Amsterdam
geschiedenis van de meest vrijzinnige stad ter wereld
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4.1 • 15 Ratings
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- € 9,99
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- € 9,99
Publisher Description
Russell Shorto Amsterdam
Amsterdam is wereldberoemd. Iedereen kent de grachten en de Wallen, de musea en de coffeeshops, de fietsers en de trams, en natuurlijk de tolerantie die al eeuwenlang een voorbeeld is voor de hele westerse wereld. Schrijver en journalist Russell Shorto verbleef enkele jaren in Amsterdam, op zoek naar de oorsprong van deze tolerantie.
In Amsterdam vertelt Russell Shorto de rijke geschiedenis van de meest vrijzinnige stad ter wereld. Van de aanleg van de eerste grachten in de veertiende eeuw tot het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw, waarin de zo gekoesterde vrijzinnige idealen onder vuur liggen.
`Shorto houdt van de stad, ik van zijn boek. Job Cohen
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shorto conjures the anything-goes spirit of contemporary Amsterdam, with its pot-smoking and red-light districts, from the city's fascinating past as a major port city. Amsterdam, to Shorto, was not only the first city in Europe to develop the cultural and political foundations of what we now call liberalism "a society focused on the concerns and comforts of individuals,... run by individuals acting together," and tolerant of "religion, ethnicity, or other differences" but also an exporter of these beliefs to the rest of Europe and the New World. Shorto composes biographical sketches of these originators (Rembrandt, Spinoza) and exporters (John Locke, the Dutch East India Company) as he guides readers on a narrative tour of Amsterdam's intellectual history, its rise from a sleepy site of religious pilgrimage to the center of a trading empire into the present. Shorto's examination of Dutch tolerance also focuses on its failures, including an examination of collaboration with Nazi occupiers during WWII, and its current struggle to integrate its "immigrant underclass" into a more egalitarian multicultural life. Shorto's brilliant follow-up to his previous book on Dutch Manhattan (The Island at the Center of the World) is an expertly told history of a city of new, shocking freedoms and the tough-minded people that developed them.
