This is Europe: The Way We Live Now
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Description
The authenticity comes from an understated resolution to each piece, and enough of the protagonists find peace or at least hope, so that overall we should be optimistic.
He taxonomises his various woman co-stars via their national identity: the Russians are “hard to read”; the Spanish women not particularly enthusiastic; the French are “jealous” and “moody”; Hungarians “do it just for work”. Ben Judah tells the stories of ordinary Europeans, immigrants and refugees, who are on the margins of society and all striving for something in their own way - a long-distance lorry driver falling in love, a Syrian refugee turned porn star, an Ivorian father desperately trying to make it to France with his son. For all the energy and dynamism that his subjects demonstrate, their often sad and soulless lives in a sense dovetail with more pessimistic and conservative visions of this old continent, such as Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe. A portrait of Europe as you’ve never seen it before, told through twenty extraordinary stories of the people who live and breathe it. In various of these spirals that have been going on since about 2005, various synagogues have been attacked and Jews have been accused or viewed as like metaphors for the state, for the elites, for money, for banking, you know, and whenever things go wrong in the Middle East, because you’ve got predominantly Sephardic Jewish communities in these areas very close to Israel, abutting North African, Arab Berber communities, you get a lot of tension that rises very quickly there.Ben Judah is director of the Transform Europe Initiative and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. He’s actually dreaming of making it to Dubai and of going back to the region where his family are from, that he didn’t want to leave, because he feels it will be better for his wife. And you can see that now they are weeks and even completely different months from when it traditionally took place. One is the scale of immigration and how it’s experienced in all of Europe’s cities, in so many of its fields. Or there’s never really, I think, been a competitive Sephardic, kind of, Mizrachi kind of sugar glaze, sort of rugelach competitor, I guess.
I saw how the historic winemakers of Meursault are really struggling to keep up with the pace of change.I became a journalist because I love the experience of traveling around cities and continents and listening to people with very, very different points of view one after the other. He has interviewed and profiled global figures including French President Emmanuel Macron, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, and former First Lady Melania Trump.
Judah is to be commended for his deep journalistic curiosity and unflinching gaze, yet there is an unexpected irony here. His first book, Fragile Empire (2013), a study of Vladimir Putin's Russia, was published by Yale University Press. I don’t think there’s anything particularly special or interesting about the sort of “great white male wandering around” anymore. As a journalist, he has reported on the Russo-Georgia War; unrest in Central Asia, the Arab Spring, and elections in the United Kingdom, France, and United States.His subjects are revealed to have rich and resilient inner lives however impoverished their backgrounds and circumstances, and whatever stresses press in on them in the present. Ionut, a Romanian truck driver, bore first witness to the early creep of the virus: “Then everything stopped. With unostentatious skill Judah has constructed a book that lacks a discernible narrative arc, resisting turning lives into metaphors, although it begins at dawn with a harbour pilot guiding a vast container ship “filled with… crap” towards the orange glow of Rotterdam, and ends as the late summer sun sets on an Irish country garden where a woman with cancer, “terminal… but stable”, notices the petals fading and awaits what will unfold.
Britain Debrief is a new series of short interviews on Britain in the world brought to you by Ben Judah, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, in Washington DC. Who makes up this population of 750 million, sprawled from Portugal to Ukraine, from Sweden to Turkey?And all of the people in the book are asking themselves, and they’re also asking you, is this the way we want to live now?
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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