Product Description

"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it."—Jacob Weisberg, Slate Finally in paperback after six hardcover printings, this international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. 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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #267239 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393333541
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, Tacitus to Margaret Thatcher, this scintillating compendium of 110 new biographical essays plumbs the responsibilities of artists, intellectuals and political leaders. British critic James (Visions Before Midnight) structures each entry as a brief life sketch followed by quotations that spark an appreciation, a condemnation or a tangent (a piece on filmmaker Terry Gilliam veers into a discussion of torturers' pleasure in their work). Sometimes, as in his salute to Tony Curtis's acting or his savage assault on bebop legend John Coltrane's penchant for "subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder," James's purpose is just bravura opinionating. But most articles are linked by a defense of liberal humanism against totalitarianisms of the left and right—and ideologues who champion them. He lionizes prewar Vienna's martyred Jewish cafe intellectuals; castigates French apologists for communism—especially Sartre, who "could sound as if he was talking about everything while saying nothing"; and chides Borges for not noticing Argentina's descent into fascism. This theme can grow intrusive; even in an entry on children's author Beatrix Potter, he feels called upon to denounce Soviet children's books. But James's brilliantly aphoristic prose, full of aesthetic insights but careful not to let aesthetics obscure morality, makes for a delightful browse suffused with a potent message. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
For more than 40 years a critic, writer, and public personality, the Australian-born Clive James, prolific author of Unreliable Memoirs, The Meaning of Recognition, and North Face of Soho, among many other books, has garnered a well-deserved reputation as "an eclectic master of the high/low" (Los Angeles Times). James's wide-ranging intellect is on display here in a big way: "doorstop" appears more than once in reviews of the book. Fortunately, the book moves along—thanks to the author's deft prose, his keen sense of humor, and his ability to connect a host of disparate subjects. Though the book clearly isn't meant to be read straight through, even those skeptical of James's agenda admire the scope of the undertaking. Red flags: the seeming randomness of some of James's entries, his digressions, and his inclusion of fewer than a dozen women (including Coco Chanel and Margaret Thatcher) on the list.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* As of This Writing (2003) showcased the range and brilliance of James' criticism. In this towering volume, the fruit of 40 years of passionate involvement, James proves to be a consummate writer of biographical essays. Motivated by concern that we are losing track of the great thinkers and creators of the last century and forgetting the true nature of humanism, the force that "makes civilization civilized," James explicates the accomplishments of more than 100 seminal artists, writers, composers, and philosophers. The dream capital of James' republic of culture is Vienna during the heyday of cafe society, and his guiding light is the Viennese polymath Egon Friedell (1878-1938). James' remembrance of his hero is at once electrifying and profoundly moving, and so it is throughout this magnificent, soulful, and unpredictable assemblage. Where else might a reader come upon side-by-side considerations of Albert Camus and Dick Cavett? Coco Chanel and Charlie Chaplin? James also writes incisively and entertainingly of Miles Davis, Erik Satie, and Beatrix Potter. His knowledge is encompassing, his interpretations provocative. James not only preserves culture and nurtures humanism but also revitalizes the beauty and power of the English language. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Like having a conversation with a learned friend
Intrigued by the excerpts running on Slate.com, I snapped this one up when it came out. It consists of capsule essays on a wide range of scholars, artists, writers, philosophers, political figures, and so on. The common thread running through the essays is a defense of the humanist impulse in the face of totalitarianism, and how this issue is perpetually relevant. The tone is a mournful one at times, as if the author feels this battle of ideas has been forgotten by succeeding generations. The figures represented run the gamut from Louis Armstrong to Wittgenstein, from Borges to Satie. There are also numerous lesser known figures like philologist Ernst Robert Curtius or polymath Egon Friedell, as well as villains (Hitler and Mao, among others). James's dismantling of Sartre is almost worth the price of admission itself, but perhaps the single best essay is on Sophie Scholl, a young member of the White Rose resistance group in Nazi Germany, who chose to die in solidarity with her friends, as a symbolic gesture of defiance. This essay is the only piece of writing (other than old love letters) that has ever made me tear up. James often goes on his own idiosyncratic tangents in the middle of a chapter, but this is one of the book's charms, like having a conversation with a learned and, at times, frustrating friend.

