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| Original Title: | Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts |
| ISBN: | 0393061167 (ISBN13: 9780393061161) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Prime Minister's |
| Literary Awards: | Nominee for Nonfiction (2008) |
Clive James
Hardcover | Pages: 912 pages Rating: 4.11 | 1453 Users | 214 Reviews
Be Specific About Appertaining To Books Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
| Title | : | Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts |
| Author | : | Clive James |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 912 pages |
| Published | : | March 17th 2007 by W. W. Norton Company (first published March 1st 2007) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. History. Biography. Philosophy. Art. Cultural |
Rendition Concering Books Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
This book should come with a warning label on it. If you are anything like me, reading it will make your to-read shelf grow tremendously.Clive James is a well-known Australian writer, critic, broadcaster, and poet; he has often been described (in the US) as a public intelectual. Cultural Amnesia spotlights his comprehensive and deep knowledge is of Western culture, with a special focus on 20th-century Europe. The volume is comprised of 106 biographical profiles of a wide range of writers, musicians, artists, actors whom James deems important to know to understand 20th-century cultural, intellectual, and political life. (Note that some figures lived in earlier centuries, but James always makes their relevance to the 20th century clear.) These brief essays are organized alphabetically, and structured around one or more quotations from the individual being featured, which James uses as a jumping off point for a series of ruminations. While he stays focused on the life of the individual being profiled in some cases, in others his thoughts take him to other cultural and political figures. Following his connections and seeing how his mind works is part of the fun of reading this collection.
Anyone who fears that Cultural Amnesia is a staid, boring encyclopedic volume need worry no longer. James clearly loves learning and sharing his knowledge. He often talks about his experiences teaching himself to read a host of languages, including Spanish, German, and Russian by having a dictionary in one hand and one of the classics he discusses in his essays in the other. He clearly wants us all to join him in what he says is the best way to learn a new language.
In addition, these essays are developed along some common themes, particularly James's championing of humanism and liberal democracy. He writes movingly about writers' responsibilities to fight totalitarianism, as he draws on positive and negative examples from World War II in particular, with special attention to Germany, Austria, and France. As I was reading, I felt I was deepening my understanding and appreciation of Western culture, sometimes by taking a new look at a well-known figure, and other times by learning about a previously unknown person whose work I am know seeking out. (Top on my list is Egon Friedell, whose 3-volume A Cultural History of the Modern Age has been reissued and is high on my April list of books to order).
I read through the essays in Cultural Amnesia in order, which led to some interesting juxtapositions. I moved from Louis Armstrong to Raymond Aron, from Albert Camus to Dick Cavett, from Coco Chanel to Charlie Chaplin. In the M's, I spent some time with Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann, after which I segued to Mao Zedong. I think it is fitting, given James's central themes, that his final sketch before his conclusion is one of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir The World of Yesterday I just reviewed. Zweig was one of the foremost proponents of the liberal humanism, the internationalism, the commitment to freedom through culture, that James strongly advocates. In his concluding essay, James writes stirringly of the reasons why 21st-century readers should look to the past to understand a way forward to protecting liberal democracy from the forces of hatred, intolerance, and totalitarianism in the future:
"The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency – which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail – began in humanism, and can’t long continue without it. How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don’t know how it was put together? It was the human mind that got us this far, by considering what had happened in history; by considering the good that had been done, and resolving to do likewise; and by considering the evil, and resolving to avoid its repetition. Much of the evil, alas, was in the mind itself. The mind took account of that too. The mind is the one collectivity that the free individual can thrive in: which is lucky, because live in it he must. Even within ourselves, there are many voices. Hegel, when he said that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the best thing about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself."
Clive James
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A poorly formatted but serviceable web page includes the table of contents for Cultural Amnesia, in case any of you would like to review the vast array of people profiled by James: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip... Amazon's "look inside" feature provides another view of the Table of Contents: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Amnesi...
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James is currently diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema. A number of articles published in Australian papers earlier in March 2013 featured interviews with his daughters and some examples of his recent poetry.
A February 2013 interview with James was published in The New Republic, and provides insight about James' approach to educating himself: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11...
Rating Appertaining To Books Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
Ratings: 4.11 From 1453 Users | 214 ReviewsPiece Appertaining To Books Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
Clive James manages to both enthrall you and challenge you with every sentence he writes. This is the thing that impressed me most about his essay writing skills: his sentences are mostly beautiful, sometimes very long and at all times packed with a lot of hidden meanings, irony and cleverness. His range of subjects is massive - in this book there's an essay on Tacitus, and one on Charlie Chaplin. You can figure out by yourself how wide the spectrum is. It is definitely a hard read, not for theThis is not a work for reading quickly. Unless you're an "Oxbridge" grad, in which case, you might not need it at all. In the form of alphabetically-arranged biographical sketches, the Australian social and media critic James offers the short course on both the literary canon (remember that?) and political themes of the last 150 years. As other reviewers noted, reading "Cultural Amnesia" is sure to expand your TBR list--but also to enhance your stock of bon mots. Copious notes are compulsorily
Please read my complete review here. It begins, inflammatorily enough:Is it possible to ask, without sounding like a morbid troublemaker, why the death of Clive James last November was not greeted with the outpouring of vituperation that marked Harold Blooms demise the month before? Granted, Bloom celebrated Miltons Satan and took a certain delight in playing the villain, as opposed to Jamess avuncular televisual charm, but stilldont the politically fastidious take politics seriously?Read
Another author, in a passage I have regrettably managed to misplace, once compared each educated person's accumulated knowledge of Western culture as a unique, personal "cathedral" built with care and pride.This book is a roughly 850-page blueprint of Clive James's cathedral. He focuses mainly on writers in Eastern Europe during and prior to the Holocaust. It is unclear whether he recognizes that he is providing a personal, not an objectively correct, definition of the culture and genre that is
Plenty enough comments about this one--and after reading through it with a couple of reading friends, I feel like I've said all I want to say about it already. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the cultural history of the 20th Century, James' point in all these essays is to raise ideas that, if we are not careful, could be forgotten as Liberal Democracy moves forward into the 21st Century. Some of the figures that James focuses on will be unfamiliar to the common reader (close to half
Even though I was hooked on the Slate.com excerpts of some of the essays from this book, it took me awhile to get to. It's a daunting, lumbering brick of a book that took up a lot of my reading time early this year. Over the course of many, many essays, the format is about the same: it's a cultural figure (mainly from the 1900s, but with some extreme exceptions), there's a little biographical sketch, and then Uncle Clive tells you a story. A great deal of the time, this story has something to do
The Picador e-book came with three extra essays, on the 'sludge' CJ read as a boy, on a stalker of Nicole Kidman, and on Formula 1 racers, all worthwhile, although I was kind of miffed that such a long book was just a little longer. And I don't want to exaggerate how long it took to read (about a year, once I started in earnest). Somewhere in the "M"s my enthusiasm peaked, and the rest of the alphabet was, if not a repetition of themes, then at least less likely to astound the reader.One
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