SinisterMinisterX said:
Next up: Jacquez Barzun, From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years Of Western Cultural Life, 1500 To The Present
I can already tell that this one looks like a steaming load. It starts with the Protestant Reformation, but it only takes a few pages before the author drops this turd:
"Dozens of cults have latterly arisen in the Christian West: Buddhism, Islam, Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Dr. Moon's Unification Church..."
Buddhism is 1400 years old and Islam 800. Those are religions, not cults, and are observed by hundreds of millions. Lumping them in with the Moonies displays extraordinary ignorance. "New" to the West or not, they deserve more respect. Nor is Yoga or TM a cult. I understand the author is writing about mainstream Western culture, which inevitably means a Christian culture - but that doesn't mean he is right to treat other cultures like dirt.
Meh, I'll read the book anyway. Maybe the author just starts out by putting his foot in his mouth, and it gets better.
You've apparently already figured this out, but Dawn to Decadence is a disappointment: broad, but shallow, summary of Western culture. A very ambitious work, I found it very dry, and I gave up trying to read it from start to finish. Not bad as an occasional reference work, however.
I will second SMX's recommendation of Battle Cry of Freedom. It is excellent, and probably the best one-volume work of the American Civil War available. It is often criticized as being biased in favor of the North, but I thought it was relatively balanced. Anyone interested in the topic of slavery might be interested to read Time On The Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engelmann. It is a scholarly economic text by Nobel-prize-winning economists who argue that, contrary to what many assumed at the time of publication (mid-1970s), American slavery was (generally speaking) economically efficient and living conditions of slaves in the South were often better than those of free blacks in the North. The book is misunderstood by many as an endorsement of slavery, but that could not be farther from the truth. Fogel's premise is that slavery was not doomed to fail for economic reasons, but rather was doomed to fail because, at some point, most Americans came to the inevitable conclusion that the moral case against slavery was far stronger than the economic case for it. In some ways this is, of course, inconsistent with the excerpts from Battle Cry of Freedom identified by SMX, though I suppose one conclusion is that people could be opposed to slavery, on principle, yet still be racist. For fans of fiction and the Civil War, I recommend The March by E.L. Doctorow (a recent fictionalized account of Sherman's March to the Sea) and Beloved by Toni Morrison (a ghost story -- that's a gross oversimplification -- about a family of freed slaves; it was recently selected in a New York Times survey as the best work of American fiction in the past 25 years).
Unrelated to the Civil War, I cannot recommend strongly enough Cormac McCarthy's new book, The Road. I would recommend it to anyone, but fans of Iron Maiden may be more likely than the average reader to appreciate McCarthy's worldview. I don't want to say too much and spoil it, but it is about a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world in which virtually all life has been destroyed, but for a very few humans who are either cannibals or people trying to avoid being eaten. Very different in setting from his earlier works, but similar in tone. McCarthy is, in my humble view, the greatest living American writer, and he has been compared by scholars far more well-read than me to Faulkner, Hemingway and Melville. Go get it. No, I get no money from sales of his books.
talk about a Nietzche disciple lol. Very good books indeed, though I'm afraid he's a little confused, but I don't blame him hahaha.
