Nexo, Martin Andersen Muir, Jessie:Pelle, the conqueror, 2-vol. set, Volumes I and II; Boyhood; Apprenticeship; The Great Struggle; Daybreak
- gebunden oder broschiert 2014, ISBN: aaff6baab41e8e742575151e228edc90
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: 2014. Hardcover with dustjacket. Brand new book. America's criminal justice system is broken. The United State… Mehr…
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: 2014. Hardcover with dustjacket. Brand new book. America's criminal justice system is broken. The United States punishes at a higher per capita rate than any other country in the world. In the last twenty years, incarceration rates have risen 500 percent. Sentences are harsh, prisons are overcrowded, life inside is dangerous, and rehabilitation programs are ineffective. Police and prosecutors operate in the dark shadows of the legal processÑsometimes resigning themselves to the status quo, sometimes turning a profit from it. The courts define punishment as "time served," but that hardly begins to explain the suffering of prisoners. Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson, a distinguished law professor, diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime. He reveals the veiled pleasure behind the impulse to punish (which confuses our thinking about the purpose of punishment), explains why over time all punishment regimes impose greater levels of punishment than originally intended, and traces a disturbing gap between our ability to quantify pain and the precision with which penalties are handed down. Ferguson turns the spotlight from the debate over legal issues to the real plight of prisoners, addressing not law professionals but the American people. Do we want our prisons to be this way? Or are we unaware, or confused, or indifferent, or misinformed about what is happening? Acknowledging the suffering of prisoners and understanding what punishers do when they punish are the first steps toward a better, more just system. Robert A. Ferguson is George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism at Columbia University. "If I had won the $400 million Powerball lottery last week I swear I would have ordered a copy for every member of Congress, every judge in America, every prosecutor, and every state prison official and lawmaker who controls the life of even one of the millions of inmates who exist today, many in inhumane and deplorable conditions, in our nation's prisons. The book is potentially transformative not just because it offers policy makers some solutions to the litany of problems they face as they seek ways to reform our broken penal systems. It is transcendent because it posits that America needs a fundamentally revised understanding of the concept of punishment itself if it is to save its soul in these prisonsÉ This book forces prison officials and lawmakers to look inward and see within themselves the dark, unremitting reasons why things have gotten as bad as they have inside our prisons and jails. It says squarely to these political and legal and community leaders (and by extension to their constituents): in seeking to bring retributive justice to bear, in seeking to diminish the prisoner, you have also diminished yourself in ways you are unable or unwilling to admit. Even today, with the whiff of reform in the air, this is a brave and honest message."ÑAndrew Cohen, The Atlantic "Inferno is a passionate, wide-ranging effort to understand and challengeÉour heavy reliance on imprisonment. It is an important book, especially for those (like me) who are inclined towards avoidance and tragic complacency. If Robert A. Ferguson is persuasive on nothing else, he is convincing in his claim that we should look our use of imprisonment full in the face. That means examining the psychological, philosophical, cultural, institutional, and political reasons for locking so many away. This examination can be uncomfortable indeed. Ferguson is relentless in demonstrating how our use of the language of fairness and rationality can obscure vindictiveness and arbitrarinessÉ Ferguson brings this unblinking honesty to other aspects of the punishment system. He insists that we uncover and acknowledge the pleasure people can take in retribution. He shows how the sterile influence of legal positivism has helped to strip legal language of its moral componentÉ His book is too balanced and thoughtful to be disregarded."ÑRobert F. Nagel, The Weekly Standard "The book's descent into the frightening depths of criminal punishment leaves us nearly despondentÉ Ferguson's major re-envisioning of what incarceration offers us is a chance to turn our present incarcerative hell into a purgative place where hope of redemption can still surviveÉ Ferguson's book opens our eyes in the darkness and points to a possible exit. It should be required reading for judges, legislators, politicians, prison authorities and all of us who are democratically responsible for the inferno that together we have created."ÑFrancis R. Herrmann, America "This is less a public-policy book than a deeper exploration of what it means to punishÉ So much of Ferguson's project is an attempt to bring readers closer to understanding what it's like to fall into the maw of the justice systemÑthat's why he has no compunction about bringing in literature (Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and other authors) when nonfiction is too dry or imprecise to do the job. When trying to understand the unimaginable torment of sitting alone in a coffin-like cell for years, or of watching helplessly as one's execution date creeps closer and closer, sometimes fictions comes closer to capturing these horrors better than any ACLU report ever could. Inferno is a wide-ranging effort that covers many subjects. A section on Cesare Beccaria, an 18th-century thinker and reformer on justice issues, is fascinatingÉ Ferguson's descriptions of the hell that is solitary confinement (and the arbitrary, capricious manner in which the incarcerated are subjected to it) are powerfulÉ Inferno still stands out as an interesting, intellectually innovative take on a hellish problem."ÑJesse Singal, The Boston Globe "Probing and thought-provokingÉ The book moves deftly among philosophy, law, and criminology, but its heart and soul is literatureÉ [An] excellent book."