An intriguing book about the continuing evolution of civilization.
Solayappan searches for an ethical center of modernity in this debut work of philosophy.
The modern world came into being around A.D. 1500, when economic and technological developments in Europe caused the West to advance at an accelerated pace from the rest of the world. Prior to that time, the globe’s major pre-modern civilizations existed at more or less the same level of maturity. The four philosophies that provided them with their traditions— Confucian, Indian, Islamic, and Christian—had been “perfect and ethical in their inception,” though each had then “degenerated fairly soon.” The major philosophical engines of the modern world—European Enlightenment values, Marxism—have been based in pragmatism rather than morality. In searching for an ethical modernity, Solayappan focuses his attention on the Indian independence movement. “With the advent of modernity,” the author writes, “it was only in India, during the first half of the 20th century, that a discourse on ethics was carried out in the public sphere.” In the cauldron of modern colonialism, Solayappan explores how an ethical movement fared in the modern world and traces its ramifications for the nature of truth and the chances for a peaceful world. The author has a natural, professorial prose style and is adept at organizing huge swaths of history and human experience into easily digestible concepts. While his thesis is never fully apparent (even by the book’s end), his ruminations are compelling enough to keep the reader more or less content to follow his train of thought. His prescriptions for how to create a more ethical world are as attractive as they are impractical (“America needs to do three things to transform its capitalist system overnight into an ethical system”), but the book succeeds as a work of imaginative thinking as opposed to a manual for immediate change. Solayappan asks the reader to question the way that things are, to consider how they have been, and to always remember that this moment—though one of great fluctuation —is but a brief one in the long history of human self-improvement.
An intriguing book about the continuing evolution of civilization.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-02804-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sai Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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