Cultural Amnesia
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Cultural Amnesia
Clive James
Essays
James Mustich
Jul 28, 2018
“In the forty years it took me to write this book,” Clive James discloses at the outset, “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." The resulting volume is a collection of forty-odd brief essays, each prompted by a sentence, epigram, or passage James has highlighted in the course of his wide reading. The whole enterprise is an impassioned and—by dint of James’s glorious style—engaging defense of the reading life: “somewhere within the total field of human knowledge,” he writes, “humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all.” This massive, sprawling, quirky exploration of one man’s humanistic vocation leaves us not only with a remarkable reading list, but with a thinking list as well. In its idiosyncratic way, it’s a book you can’t put down, and will never exhaust.
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Carlton Collister
Jan 11, 2019
Humbling and exhilarating.
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JWV
Dec 2, 2024
An amazing book I hadn't even heard of before I found it on this list.
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