Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 3, #17]
BOOKS AND CULTURE Reviews
A New Book of Alexis De Tocqueville.
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/may/newpolitics.html
At a conference on Democracy in America several years ago, one of the speakers took up Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction that increased centralization and equality in the United States would produce the “soft despotism” of a “schoolmaster” state: “Above [the citizens] rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watching over their fate,” Tocqueville writes.
It is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment …. The sovereign power doesn’t break their wills, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action. It doesn’t destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn’t tyrannize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restrains, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as their shepherd.
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/may/newpolitics.html
Tocqueville’s Discovery of America.
Leo Damrosch.
Hardback: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Buy now: [ Amazon.com ]
THE NY TIMES REVIEW OF
THIS BOOK IS OVERDUE:
How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
By Marilyn Johnson
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kennedy-t.html
One day, apparently before the rise of Google Book Search, Marilyn Johnson made an odd request at the New York Public Library. She needed to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called “information sickness,” which she recollected from a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney, “Easy Travel to Other Planets.” She couldn’t find her own copy, so a team of librarians went spelunking in the stacks, wearing miner’s helmets, as Johnson tells it. They surfaced with a copy preserved, strangely enough, on microfilm, and soon Johnson was reading the dimly remembered passage in which a woman keels over, blood gushing from her nose and ears as she raves about disconnected facts. When the woman recovers from her fugue state, she says: “I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.”
…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kennedy-t.html
THIS BOOK IS OVERDUE:
How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.
Marilyn Johnson.
Hardback: HarperCollins, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon.com ]
A Review of the Recent Movie
About the Latter Years of Leo Tolstoy’s Life
The Last Station,
From our Friends at Jesus Manifesto
http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/04/the-last-station/
“Everything I know I know only because I love”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
This is the quote that opens The Last Station, a film based on the novel by Jay Perini. The Last Station chronicles the final years of perhaps the greatest writer of the 20th century, Leo Tolstoy. Featuring terrific performances by Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, it is a simple film and slightly specialized, but gives us a glimpse into the epic life and marriage Tolstoy had.
…
Read the full review:
