Translated material
Ilya Kun. Foreign cars #20
Knocking on Heaven's Door : American Religion in the Age of Counterculture Mark Oppenheimer. - Yale University Press, 304 pages
Sex, drugs, rock and roll, living in hippie communes, passion for Eastern spiritual practices, political leftism - all these childhood diseases of the 60s had serious complications on the religious consciousness of the West. The consequences reverberate half a century later: these are homosexual marriages sanctified by the church, and the transformation of Christian communities into song and dance ensembles a la Jesus Christ Superstar, and the practice of ordaining women to the priesthood, and other aggressive manifestations of civil liberties. The counterculture of the 1960s, which claimed to be a social (or at most anti-social) movement, actually took the form of a new religious tradition, especially in the United States, argues Mark Oppenheimer, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist who has just completed his doctorate in theology. The young professor entitled his book (whose heroes are old enough to be the sons of him) with a line from a Bob Dylan song. Oppenheimer describes an era when the church was faced with an existential choice: where to lead and what to teach people in an era of mass anti-war demonstrations, birth control pills and various kinds of group experiments that looked at the Buddhist East at one end, created a sexual revolution at others, and plunged into the depths of the third expanded consciousness. Unfolding before the reader a chronicle of events or, if you like, a medical history, Oppenheimer reminds us from what rubbish collective prayer services and other modern - now completely conventional - religious practices grew. The aging heroes of that bloodless revolution can feel nostalgic, and their children and grandchildren can learn from the experience of their elders.
The Wall Street Journal
George Sim Johnston (George Sim Johnston)
“As a Catholic, of course, the most interesting chapter for me was “Roman Catholics and the Popular Masses”... Oppenheimer is right in asserting that the form our daily religious practice takes has a profound influence on our ideas about God. But he doesn’t get it right his thought - he skims the surface, sometimes hitting the annoying sociology. Yes, people discovered various forms of existence - the sounds of a guitar, the aromas of oriental incense, the warmth of brotherly hugs and all kinds of searches for their identity. But what was happening in reality then?.. In the late 1960s, many Jews and Christians managed to domesticate God, placing him in the service of the individualistic ideology of “free choice . ”
Forward
“A couple of years ago, my friends and I were returning from Nevada from the Burning Man festival. Terrible fatigue and a hangover were mixed with the feeling of chaos and euphoria of the previous week, which passed in our altered state of consciousness. We were driving through the desert, almost falling asleep, and then I turned on radio. We were immediately bombarded with a murky stream of advertisements, in bad voices extolling the virtues of cars, stores and the radio station itself. We were unable to listen to it. Having breathed in the fresh air of a living counterculture for a week, we felt how unbearable and alien to us modern America was. Then I switched the radio to the religious AM channel. They talked about sin, about heaven and hell. But these words - both the meaning and the intonation - were much closer to us than the “modern” music and advertising that sounded on regular radio... Oppenheimer wrote a good and professional work. But it seems to me that it is unlikely that he actually deeply understands what he writes about. In the Nevada desert, two years ago, we realized that religion itself is a counterculture, opposing the dreary materialism of the late 20th - early XXI centuries If you write a book about the interaction between religion and counterculture and you don’t understand it, what is all your work worth?”
Jesse Browner . The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down : An Informal History of Hospitality. - Bloomsbury, 198 pages
Do you like to invite guests? This means that deep down you want to become a dictator. In any case, you definitely love power. This is the main idea of the author of “An Informal History of Hospitality,” writer and translator Jess Browner (he has written two novels and English translations of Jean Cocteau, Rilke and Eluard). So that the reader is left in no doubt, Brauner talks in detail about the hospitality of Hitler, who personally came out to meet each of the guests of his high-altitude residence Berghof and always gave them a lecture before dinner on the benefits of healthy food (mainly on the moral advantages of vegetarianism). In addition, in all the guest rooms of Hitler’s huge house, without exception, the owner’s caring hand placed his own works (Mein Kampf) and French pornographic magazines. When receiving guests, the author of “The History of Hospitality” believes, any host tries to impose his image of the world on them, and from here, it goes without saying, the dream of world domination is just a stone’s throw away. However, sometimes hospitality may not even be a sublimation of the will to power, but a direct tool for influencing others. A good example of this is Gertrude Stein, who was able to become a real prophet of modernism solely thanks to her famous Parisian “Saturdays”, where all the hungry bohemians of the beginning of the century fed: from Picasso, Matisse and Braque to Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. The book contains a lot of delightful historical anecdotes about hospitality, including the story of the duchess in the title, who did not want to sit on the chair given to her instead of a chair at a reception with Louis XIV. The Sun King, apparently fully sharing Brauner's ideas, sent her into lifelong exile.
The New York Times
"...be careful - the conclusions Brauner draws in his book may frighten those who think that all their lives they have invited guests only to drink, eat and talk about life."
“The final chapter, which tells how the Browner family celebrates Thanksgiving, may have been therapeutic for the author personally, but it doesn’t really fit into the overall flow of the book . ”
The New York Observer
"Browner is a tireless amateur historian, enthusiastically scouring the annals of Western civilization for entertaining tales of hospitality: from the Roman emperors, for whom dinner was not lunch without sprinkling a good dose of poison on someone, to the notorious inability to host guests of the British Lady Morrell."
