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158 books match the query 'End' and 3 start with b
Battling to the End
Conversations with Benoit ChantreRené Girard
Michigan State University Press, 2010
Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the Prussian military theoretician who wrote On War, is known above all for his famous dictum: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In René Girard’s view, however, the strategist’s treatise offers up a more disturbing truth to the reader willing to extrapolate from its most daring observations: with modern warfare comes the insanity of tit-for-tat escalation, which political institutions have lost their ability to contain. Having witnessed the Napoleonic Wars firsthand, Girard argues, Clausewitz intuited that unbridled “reciprocal action” could eventually lead foes to total mutual annihilation. Haunted by the Franco-German conflict that was to ravage Europe, in Girard’s account Clausewitz is a prescient witness to the terrifying acceleration of history. Battling to the End issues a warning about the apocalyptic threats hanging over our planet and delivers an authoritative lesson on the mimetic laws of violence.
Beginning to End the Climate Crisis
A History of Our FutureLuisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning
Brandeis University Press, 2023
“Act as though your house is on fire. Because it is.” Following Greta Thunberg, millions of young climate activists have been taking to the streets around the globe as part of the Fridays For Future movement. They demand that we “unite behind the science,” as, for too long, climate scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about rising temperatures, tipping points, and the devastating consequences of extreme weather—but politicians do nothing.
So how do you begin to end the climate crisis? Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning begin by telling stories. Neubauer cofounded the youth climate activist group in Germany and has become its most prominent voice. In this book she and Repenning weave in personal accounts of their evolution as climate activists with a thorough analysis of how climate change impacts their generation, and what every one of us can and must do about it. The young and old in the United States and around the world can learn valuable lessons from their European counterparts.
Bike Lanes Are the End of Us
Alexander S. Dawson
Vanderbilt University Press, 2027
Bike lanes are aspirational projects. They speak to a series of dreams about what North American cities could be, especially in and around an environmentalist and Europhilic vision (the latter having a very long history in the Americas). And yet, cycling infrastructure is built on or alongside the roads and modes of transport that came before it and maps onto preexisting forms of racial and spatial inequality. In many North American communities where social ties have long been fraying, efforts to build bike lanes have replicated the social crises that we see in other spaces.
Amsterdam’s oft-cited bike lanes are integrated within a system of regional trains, buses, and subways, allowing riders to park their bikes and engage in multimodal commuting, and are in turn the product of a social safety net that is among the most robust on the planet. However, in American settings, these projects have been slow to launch and their results have been uneven, in part due to spatial inequality in our cities, and in part because suburbanites and people with means have grown more attached to their private cars, rather than less so, in recent decades.
Recent controversial bike lane initiatives in Mexico City and Vancouver show how such projects not only create uproar among monied urbanites but may actually displace entire modes of transportation used primarily by marginalized residents (especially in the case of Mexico City), when the wish to imitate European models defeats efforts to see a North American city for what it is. In comparing Mexico City and Vancouver, Bike Lanes Are the End of Us traces how bike lane politics collide with distinct racial, spatial, and infrastructural realities to produce “green” reforms that can reinforce existing inequalities just as readily as they promise greater mobility.