This is the best book I know that treats Adorno's relationship to postmodernism (esp aesthetics). Certainly written for experts, it presupposes strong familiarity with Adorno and some of the posty folk (esp Derrida).

Any attempt to disentangle the many threads of Adorno's rather confusing opus hinge on the fact that he never exhibited any sense of actuality. He was but mere unlived potential, a wasted and fragmented soul. Academics will read and enjoy. The rest of us will be stuck with Star Trek.

It is probably harsh to say of Pensky, "The parallels are with Star Trek", since surely they lie elsewhere, near the Bay of Fundy. When the villagers arrived to tell us that the basilica's southern tip had submerged we finally got it, Adorno had an acutality, but one very different than what we previously had assumed.

This is not a major work, but it is a nice little book, which presents some of Habermas's main ideas succinctly, and applies them to contemporary political issues. The reader is challenged to rethink the political situation. And, especially, as an American, I found the *German* political problems presented, and Habermas's approach to them, thought-provoking. The title surely resonates with Santayana's well-known dictum that those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. But the book also shows how even *remembering* is itself a part of the problem situation and not straightforwardly a solution to it.