Word: dictatorship
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Caracas in the 1950s and 1960s was a modernist boomtown. Croesan oil wealth and a powerful military dictatorship together created massive urban planning projects, built in the modernist style both by renowned American architects, like Philip Johnson, and South American practitioners of the style. The city was once called “pedacito del cielo”—a little piece of heaven. This is not just a nickname, but also seems to refer to the unfulfilled dream of a modernist utopia. Now, slums surround many of the geometric concrete surfaces and glass curtain walls...
...secret mentioned in the first act of a tragedy, the Boger swing sits on the desk waiting patiently to go off.But Kertész’s novella is constructed around a vacuum of action, creating such a vast amount of unreleased pressure that not only does the dictatorship implode because of it, but so does the idea of any finite distinction between the human and the inhuman. The only action leaves two innocent victims “sagging on their fetters like empty sacks” and the reader trying in vain to shake off chills...
...thought of that family frequently. People outside China always want to know what will spur political change, what will turn an authoritarian dictatorship to democracy. Conventional wisdom says it happens when a society develops a solid middle class with rising expectations. That, anyway, is the story of Taiwan and South Korea. But in China, my neighbors, even though they are often, in private, bitterly critical of the government, seem content to leave it well enough alone. Having made the Short March, they have a vested interest in stability...
...caught in a struggle against an entrenched authoritarian regime on one hand and a rising, chauvinistic Islamist movement on the other. "This is a battle for democracy," he explains during one in a series of interviews with TIME. "Writing is part of that, so I am inside the battle. Dictatorship has an understandable fear of real culture as opposed to the state's culture. Once people are exposed to real culture, they will ask about their rights." He argues that authoritarianism is at the root of many of Egypt's social ills, including the spread of extremist Islam...
...novel displays Al Aswany's ability to portray in the most subtle, realistic manner the complex forces that shape such lives. With Chicago, he has produced a highly political diatribe against dictatorship, reflecting the rising calls for democracy in Egypt at the time he was writing it. The climax of the book unfolds with a scheme by Nagi, the medical student, and Salah, the professor, to stage a small protest during an official visit to the U.S. by the unnamed Egyptian President. Having been selected to give a short speech welcoming the President to Chicago, Salah intends to read...