Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
by Clive James
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Book Summary Information
Author: Clive JamesEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-03-19
ISBN: 0393061167
Number of pages: 768
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Book Reviews of Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
Book Review: Best taken a little at a time
Summary: 4 Stars
Definitively not a book to take to the beach! I admire anyone who sat down and read this cover-to-cover. But I enjoyed dipping into it and then coming back to it later for more.
Very easy to read and the subjects of the essays (authors, politicians and personalities) are nothing more than a jumping off point for James. The essay on Terry Gilliam was basically an essay about political torture. Sometimes James hardly mentioned the person at all. But all contained at least one interesting comment. (The section on Heinrich Heine turned in to an essay on celebrity stalkers and contained the wonderful line, "Garbo...correctly sensed that a man ready to rob a woman of her peace would just as easily take her life if given the chance.")
I do admit to feelings of intellectual inferiority in reading the book. James was always urging you to read an author in his original language, but unfortunately, I don't read five or six foreign languages. (Even the reviews of this book made me feel inferior - unlike the sharp-eyed James from Lambertville, I didn't notice any typos until I was almost half way through the book!) And as you would imagine, you may have some dispute as to whether some of the people should have been included. I love Dick Cavett, but is he really on the same level as Sartre and Keats? And really, Tony Curtis? Really?
Still, a very interesting and thought provoking book.
Summary of Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
Forty years in the making, a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism.Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism," the renowned critic Clive James presents here his life's work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes, "If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive." Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost. 110 photographs.
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