Switzerland Books

This is a beautifully presented publication. Its padded hard cover and thick paper quality are matched by excellent colour photographs.

The choices of homes is good: from palaces to simple country cottages. The text for each home is limited because of space for translation into French and German, but its gives a personal background to each building and interior.

It has none of the frilly interiors or silly text that often accompanies the English versions of Scandinavian interior books.

It is an excellent companion to The Swedish Room, which gives a more comprehensive historical perspective.

Martin Suter is my favorite writer of thrillers in the German language. He is a Swiss living abroad (why is it that so many of my favorite writers are expatriates like myself? Nabokov, Sebald, Doeblin, O'Brian, and quite a few more... ). He has a sideline in his publishing career: he writes splendid little satires on business life and the subculture of the 'Schickeria', as we call the yuppies and nouveaux riches in German. His main location is Zurich, which has its fair share of bankers, art dealers, other dealers, confidence men, etc. Actually his best novel is his latest, set in the art market scene in Zurich, but that one is not out in English yet.
The Deal with the Devil is a little burdened by the fact that some of its narrative elements are a little unconventional. Actually I think these parts are very good, but they challenge belief and are not straightforward prose.
The story is about a Zurich divorcee, a young woman struggling to get a foothold. Her husband had tried to kill her and is now in an asylum. She is into the wild life and we get to know her on a bad drug ride. We learn that she has more than a drug problem: she suffers from a peculiar disorder of her senses which makes her confuse smells, sounds and colors. That is a rare problem to have and it takes her and us some getting used to. (It is called synesthesia. Nabokov had it on a smaller scale; you find his comments on it in his autobiography: Speak, Memory.)
She tries to get away from this life and takes a job in a mountain resort hotel in a village. Simple life, right. She finds herself in a difficult web of social relations at her workplace and in the village. Not exactly a haven for troubled souls. Don't think for a moment that you are being led into esoteric experiences, or that this is the umpteenth version of Dr.Faust. This is in the end just plain neurology and criminology.
If you want to keep your ideas of Switzerland intact, as a clean and safe place with nice mountains and clean, reliable people, don't read this.

This genealogical study explores that family that settled Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in 1753. The family left no male heirs. All descendants of this family are through the only daughter. Subsequent research determined that the progenitor of the family was not from Switzerland and may have been Alsatian. (This research was published in the journal NEXUS, vol 10, pp. 152-155 in October 1993. Copies are available directly from the author.)

If you are interested in the empirical implications of the philosophical literature on deliberative politics, then this book is worth buying. Why? Well, it is simply the first attempt to use Habermas' discourse ethics as a research framework to study parliamentary deliberation. This was done over several years in a cross-national basis (US, UK, Germany and Switzerland) by a team led by Prof. Jürg Steiner. Neatly organized, clear, and very convincing, this book should also be read as a source of inspiration for future research (see pp. 166-169), specially in the informal arenas of the public sphere that Habermas so highly praises.

a man who loves a woman and prouds of his work, but couldn't be loved by them.
his story

Kernecker and Flippo's collection of folk tales from German-speaking Europe is wonderful material for students of the language with a basic proficiency in German grammar and vocabulary. It is comprised of seventeen legends, varying in length between one and three pages, each preceeded by a paragraph of background material and followed by a page of review questions. The book includes a small but invaluable German-English glossary, owing to the out-of-the-way nature of some of the vocabulary. Aside from the preface and glossary, this book is written entirely in German. While it is not appropriate for the beginner, it is a highly entertaining and helpful book for more experienced students of German.

I loved this book it was awesome it explains many things about countries and is an indepth look at our society. Even Though it was written years ago it is completely applicable today.
(PS READ THIS (THE GERMAN) VERSION IT KILLS THE ENGLISH VERSION)!!!

Surprisingly, I found this not only a facscinating but instructive study for me as a citizen of democracy in America. For beyond its merit as a description of democratic governance in Switzerland, Fossedal's study persuasively shows that we in the United States are behind the curve in the way we do democracy.

Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address of a century and a half ago affirmed our stand for a government of, by and for the people. Fossedal's study of democracy in Switzerland makes it clear that while we may make a sustainable claim for having a government of and--less convincingly--for the people, ours is not a government at the national level by the people when in the U. S--in contrast to Switzerland--ordinary citizens have no way to establish policy or make laws directly.Having collapsed democracy, conceptually, into exclusively representative democracy,we have so much to wake up to in reading Democracy in Switzerland. And the author's exercise is a powerful wake-up call to this end.

Fossedal is not just a scholar in Democracy in Switzerland, but an advocate of direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy. Or more pointedly, he is an advocate of civically mature democracy which requires ordinary citizens, in a deliberative process to be directly involved in the central act of collective self-governance: establishing policy and making laws..

At the outset, I wondered:how necessary is inclusion of a history albeit brief of the Swiss people? .After reading Part 2. History, I came to see its value. Captivating are the anecdotal stories--scattered throughout the study--derived first hand by interviewing Swiss citizens and officials. These exhibit common sense in both attitude and in their way of doing democracy. They coalesce into persuasive support of Fossedal's thesis that: "the Swiss polity,as an historical and on-going exhibit of the exercise of a deliberative direct democracy is a persuasive rebuttal to the stand of elites from the Greeks of yesterday to the elites of today who hold that exclusionary representative democracy, in itself, is a better form of democracy than a direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy....In a word, an effective rebuttal to the stand; you can't trust the people...Switzerland answers the potential question of the political scientist or citizen: What happens if we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers?".

The book is laid out logically and invitingly in five parts:

In Part 1 Conception, the author gives an account of his"pilgrimage" to the town of Schwyz where the "Bundesbrief, "the "charter of allegiance," or the "confederation bond" entered into in 1291, is preserved. Thus at the outset, the reader is drawn into the story aspect of this scholarly study. As noted earlier, this story aspect crops up via his many other encounters with the Swiss citizenry described.

Part 2: in three relatively short chapters Fossedal covers a thousand years of Swiss history. Throughout the focus is on how the Swiss confederation formed itself first by neighbors being forced by their own internal social and political oppression to look outward and confederating but in later times motivated to unite more closely by the attraction of the Swiss model of a self-governing people in itself

In Part 3: Institutions, Fossedal examines the Swiss Constitution, its structure, powers and procedures for its Executive, Judiciary and Parliament as well as the procedure and operation of Referendum.

In Part 4 Issues: he devotes a chapter to nine major issues of social and political life. Both via anecdote and reasoning this political journalist lays out the case that democracy really `works' when we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers--supported by a functionally deliberative structure in which to make laws.

In Part 5 L'idee Suisse, the author does much more than impart information and make a `pitch' to the rest of democracies to follow this`new' idea: Here particularly his study rivals the analysis, critique and prognosis of democracy done by de Tocqueville in mid-nineteenth century America.

Among the numerous things that impressed me about Direct Democracy in Switzerland, I cite one of many benefits in reading it. At the head of the final chapter Fossedal states:"There is little point in studying Swiss democracy unless there is something distinctive about it--and not only distinctive, but importantly distinctive.If this is a bad assumption, then Switzerland is worth thinking about only for the specialist." Convincingly Fossedal shows there is an important practical Swiss lesson for democracies worldwide in the twenty-first century, that is, direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy works and is an idea whose time has come for us in the United States..

By way of conclusion, the advance exhibited by Swiss democratic governance which Fossedal advocates is, in fact, embodied in a project being sponsored in the United States by The Democracy Foundation (TDF) today. Moreover, we, as registered voters, will be able to vote directly in an amendatory election to put into statutory procedure this structural advance. The amendment and act is called National Initiative for Democracy (NI4D). In full disclosure I am Secretary of TDF. Don. H. Kemner

This is a book from a workshop done with teacher Michael Barnett. He responds to real students letters about issues they have with and surrounding sex. It has some very nice subtle meditations at the end.
I would have to say, in the UK and Germany this book sells for 10 Euros, not sure why the price is so high it is a short paperback book.

Lovely book though,
Sadao

Drina's grandparents is moving to Switzerland for the winter,and Drina is going to a Swiss finishing school where her cousin Antonia goes,too.She is quite sad all the time.But when a classmate Tamina Rionante arrived,she become happier.And then she is making a new ballet for Christmas in the school.I like the Drina series very much and I hope I can read Drina Ballerina, the one I don't have.