Libros del Zorzal

“A Latin American government may fling their whole diplomatic machinery to the rescue of a member of the military accused of torture or genocide –who is unexpectedly arrested during a naive visit to Europe–, or send an airplane to take him back home, but does absolutely nothing to repatriate (and employ) thousands of scientists exiled in the First World. Of course, this is explained by the simple fact that those governments perfectly know what torturers and murderers are for, and have a social role for them, while they are clueless about what a scientist is or how to connect him to the gears of his society. These countries may at the most have a little scientific research just like they have Bengal tigers in their zoos, but by no means they have science.” 

Marcelino Cereijido has a PhD in medicine from the University of Buenos Aires and is a professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Mexico’s Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Avanzados (Center for Advanced Studies and Research). He has published hundreds of papers and a dozen books –some of them are specifically about of his area of work, while others are essays or informative books on disequilibriums, time, death and the science-society relationship.

Laura Reinking studied literature at Mexico’s Universidad Iberoamericana. She specializes in business affairs’s difussion and regularly publishes articles about communications, especially their ever-changing technologies and their impact on citizens.

“If the inner farewell has already taken place, the last days in one’s country won’t bring rage and rebelliousness but, rather, tenderness. It is good to fix those tender images in one’s mind: they own that lucidity which only appears during farewells. One thousand times we’ve seen the cafe on the corner, the tree in the yard, the face of the neighbor. But the look of the person about to leave is an amazingly sharp black and white photograph. It is also good to make lists of what we like best, to take those items with us across the river, the cordillera or whatever border we’re about to cross; lists of things or people we would have never thought about if we weren’t planning to leave.” 

Al que se va is addressed to those who decide to abandon the country but also to those who stay –head and tail of the same uprooting phenomenon. The author analyzes the benefits and hardships of being an emigrant, expelled from one’s own land by an economic system which “exiles”. 

Alicia Dujovne Ortiz has long worked as a journalist with newspapers from Argentina, Mexico, Spain and France. She has published several books, some of which are Eva Perón, la biografía (worldly acknowledged and translated into many languages), El árbol de la gitana, Mireya and the biographies María Elena Walsh and Maradona soy yo.

“As a consequence of the increasing consumption of fossil fuel, the carbon dioxide emissions have increased and will increase exponentially, as will their concentrations in the atmosphere. The resulting global warming is likely to turn into the most devastating extinction of species of the last millions of years and, if it persists, the Earth will become something radically different from what it is today. These changes will entail catastrophes and conflicts, some of which we can already observe.” 

With scientific rigor but a clear language, the author explains and analyses the causes and effects of the climatic change. Searching into a background of political and economic interests, he reveals the urgent need to confront this potential source of catastrophes, which affect not only the environment as we know it but also the life of man itself.

Vicente Barros has a PhD in Meteorological Science, is a Chief Researcher at the Conicet and a Climatology Professor at the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Natural Sciences, where he heads the Master in Environmental Science. He has written more than one hundred papers on climatic problems, half of which have been published in international scientific magazines. He took part in the making of one of the chapters of the Third Report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climatic Change in 2001.

This book is about those things that matter to us –difficulties, joy, sorrow, fear: things which are present in the different moments of our life. Love, work, family, old age, illness; issues or dramas, as the author says in the prologue, which daily life can easily turn into difficult matters, and which we often can’t perceive in their true dimension. 

Dr. Luis Chiozza, also the author of ¿Por qué enfermamos? (Why Do We Fall Ill?) –translated into English, Portuguese and Italian–, with more than 30000 sold books and more than 15 published titles, writes these “compositions on what matters to us” in a reflective, non-conclusive mode, bringing us nearer to simple, everyday subjects all of us have to face and which often result in illness. 

This book, however, is not about illness: from his vast experience in the field of psychotherapy, Dr. Chiozza reflects and describes moments, situations and feelings, providing us with some keys to understand our own things of life.

A lot has been said and will continue to be said about anorexia. However, this ever-present discussion does nothing but solidify some prejudgments, hindering the critical judgement and freezing thought. Being thin is an aesthetic ideal and at the same time a threatening stigma for the young women who subject themselves to the current model of beauty. Anorexia, that old story, now appears under the mask of what is fashionable, trying to confuse us by hiding its timeless face. But if we stop to consider the textual images this book has to offer, we’ll have to admit that face is unmasked chapter after chapter, through the different testimonies provided by history. 

El país de Nuncacomer is more than an illustrated book. Here the meaning is revealed through the images, as contrasting emotions are invoked by the interplay between light and shade that this amazing book literally proposes. And as if it wasn’t enough… who would have thought we’d meet the real Jack the Ripper in Nevereat? In what can be seen as a very effective reunion, words illustrate the text and, in turn, the text illustrates the drawings. This original discourse is at once art, erudition and practical knowledge.

Don’t give an anorexic food… give her this book.

In this work, Silvia Bleichmar analyzes a variable which is not present in official statistics but whose growth rate is alarming: the Dolor País (“Country Pain”) index. Somehow answering the notion of “Country Risk”, which is measured by international consultancies and aimed at sectors of high economic concentration, the author delves into the causes of the outburst and examines the different psychological components of a society in crisis.

Silvia Bleichmar has a Doctorate degree in Psychoanalysis from the University of Paris VII, and teaches at universities of Argentina, Spain, France and Mexico. She is also a founding member of the Buenos Aires School of Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis, and directs the Trabajos del Psicoanálisis magazine. Among her numerous published works are the books En los orígenes del sujeto psíquico and La fundación de lo inconsciente.

