Category: politics

Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Perestroika’ author João Cerqueira

‘Perestroika ended the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. However, oddly enough, the topic was forgotten.’

Author João Cerqueira. Image via ReadersFavorite.com.

November 9 will mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall that once separated communist East Germany from democratic West Germany. While this event may sound like ancient history to some younger readers, I have vivid memories of watching in astonishment the TV news reports of the wall’s dismantling. Today, this act is seen as symbolic of the collapse of the Soviet Union’s style of communism, the collapse of that nation and its Eastern European satellites, a collapse hastened by the political reform movement in the Soviet Union known as “perestroika.”

The downfall of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe is the subject of Portuguese writer João Cerqueira‘s latest novel, Perestroika: An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth. The novel tells the story of a fictitious Eastern Bloc nation, Slavia, that is caught in the social and political upheavals of that era.

Continue reading “Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Perestroika’ author João Cerqueira”

Friday Five: Thanks, Obama

Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. (Photo via InsideHigherEd.com)
Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. (Photo via InsideHigherEd.com)

This blog was born in 2005, during the tumultuous first year of George W. Bush’s second term as president, but it grew up during the Barack Obama presidency. Obama made his way into several posts here over the past eight years — no surprise, given the constitutional law professor’s interest in higher education policy. As Inside Higher Ed’s Doug Lederman and Paul Fain wrote on Thursday, “[N]o president in history has, with his rhetoric, so clearly embraced the idea that postsecondary education is a must for individuals and essential for the country’s economic and societal well-being” or “pushed as hard to improve its efficacy, from the belief that something so valuable should deliver on its promises.” Continue reading “Friday Five: Thanks, Obama”