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Roubaud employs the now standard tricks of the postmodernist: breaking the wall between reader and author, twitting convention, playing with our understandings of culture and media -- and he does so with a wink. This book is hilarious. One senses that his stripping away of all the pretenses of fiction leaves only the author, and that he's charming.
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Barzun approached his special field of cultural history in a refreshingly irreverent manner. "You may like to think of culture - I often do - as an enormous pumpkin, hard to penetrate, full of uncharted hollows and recesses for cultural critics to get lost in, and stuffed with seeds of uncertain contents and destiny."
Early in his career he produced a connected series of books, starting with 'The French Race" (1932) and 'Race: A Study in Superstition" (1937 and 1965), moving on to "Darwin, Marx, Wagner" (1941) and "Romanticism and the Modern Ego" (1943). The major themes that connect these studies are (a) the appeal to race, class or nation to supply a new motive power for social change and (b) the an attempt to inject new life into the idols of Progress and Fatalism.
A subsequent theme in his work is the parlous state of learning and especially the widespread lack of understanding of the "house rules" for productive intellectual activity. The relevant books here are "The House of Intellect" (1959), "Science: The Glorious Entertainment"(1964) and "The American University" (1968).
The message of "The House of Intellect" is that its inhabitants, the intellectuals themselves, have trashed the house. The blame cannot be placed with the crassness or greed of big business, the shallowness of a consumer society, or the ignorance of the uneducated. The major malign influences are distorted perceptions of the nature and function of Art, Science and Philanthropy. These things have their value and their place, but Barzun shows how they have become diverted from their proper ends to impose in a destructive manner upon the conditions of scholarship and the life of the mind.
His comments on art later grew into a whole volume, "The Uses and Abuses of Art" and his views on the uses and abuses of science expanded into a whole book as well. The spirit of Philanthropy is expressed though the well-meant allocations of funds from the great foundations. However Barzun details how the net effect of this funding, especially that provided for conferences, is to dissipate rather than to concentrate thought, to take up time and effort on apparent novelties at the expense of solid and genuine but not superficially exciting or "relevant" work. A whole "grant application" industry emerged, engaging time and talents for trivial purposes, often enough dedicated to outright hokum, to the detriment of the proper function of intellectuals and intellect.
This book has "white dwarf" status because there is more in it each time it is re-read.
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Since I am not of Christian faith, the last few chapters were a bit over my head. Nonetheless, a few key aspects of these religions did shine through and it is interesting to learn about some of the basic differences between these faiths. Furthermore, those of Christian belief will be enlightened to the Muslim thought.
Certainly a good intro to Islam and its place in today's world. One can truly see the many aspects of this growing religion.
Islam is the second-largest religion in the world and the fastest-growing religion in the U.S. and worldwide, yet Westerners and especially Americans are appallingly ignorant of this major force in today's world. There has been a sustained disinformation campaign by the Christian Church against Islam for over a thousand years, and this prejudice has worked its way invisibly into Western culture. It is imperceptible to most Westerners and is felt intensely by Muslims.
This book does much to inform and to clarify. It is doubly surprising, then, that it was written for Christian missionaries working in Islamic countries. Christians will find useful sidebars comparing and contrasting Christian and Islamic beliefs on several topics. Highly recommended.