Payback
Schulden und die Schattenseite des Wohlstands
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Margaret Atwood erklärt uns mit faszinierender Klarheit, wie maßgeblich das Konzept der Schuld – im ökonomischen und im moralischen Sinn – unser Denken und Verhalten seit Anbeginn der menschlichen Kultur prägt und bestimmt. Mit Witz und Sachkenntnis verfolgt sie ihr Thema quer durch Zeiten und Disziplinen. Am Ende entlässt sie uns mit einer zentralen Frage: Was sind wir Menschen einander, was sind wir unserem Planeten schuldig?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atwood's book is a weird but wonderful m lange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research. "Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due," Atwood observes on this conversational stroll, from the homely and familiar "notion of fairness" and "notion of equivalent values" in Kingsley's Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's Eumenides. "Any debt involves a story line," Atwood points out as she leads the reader into "the nineteenth century debt as plot really rages through the fictional pages," and ruin is financial for men, but sexual for women. Things get even darker on "the shadow side" where "the nastier forms of debt and credit" debtors' prisons, loan sharks and rebellions abide. Atwood is encyclopedic in her range, following threads wherever they lead credit cards and computer programs, Sin Eaters, Saint Nicholas, Star Trek, the history of pawnshops and of taxation, Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty and Dante's Divine Comedy, Christ and Faust and a consistently captivating storyteller.
