The Fanatic

The impressive debut from an exciting new Scottish voice – a stunning novel about history, identity and redemption. A no. 2 best-seller in Scotland.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (Edmond Burke) Or for selfish people to obstruct those who are trying to do the right thing. This book probes the Islamic fanatics' end game - convert or die, they tell the West. The fanatics see our very success as a mortal threat to their own perverted version of the "pure" Islam world over which they thirst to rule. But the book also probes the feckless French and foolish liberals who are so wrapped up in their own agendas that they stand between forceful leadership and the real enemy at the gates. Bin Laden is perfectly willing to brainwash his followers into sacrificing their lives for the illusion of eternal paradise. Not that Bin Laden and his chief lieutenants are ready to die for their cause just yet. They want others to die so that they can live out their fantasies of a world converted in their image. How does he get away with it? By skillfully preying on the weaknesses of others, including the short-sighted who are blinded by their greed, cowardice or folly. This is where the feckless French and foolish liberals come in. As the book explains, tyrants like Saddam Hussein suit the fanatic Islamists' ambitions perfectly. All of this and more were staring the feckless French and foolish liberals in the face. But they turned a blind eye. At a crucial point in the history, they chose a course even worse then doing nothing. They obstructed decisive action against the growing cancer to serve their own agendas. In their own way and for their own selfish reasons, the French (along with other European elites) and the liberal establishment have trouble dealing with decisive assertions of U.S. power. They want to bring the United States down to a level that is indistinguishable from any other country. In a world of moral ambivalence that the feckless French and the foolish liberals are used to inhabiting, the United States government is no less to blame for what happened on September 11th than the terrorists and dictators who support them. This book connects the dots in the concerted strategy to fight the War on Terror that the liberals and French refuse to see and explains how George Bush's decision to remove Saddam Hussein after twelve years of inaction on the part of the United Nations was an essential part of that strategy

This provocative collection of short stories charts the growth of a generation from the liberating irreverence of the late 1970s to the dilemmas of responsibility and fidelity of the 1990s. The stories resonate with Hanif Kureishi's dead-on observations of human passion and folly, his brilliant depiction of seedy locales and magical characters, and his original, wicked sense of humor.

Proposes that the murderous violence that has riven our society is driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred. Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents a vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war. - from publisher information.

Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Opera lovers are an intense lot, Benzecry discovers in his look at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires.

My Friend the Fanatic is a portrait of the world's most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, and the fourth most populous nation in the World. A nation once synonymous with tolerance that now finds itself in the midst of a profound shift toward radical Islam. The portrait is painted through the travels of a pair of unlikely protagonists. Sadanand Dhume, the author, is a foreign correspondent—a Princeton-educated Indian atheist with a fondness for literary fiction and an interest in economic development. His companion, Herry Nurdi, is a young Islamist who hero worships Osama bin Laden. Their travels span mosques and discotheques, prison cells and dormitories, sacred volcanoes and temple ruins.

Alan Gewirth's Reason and Morality, in which he set forth the Principle of Generic Consistency, is a major work of modern ethical theory that, though much debated and highly respected, has yet to gain full acceptance. Deryck Beyleveld contends that this resistance stems from misunderstanding of the method and logical operations of Gewirth's central argument. In this book Beyleveld seeks to remedy this deficiency. His rigorous reconstruction of Gewirth's argument gives its various parts their most compelling formulation and clarifies its essential logical structure. Beyleveld then classifies all the criticisms that Gewirth's argument has received and measures them against his reconstruction of the argument. The overall result is an immensely rich picture of the argument, in which all of its complex issues and key moves are clearly displayed and its validity can finally be discerned. The comprehensiveness of Beyleveld's treatment provides ready access to the entire debate surrounding the foundational argument of Reason and Morality. It will be required reading for all who are interested in Gewirth's theory and deontological ethics and will be of central importance to moral and legal theorists.