Murray’s answers are bound to set the walls of the academy and the halls of the learned journals ringing with rebuttals. But...
Yes, human societies really do evolve for the better—thanks to the technologies, ideas, and other contributions of scads of mostly dead white European males.
Never let it be said that Murray (What It Means to Be a Libertarian, 1997, etc.), co-author of the hotly debated Bell Curve (not reviewed), shies from controversy. His overarching thesis will attract gainsayers from the outset, especially among the cultural relativists whom he takes great pains to twit throughout his long—but eminently readable, and often entertaining—discussion. (“Assessing the comparative contributions of the Greeks and Aztecs to human progress,” he observes by way of an opening shot, “is not a choice between equally valid constructions of reality.”) Cultural and intellectual historians of a certain bent may find more troubling Murray’s rationale for identifying those who have really made a difference in shaping the ways in which the civilized world thinks, works, and lives: his method resembles that of a search engine in ranking artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and other assorted thinkers and makers by the number of “hits” they earn in standard surveys of the literature. Michelangelo is thus the world’s premier artist because he figures most heavily in the indexes of art surveys—but, Murray rejoins, “Shakespeare gets more attention that everyone else because Shakespeare wrote better than everyone else.” Setting aside the question of whether intellectuals, like Hollywood types, can be famous merely for being famous—one manifestation of the Google effect—Murray’s overview of the progress of art and science is engaging, user-friendly, and even self-effacing. (He allows that while he doesn’t enjoy the later works of Henry James, his wife does, “and over the years I have had to accept that I don’t know what I’m talking about.”) Murray wrestles with Big Questions: What kinds of social conditions favor the arts? Why did London emerge as a world center, while Hangzhou did not? Why are Western philosophers more important than, say, their Asian counterparts, pound for pound? Why have women been so poorly represented for so long in the inventories of culturally important figures?
Murray’s answers are bound to set the walls of the academy and the halls of the learned journals ringing with rebuttals. But readers who took pleasure in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence are sure to enjoy his arguments and elegant presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019247-X
Page Count: 688
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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