Ulrich Baer

Vice Provost for Arts Humanities and Diversity and Professor of German and Comparative Literature Ulrich Baer

WE ARE BUT A MOMENT takes the reader on a brisk tour of the globe that vividly imagines the inescapable crisis of the near future posed by overpopulation, diminishing natural resources, climate change, species extinction, and economic tumult. It is 2025, and a young White House aide, Aleks, finds himself locked up in quarantine when he tested positive after a routine briefing from a hotspot. Aleks recounts how our much-admired female president became a globally revered leader who unites much of the world under the environmental banner. Aleks's position as environmental advisor to the president's policy team gives him a privileged insider's view into the political maneuvering that has led to U.S. global dominance. When he discovers unfamiliar files on his computer, he is thrown into a moral crisis over who he trusts, what he believes, and the value of the causes for which he has been fighting as he grapples to make sense of the people and events that led to his quarantine. Philosophical rather than prescriptive, the book is about how we live and die in the 21st century, what we consume, how we inhabit our world, and whether we can all live and love in the future.

We Are But a Moment

In a bold reassessment, this book analyzes the works of Baudelaire and Celan, two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself. It relates Baudelaire's exploration of the trauma of the minute personal shocks of everyday existence to Celan's engagement with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust.

Vice Provost for Arts Humanities and Diversity and Professor of German and Comparative Literature Ulrich Baer

About

Books

Join the club