| Description |
xv, 407 pages ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 365-391) and index. |
| Contents |
The great backlash -- Malaise -- Dragon Year -- "A wild but welcoming state of anarchy" -- The emperor as revolutionary -- Tory insurrectionists -- A dream of redemption -- The Imam -- With a gun in the hand -- The Prophet's proletariat -- Truth from facts -- The blood of the martyrs -- The Lady -- Thrice banished, thrice restored -- The Evangelist -- Eleven million people -- Back to the future -- The second revolution -- Playing bridge -- Fraternal assistance -- Solidarity -- Khomeini's children -- Jihad -- "The Lady's not for turning" -- Socialism with Chinese characteristics -- The problem with progress. |
| Summary |
"Most historians would have us believe that the 20th century ended and the 21st century began in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of the West over the Soviet Union. But as veteran journalist Christian Caryl shows in Strange Rebels, the world we live in today--and the problems that plague it--can actually be traced back a decade earlier. 1979 was the year that the postwar order evaporated, reshaping the international system and making way for a new era of global history. As Caryl shows, 1979 marked the launch of a global counterrevolution against the secular, progressive consensus that had dominated the world since the end of World War II. At the heart of this countermovement was popular disenchantment with many governments' attempts to create rational, egalitarian societies within their countries; by the 1970s, such utopian quests seemed only to have yielded static, imbalanced systems that allowed local elites to impose rigid, mechanistic political visions on their constituents, undermining traditional sensibilities, beliefs, and freedoms in the process. The epic series of counterrevolutions that took place in 1979 threw off these utopian systems and replaced them with more pragmatic, traditional ones, fundamentally transforming politics and economics across the world. As Caryl vividly proves in Strange Rebels, our modern age--with its politicized religion, post-communist globalization, and laissez-faire economics--would not exist were it not for the events of 1979. Indeed, 1989 itself could not have happened without the counterrevolutions of this fateful year. Weaving together these dramatic stories into a paradigm-shifting revision of our recent history, Caryl offers a startling new argument about the hinge on which the twentieth century turned"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
History, Modern -- 1945-1989.
|
|
World politics -- 1975-1985.
|
| ISBN |
9780465018383 hardcover $28.99 |
|
0465018386 hardcover |
|