ÑJoshua Dubler, The Chronicle of Higher Education "The measurements of the American mania for incarceration are both staggering and, apparently, meaningless. With five per cent of the world's population, the U.S. has 25 per cent of its prisoners, 100,000 of them in mind- and soul-destroying solitaryÉ The heart of this superb book is a search for the deeper reasons, for the roots of the American impulse to punish, and punish severely. FergusonÉmaintains a tone that is remarkably, not accusatory or political, as he roams through Dante and Melville, Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli looking for clues, for the punished are generally silent (or silenced)É The current, self-defeating situationÑwhere the $80-billion-a-year U.S. prison system does nothing so well as it trains and brutalizes future violent offendersÑhas been a generation in the making, and will probably take as long to wind down. But that process can't even begin until Americans start talking about why they do what they do."ÑBrian Bethune, Maclean's "Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment explores the unusual cruelty and vengefulness in our criminal justice system."ÑAndrew Sullivan, The Dish "An important wake-up call about an emerging crisis that threatens to become a human rights scandal of global proportions."ÑKirkus Reviews "Ferguson's descriptions of prisoners' suffering are compelling and thought provokingÉ A must for those working within the criminal justice system, the law, or religion."ÑFrances O. Sandiford, Library Journal "Ferguson succeeds in his aim of provoking thought in this broad assault on the American approach to punishing crimeÉ Ferguson also manages to make the reader identify with the incarcerated, no mean feat in a society where many are more likely to view themselves as a potential victim of crime than a potential inmateÉ The need for punishment is not in question, rather it is the severity, and Ferguson time and again forces the reader to look deeper at an issue to which most people are obliviousÉ For the most part he makes a heavy, complex, and contentious subject accessible to the layperson."ÑPublishers Weekly (starred review) "Robert Ferguson's Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment is a book of searing moral vision. He asks how it is that we have become a nation of punishers who can no longer see the human dignity of the punishedÑindeed, can no longer see the punished at all. Inferno penetrates the veil thrown over America's prison archipelago, insisting that we recognize the psychological, moral, and social consequences to the punished and punishers alike. How, he asks, have we allowed the growth of a punishment regime no less horrifying than that of the Soviet gulags? Ferguson is our Dante, acting as our guide through the travesty that is the American inferno. No one can come away from this book without a sense of their own complicity in the sin of our nation, yet with some hope that though the path forward is difficult, it is not yet completely closed."ÑPaul W. Kahn, Yale Law School "Inferno is a passionate, anguished cry against what is sometimes lamented but more than anything is taken for granted and ignored. He enlists his readers in a serious and sustained effort to reform America's prisons and jails. I know of no book just like Ferguson's."ÑLloyd Weinreb, Harvard Law School, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London England: 2014, New York: H. Holt and Company, 1917. Ex-Library. Hardcover. Good-/None. Our photos depict the actual book offered. Red cloth boards with black titling on front and spine; spines are toned. 1st volume boards are faded much more than 2nd vol. Worn at extremities. White library numbers at spine heels. Bindings are sound. Attractive bookplates on front pastedowns. Rear paper at hinge is broken on 2nd volume. Owner's name pencilled on FFEP of 2nd volume. Verso of title page and half title page bear library notations. Title page and rear end papers have American Swedish Historical Museum blindstamp. Interiors otherwise unmarked. Page edges toned and waterstained on 1st vol. Lacking dustjackets. 8vo. Ships from US; rates may vary from quoted due to double volume. Any variance in estimate to be preapproved by customer. BOOK INFO: 'When the first part of Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conquerer) appeared in 1906, its author, Martin Andersen Nexo, was practically unknown even in his native country, save to a few literary people who knew that he had written some volumes of stories and a book full of sunshiny reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great success with Pelle, very little is known about the writer. He was born in 1869 in one of the poorest corners of Copenhagen, but spent his boyhood in his beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town, Nexo, from which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker's apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resembles many great novels in being largely autobiographical. Later, he gained his livelihood as a bricklayer, until he somehow managed to get to one of the most renowned of our people's high-schools, where he studied so effectually that he was enabled to become a teacher, first at a provincial school, and later in Copenhagen. Pelle consists of four parts, each, except perhaps the last, a complete story in itself. First we have the open-air life of the boy in country surroundings in Bornholm; then the lad's apprenticeship in a small provincial town not yet invaded by modern industrialism and still innocent of socialism; next the youth's struggles in Copenhagen against employers and authorities; and last the man's final victory in laying the foundation of a garden-city for the benefit of his fellow-workers. The background everywhere is the rapid growth of the labor movement; but social problems are never obtruded, except, again, in the last part, and the purely human interest is always kept well before the reader's eye through variety of situation and vividness of characterization. The great charm of the book seems to me to lie in the fact that the writer knows the poor from within; he has not studied them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next, sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would be content to work out into long chapters or whole volumes. His sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves. Pelle has conquered the hearts of the reading public of Denmark; there is that in the book which should conquer also the hearts of a wider public than that of the little country in which its author was born.' (-from a prelim Note by Otto Jespersen, Pofessor of English in the University of Copenhagen, April 1913). 562 and 587 pp., respectively; 13 x 19 cm., H. Holt and Company, 1917<
