did the narrator detract from the book?
The recording sounded like it was playing at double speed, but slowing down the play time had it dragging and catching. It's really hard to listen to such serious (and great) content when it sounds like it's being read by the chipmunks. I would recommend against buying this audiobook.
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10 people found this helpful