I was tempted to dock a star in my rating because of the unusually high level of typos. In all seriousness, I have never encountered a book with so many - It may border on an average of one typo per page. Norton, someone was asleep at the switch here. Despite this distraction, a wonderful read.

Fascinating reflections
This is a fascinating volume, in fact, almost a nonvolume. James notes at the outset that (page xv): "In the forty years it took me to write this book, I only gradually realized that the finished work, if it were going to be true to the pattern of my experience, would have no pattern." He goes on to note of the many brief biographical sketches that he presents in the book (with reflections on related thinkers and on context): "As the time for assembling my reflections approaches, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided" (page xvi). As such, "If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible" (Page xvi). Thus, the reader is the workforce to make sense of the various reflections and vignettes.

James puts emphasis, in an "Overture," on Vienna of the late 19th and early 20th century. From there, he provides brief character sketches from "A" (e.g., Anna Akhmatova, Louis Armstrong, Raymond Aron) to "Z" (e.g., Aleksandr Zinoviev, Stefan Zweig), with stops at other letters in between. Thus, the ordering is simply alphabetical, again to make the reader pull things together him or herself. While the thoughts that he injects into these sketches can sometimes be rather close minded (his rather haughty dismissal of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault), that is easily forgiven for the erudition and provocative comments that recur throughout this book.

Let's take a look at a handful of the biographical treatments to illustrate his approach. Louis Armstrong, while a victim of racism from birth to death (in 1971), rose above that. The intriguing tie between him and Bix Beiderbecke (a white jazz musician, in an era when many said that whites could not play the genre) is one example. Just so, a brief sidebar on Benny Goodman (white) and his skills in jazz, all justaposed with Armstrong's appreciation of Beiderbecke. An interesting essay tying several themes together.

Then there is William Claude Duckenfield (W. C. Fields). The essay focuses on how increasingly strong censorship in movies began to strangle Fields' career--maybe more than alcohol or age. One aspect of this essay is the observation that (page 208) Fields was ". . .one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home."

He discusses, in the book, some people whom he defines as evil. One of those is Mao Zedong. However, he portrays things in a bit more nuanced fashion. For instance, he says that Mao began very differently than other terrors such as Hitler and Stalin. While, in the end, he was responsible for a massive number of deaths, Mao "started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves" (page 457). In the end, James suggests, ". . .to concentrate on Mao's late-flowering monstrosity is surely a misleading emphasis. His early-flowering humanitarianism is a much more useful field of study" (page 459). What makes this essay compelling is that it recognizes the evil unleashed by Mao--but also a different potentiality when he was younger.

A final example: Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese Admiral who orchestrated Pearl Harbor and the failed Midway offensive. James plays with some of the well known themes--Yamamoto's years at Harvard University, his artistic sensibilities (as Patton, he composed poetry), his pessimism that Japan could defeat the United States if the war lasted very long.

Even looking at this volume as a series of intriguing character sketches makes this an interesting volume. Questions raised by James about some of the people studied lead to the reader reflecting on exactly what is at stake with the individual being discussed. There are also the larger questions hinted at in earlier pages of the volume. A fascinating potpourri by an intellectual who seats each character in a deep historical context, even by a few well chosen comments.

What was the 20th century for?
The main claims of the author are that Western liberalism (the classic definition) nearly perished in the 20th century, due almost entirely to a persistent and recurring urge to totalitarianism; that these movements were paralleled by waves of fawning essays from liberal intelligentsia who apologized for butchers; that the cross-connections between history, music, and the arts are what humanism is (or should be) all about; and that we forget the history of the 20th century at our peril.

So it's dismaying that few reviews even touch on these points.

Personally, I was very intrigued on first reading of the book-- enough to buy and read 3 European and World histories. What I found was corroboration of his facts (Norman Davies' estimate of deaths due to Stalin is at least 54 millions. Mao would make him look like an amateur. Pol Pot-- he had fewer to work with, so he went for the record percentage killed.) And in a fresh way, I can trace modernism and its associated destructive forces from the French Revolution onward.

I then re-read Cultural Amnesia and more fully appreciated Clive James' genius.

A superb accomplishment.