Edinburgh Taster: William and Kenneth Hopper, Susan Richards and Fatos Lubonja
If you can’t make it to the Edinburgh Literary Festival this year the Frontline Club is offering a unique opportunity to hear some of the authors while they are in London.
William and Kenneth Hopper’s predictions of economic collapse in The Puritan Gift were borne out in 2008 and their analysis of managerial culture and the role of Puritan work ethic played in America’s commercial and economic success has much to teach us about the future.
The brothers warn that the continued loss of those core values will put future prosperity and security at risk and argue for a reconnection with them in order to reshape the economic future. They also believe that the origins of the Japanese Economic Miracle provide important lessons for developing countries today, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
In recognition of their Kenneth Hopper and William Hopper were appointed Visiting Fellows in Manchester Business School in the Faculty of Humanities from 2008 to 2011.
Fatos Lubonja, the award-winning Albanian writer who will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August will be at the Frontline Club on 25 August to discuss his extraordinary memoir, Second Sentence: Inside the Albanian Gulag, about his imprisonment in Communist Albania where he discovered that prisoners could be convicted of a second sentence while already serving their first. A compelling portrait of an impenetrable and merciless political system that also highlights the preciousness of freedom of speech.
Susan Richards travelled Russia over a period of decades, meeting an eclectic group of
characters and discovering a seldom-seen reality. Her book Lost and Found in Russia explores the heart of this shifting land and peers behind the façade to show
how sometimes, in Russia, reality is very different and demonstrates how in Russia the past and the present cannot be separated. Susan Richards the author of Epics of Everyday Life, which won the P.E.N. Time-Life Award
for Non-Fiction and the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award in 1990. She edits
openDemocracy Russia, part of openDemocracy, the website about global affairs which she co-
founded.
Photo: Nathan Makan.
