In the spirit of his Barcelona (1992), the art critic and cultural historian zooms through Roman history, from Romulus and Remus to today.
Hughes’ (Things I Didn’t Know, 2006, etc.) subtitle is a bit misleading—“personal history” composes but a nail or two in the impressive edifice he has erected—but few readers will complain about anything else. Though his focus is principally on architecture, painting and sculpture, he pauses occasionally to provide historical context, offer portraits of key personalities and grouse about popular culture. Hughes eviscerates The Da Vinci Code (“wretchedly ill-written”), religious fundamentalists (who, he says, have created no art above the level of “drive-in megachurches”), the belief in the virginity of Mary and the noisy crowds in the Sistine Chapel (“just shut the fuck up, please, pretty please, if you can, if you don’t mind, if you won’t burst”). He also raves about artists and artistic works he loves, injecting his text with heavy doses of superlatives: The Pantheon is “certainly the greatest of all surviving structures of ancient Rome”; the Sistine ceiling is “one of the world’s supreme sights.” (Hughes also gives a grand account of the debate about the recent cleaning of Michelangelo’s masterwork.) The author’s knowledge about individual artists and works—and about Roman history—is prodigious, but he is never is pedantic or dull. There are a couple of strange moments—do readers need to be told what Schadenfreude means? Isn’t it a stretch to say that Keats and Shelley were friends?—but mostly there are moments of delight and surprise. We learn that on the Grand Tour, Horace Walpole saw his dog eaten by a wolf in the Alps; we smell the streets of ancient Rome; we discover that hippos were among the animals that fought in the Colosseum. An appealing mixture of erudition about high culture and curmudgeonly complaints about low.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26844-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Despite its glaring absence of women philosophers, Grayling’s accessible omnibus will provide a steppingstone for the...
A magnificent recapping of the history of philosophy, as it stands apart from theology, in the classic model of Bertrand Russell, as “an invitation and an entrance.”
In the hands of British scholar and journalist Grayling (Master/New Coll. of the Humanities; Democracy and Its Crisis, 2018, etc.), it is a delight to engage in this sweeping history of the great thinkers throughout the ages, from pre-Socratics to the present. Moreover, in the last section of the book, the author offers a considerably shorter yet fair introduction to Indian, Chinese, Arabic-Persian, and African philosophy (hindered only by the “veil” of language, yet he ends with a challenge to readers to address this surmountable difficulty). The attempt to “make sense of things” has plagued humanity for centuries and has also led to its great advances, especially the “rise of modern thought” in terms of empiricism and rationalism as they gained momentum from the 17th century. These great forces unharnessed philosophy from the strictures of religion, culminating in the essential concept, particularly by Immanuel Kant and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers, that the “autonomy” of man meant “self-government, independence of thought, and possession of the right and the responsibility to make choices about one’s own life.” As Grayling notes, this is “essential to the life worth living,” a matter dear to the very “first” philosophers: Thales, who relied on observation and reason to “know thyself,” and Socrates, for whom the first great question was how to live. As he moves into the more recondite reaches of “analytic” and language philosophy of the 20th century, the author mostly keeps the narrative from becoming overly academic. Unfortunately, there is a disturbing lack of women philosophers across Grayling’s 2,500-year survey, even under the cursory rubric of “feminist philosophy.” The author’s approach is especially refreshing due to his acknowledgement that few philosophers were truly unique (even Buddha or Confucius); often what was required for lasting significance was a kind of luck and a stable of devoted followers.
Despite its glaring absence of women philosophers, Grayling’s accessible omnibus will provide a steppingstone for the student or novice.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7874-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great...
An alarming account of the “slow-motion catastrophe” facing the world’s largest freshwater system.
Based on 13 years of reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this exhaustively detailed examination of the Great Lakes reveals the extent to which this 94,000-square-mile natural resource has been exploited for two centuries. The main culprits have been “over-fishing, over-polluting, and over-prioritizing navigation,” writes Egan, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Combining scientific details, the stories of researchers investigating ecological crises, and interviews with people who live and work along the lakes, the author crafts an absorbing narrative of science and human folly. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, canals, and channels leading to the Atlantic Ocean, which allows “noxious species” from foreign ports to enter the lakes through ballast water dumped by freighters, has been a central player. Biologically contaminated ballast water is “the worst kind of pollution,” writes Egan. “It breeds.” As a result, mussels and other invasive species have been devastating the ecosystem and traveling across the country to wreak harm in the West. At the same time, farm-fertilizer runoff has helped create “massive seasonal toxic algae blooms that are turning [Lake] Erie’s water into something that seems impossible for a sea of its size: poison.” The blooms contain “the seeds of a natural and public health disaster.” While lengthy and often highly technical, Egan’s sections on frustrating attempts to engineer the lakes by introducing predator fish species underscore the complexity of the challenge. The author also covers the threats posed by climate change and attempts by outsiders to divert lake waters for profit. He notes that the political will is lacking to reduce farm runoffs. The lakes could “heal on their own,” if protected from new invasions and if the fish and mussels already present “find a new ecological balance.”
Not light reading but essential for policymakers—and highly recommended for the 40 million people who rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24643-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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