Turner recycles some material from earlier university press books for this, his grand synthesis that promises to overcome the stalemate in the culture wars. Proponent of a ``third way'' or ``centrist'' position, Turner (Arts and Humanities/Univ. of Texas, Dallas) rehearses the standard complaints about our culture in crisis. Unlike traditional conservatives, though, he ventures a prescription that goes beyond nostalgia for faith and values. A sober critic of the so-called avant-garde, Turner posits a ``radical center''—``a return to classical forms, genres and techniques in the arts'' that is grounded in the latest research in anthropology and science. Turner fancies his ``reconstructive postmodernism'' a new paradigm on the intellectual horizon, and it's hard to imagine anyone familiar with all the disciplines he brings together in this fascinating, if exhausting, book. A cogent critic of anti-foundationalist thought (be it feminist, Marxist, or linguistic), Turner reaffirms the need for hierarchy in the arts, for logic over force, and for beauty over relativism. His multiculturalism is truly pan-cultural, discovering the transcendent in all cultures. Turner's idea of a ``natural classicism'' is remarkably transparent—he locates classical forms in nature itself. Some of his other ideas are a bit obscure, and his tendency toward unrelieved abstraction will turn off sympathetic readers. Turner's immediate cure for cultural malaise is nothing less than a four-page manifesto that is certain to provoke debate, and his discussion of biology is sure to be used against him, despite his distinctly un-``bell curvish'' ideas. Turner's fictional ``fable for the future''—a brave new world that resembles the utopian cyberspace of the Tofflers—flirts with kookiness. A superb critic of trendy feminist and multicultural ideas, Turner deserves a hearing in the ongoing debate: He's Apollo to Camille Paglia's Dionysus.
Pub Date: April 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-932792-X
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
The ever-popular and highly readable C.S. Lewis has "done it again." This time with a book beginning with the premise "God is Love" and analyzing the four loves man knows well, but often understands little, Affection, Friendship, Eros and Charity, exploring along the way the threads of Need-Love and Gift-Love that run through all. It is written with a deep perception of human beings and a background of excellent scholarship. Lewis proposes that all loves are a search for, perhaps a conflict with, and sometimes a denial of, love of God. "Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?" To relate the human activities called loves to the Love which is God, Lewis cites three graces as parts of Charity: Divine Gift-Love, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another, to which God gives a third, "He can awake in man, towards Himself a supernatural Appreciative love. This of all gifts is the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true center of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible." From a reading of this book laymen and clergy alike will reap great rewards: a deeper knowledge of an insight into human loves, and, indeed, humans, offered with beauty and humor and a soaring description of man's search for God through Love.
Pub Date: July 27, 1960
ISBN: 0156329301
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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