Elvis Is Titanic: Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq - Rilegato

Klaus, Ian

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0307264564 ISBN 13: 9780307264565

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2007

Riassunto

In the spring of 2005, 26-year-old Ian Klaus arrived at Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. This is the poignant, funny, and eye-opening story of the semester he spent there teaching U.S. history and English in the thick of the war for hearts and minds. Inspired by the volunteerism of so many young Americans after 9/11, Klaus exchanges the abstraction of duty for an intimate involvement with individual lives. Among the Kurds, a perennially oppressed but seemingly indomitable people, he encounters both openhearted welcome and resentful suspicion--and soon learns firsthand how far even a trusted stranger can venture in this society. With assignments ranging from Elvis to Ellington, from baseball to Tocqueville, Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for charges initially far more attuned to our pop culture than our national ideals--and begins his own reexamination of truths we hold to be self-evident.--From publisher description.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

“Captivating . . . A fascinating exploration of a society jolted by great change . . . Klaus imbues the narrative with an easy humor . . . [and he] also has a fine eye for the characters who are churned up in war’s aftermath . . . Klaus, who is not yet 30, displays greater insight than many authors twice his age and twice as self-important. Elvis is Titanic beautifully captures the quotidian and often chaotic realities behind how history is made.”
—Niall Stanage, The Wall Street Journal
“Instructive and valuable . . . Readers will meet a sophisticated and motivated classroom of students . . . Klaus’s sensitivity to his environs, his knowledge of the region’s history, and his even-handed observations take his narrative beyond simple memoir.”
—Stephen J. Lyons, Chicago Sun-Times
“Earnest, thorough and elegantly written. The author’s knowledge of Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq (and the Western canon, for that matter) is prodigious.”
—Meredith Bryan, The New York Observer
“America’s unspoken overseas empire is not solely the handiwork of soldiers. Many civilians, too, have played their part in exporting the American idea of freedom to faraway foreign countries. In Elvis Is Titanic, Ian Klaus has written a marvelous memoir of his time as a teacher of American history in Iraq, as that country teetered precariously on the threshold between liberation and civil war. Valiantly trying to explain the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. to a classroom of incredulous Kurds, Klaus discovers what it really means to fight the battle for ‘hearts and minds.’ Disarmingly honest, seriously funny and utterly absorbing, this book does for Iraq what Graham Greene's The Quiet American did for Vietnam. It will endure as testimony long after this empire is one with Nineveh and Tyre."
–Niall Ferguson, author of Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

“What happens when a Rhodes scholar ventures into Iraqi Kurdistan in the hope of teaching the history of American civilization? Is he risking his life on a futile conceit? How can his generation of Americans, schooled in democratic idealism, possibly hope to connect with young Kurds, survivors of oppression caught now in the struggle between modernity and Islamic fundamentalism? Ian Klaus brings us face to face, one on one, with his students, ‘souls on hold’ he calls them. The encounters, sensitively related, are at once revealing, moving, hilarious, and exciting. This is an important book, the very pith of history.”
–Tina Brown

L'autore:

Ian Klaus, who now lives in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote for publications across the United States while he was in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in history at Harvard.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0307264564
• ISBN 13: 9780307264565
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 240