Rights sold for first edition: France (Danger Public-Le Félin)

There is a September 11 which brings to mind an instant memory: the attack to New York’s Twin Towers. That was the beginning of a new era, marked by terrorism and the global vigilance of George Bush, Jr.’s gendarmery.

El 11 de septiembre… de 1973 is the story of the beginning of the Chilean tragedy. During that day in 1973 Augusto Pinochet’s herds, with the unqualified support of the Nixon & Kissinger association, turned Santiago’s streets into a bloodbath. The resulting scores of exiles, killed and disappeared people would soon spread to the whole Chilean territory. 

Both September 11 have to do with falls: one is the fall of democratic socialism; the other, the fall of capitalism’s greatest symbol. Both were violent events. Chile’s military coup was the starting point of the extreme violence unleashed in South America and the victory of capitalism over socialism all over the world.

Pavón is also the author of many articles in relation to the Argentine crisis, dealing with issues such as the rediscovering of barter, the fusion of religions, poverty and diets, new social movements –such as the picketers and the popular assemblies–, the World Social Forum in Argentina, the exodus of local scientists, contraband in the Paraguayan border, the new language of the crisis in Argentina, trash as a mirror of Argentine society and psychological effects of the crisis.

Rights sold for first edition: France (Danger Public-Le Félin)

What is the distinct quality of human beings? What is it that makes them different from animals or machines? Moving in a field built from different perspectives –such as psychoanalysis, biology, physics, anthropology and even philosophy and history–, the author comes up with a novel proposal: human beings are, actually, “failed” animals, judging by the way they capture the world around them. This would render them capable of connecting with something their logic can not understand: the unsubstantial. That glory or perdition of the human beings, the possibility of going beyond the substance, turns out to be their decisive trait –the source of both their creative ability and their constant need to disturb the environment they inhabit. Through this original viewpoint, the book deals with relationships, psychoanalysis, upbringing and even the subject of the emergence of the human being.

Julio Moreno is a medical doctor, graduated from the University of Buenos Aires. He began as a scientific researcher in the field of neurosciences and in 1976 he started his training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He is a regular member of the Buenos Aires’ Psychoanalysis Society and the Argentine Society of Group Therapy.

Rights sold for first edition: Italy (Edizioni Borla)

Twenty-two centuries after Euclid wrote The Elements, one of the greatest contemporary mathematicians scanned from a clear an original perspective the logic of the Euclidean geometry. Beppo Levi (1875-1961), born in Turin, disciple of the main representatives of the Italian mathematical school like Corrado Segre, Giuseppe Peano and Vito Volterra, teached since 1906 at the Universities of Cagliari, Parma and Bologna.

Expelled from his post in 1939 after the enactment of the racial laws in the fascist Italia, Levi emigrates to Argentina. Thanks to an initiative of the Dean Cortés Plá and Julio Rey Pastor (great encourager of mathematics in Argentina and Spain), he settles in the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, where he leads the “Instituto de Matemática” and works in the academic upbringing of many young scientist like Luis A. Santaló, Pedro Zadunaisky and Mario Bunge, among others.

It is in Argentina where Beppo Levi writes (in spanish) and publishes Reading Euclid (1947), work that made him feel specially proud. This work remained lost for more than 50 years. In its lines he looks over the mythical Elements of the famous Greek mathematician with an agile and accessible style. In the introductory chapter, La Geometría y el Pensamiento Socrático [Geometry and Socratic Thought], Levi shows how the “axiomatic method” that is the base of the Elements sums up centuries of effort and previous philosophical thoughts. After this, the book goes on in the fascinating and deep analysis of the Geometry and Arithmetic of the thirteen books that compose the Elements. 

One of the most remarkable characteristics of Levi was his wide culture. He could stand out in many different areas: Algebraic Geometry, Analysis, Number Theory, Theory of Groups and Logic; he made some researchs in Physics and had always maintain an important care of Didactics. Such an universality may seem today unconceivable, because we are not used to establish a dialogue within and outside the disciplines. 

The curious reader of Leyendo a Euclides can follow, with the help of the teacher Levi, the ideas that have constituted the foundations of Mathematics and enjoy a renewed inspiration. He can also gaze at philosophical thought from another perspective and at the pleasant habit of learning without expecting anything in exchange, an aspiration of Euclid that subsists despite the wheel of centuries.

“Recovering such a personality as Beppo Levi and reprinting one of his works –thus making it accessible to the general public– is an undertaking to be enthusiastically celebrated.” Página/12, 10/2000.

“Beppo Levi, one of the 20th century’s most important mathematicians, presents us with the attraction and seductiveness of the Euclidean model.” Clarín, 05/01.

“Reading Euclid’s text under Beppo Levi’s guidance is a greatly formative experience.” La Nación, 07/2000.

“Guided by master Levi, the curious reader will be able to go through those ideas which laid the foundations of mathematics, thus setting out towards a new and renewed inspiration.” Le Monde Diplomatique, 10/2000.

Rights sold for first edition: France (Éditions Agone)

“Because of its unique, indestructible structure –which no market can pressurize– language is a threatening danger for the mercantilist civilization. Thus, given the language’s resistance, those in power find it urgent to make it invisible and inaudible, to cut us off from that unconscious and solidary source of pleasure brilliantly present in popular speech; in jokes –which sprout like spatter in conversation with friends–; in the new, beautiful songs; in those authentic creations which appear everyday at a school’s yard, at the family table, in the chat held by a group of teenagers.” 

The author claims that the rescuing of words isn’t just a question of philological criticism or literary talent but the requirement of a new ecological awareness, an alert against the attack of the forces that stop us from getting in touch with that language which gives way to criticism, joy, creativity and a deeper connection both with others and with ourselves.

Rights sold to Brasil (Vieira & Lent)