"Historical examples are successfully interspersed in the book with stories from the life of the author himself: for example, about how delicious sandwiches help lull one's vigilance and beat friends who dropped by for a poker game. In the last chapter, which tells how the author and his wife themselves cooked for his guests for a big Thanksgiving dinner, Brauner laments that for modern people (especially those engaged in intellectual work), hospitality is less and less associated with a personally prepared treat . "
Bill McKibben . Enough : Staying Human in an Engineered Age. - Times Books, 288 pages
Enough is already recognized as one of the best non-fiction books of 2003. Bill McKibben is the most authoritative figure among green scientists. 15 years ago, his book “The End of Nature” was published, which became the New Testament of the environmental movement. The new work is entitled even more succinctly - “Enough.” This is a prophecy about a new, genetically modified world, stuffed with nanotechnological devices, in which man, originally created in the image and likeness of God, is doomed to lose his human appearance - both figuratively and literally. "Which creator are you going to pray to if your genes came from a Pfizer lab?" - McKibben asks his reader. However, this is not just a dystopia. Science fiction has been successfully modeling man-made disasters for a long time, but for McKibben another question is more important: what will we do if a disaster does not happen? And this turns out to be the worst thing. If the process goes “as it should,” then soon and imperceptibly the human race will lose the idea that there is a person. A separate problem is the market. Most biotechnological development today is concentrated in the hands of private companies, concerned primarily with issues of profitability, rather than ethics or global ecology. The ability to determine the sex of a child in the early stages of pregnancy has already led to the beating of female infants in the womb in Asian countries. What would happen to the world's population if every married couple had the opportunity to simulate the gender of their unborn child? What if genetic modeling of some extraordinary abilities becomes publicly available? Perhaps people will be divided into those whom their parents genetically programmed for different talents and abilities, and “naturals” - antediluvian creatures deprived of any superhuman capabilities (such as most of us today). How will the relationship between these subspecies develop? What will ordinary people do in this world when bionanorobots take over all the work? Those who are ready to release the genie from the test tube would do well to ask such questions, if not from a moral, then at least from a practical point of view. McKibben's only hope is that we will have time to read his book before we cease to be homo sapiens.
PopMatters Books
“I recently spoke with one of the most educated African scientists. “We need your technology, but not your culture,” he argued. I replied: “Sorry, but it comes with us.” Technology is not everything we have there is, but by and large our technology is our culture... Although I do not share McKibben’s optimistic views, I must admit that he writes terribly well about these terrible matters. Anyone who is at least somewhat interested in issues of science and technology or ethics, as well as our future, it is worth finding time for this book. It is about the path that we will soon have to take . "
Conservative Monitor
“If I had a choice, I would choose to continue my current existence indefinitely, even if nanorobots circulated through my veins, and several genes would have to be redrawn. Perhaps the meaning of life would then undergo significant changes... McKibben postulates the death of religion and humanity. I'm not sure that this necessarily has to happen, although McKibben makes a pretty compelling case. He makes a compelling case that the technologies we indulge in today should be tightly controlled. McKibben makes it clear that there must be a line drawn beyond which intercede. The question remains: where exactly should this line be drawn? It is worth debating. Enough is a smart, intelligent book. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what the latest technologies of our time are about and how they relate to our life . "
Eric Hobsbawm . Interesting Times : A Twentieth-Century Life. - Abacus, 464 pages
Eric Hobsbawm is perhaps the most famous living historian. For many years now, his books (and over his long life he wrote a great many of them) have been included in the compulsory reading program for students of history departments around the world. However, the last work of the honored historian is not a scientific work, but an autobiography. True, Hobsbawm’s biography is such that no matter how you look at it, it still turns out to be a historical chronicle - a chronicle of the 20th century. An Anglo-Austrian Jew, born in Alexandria, Egypt in the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, studied in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge, taught at almost all the famous universities of the Old and New Worlds, saw with his own eyes the fall of the Weimar Republic and the destruction of the Berlin Wall, was a translator for Che Guevara and a member of the famous “secret society” of the Apostles (which at one time included Wittgenstein, Keynes and Bertrand Russell), lived in Catalonia at the height of the Spanish Civil War. And finally, about the main thing: all his life Hobsbawm remained a communist (he joined the Communist Party as a high school student, in the early 1930s), without becoming either a Marxist historian or a party activist. Why Hobsbawm, like many other Western intellectuals who fell under the modest charm of communism, remains faithful to his odious ideals to this day, the famous American historian and political scientist Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, explains in his review.
The New York Review of Books
“When Hobsbawm calls Thatcher’s policies “the anarchism of the lower middle class,” he brands her from two positions at once: one is the good old Marxist hatred of those who fatten, and the other, genetically even more ancient, is the contempt of the British elite for the dense, socially unstable but economically wealthy class of clerks and traders. Eric Hobsbawm is a true communist mandarin, with all the beliefs and prejudices inherent in this caste. But he is also a romantic. He romanticized the revolutionary thugs...He romanticized the Italian Communist Party of Palmiro Togliatti. .. He romanticized the Soviet Union... Eric Hobsbawm is the most gifted historian of our time. But, having lived his life in peace and quiet, he managed to turn a blind eye to all the monstrous, shameful events of the past century . "
Guardian
"Hobsbawm did not set out to write an autobiography in the traditional sense of the word. He himself honestly admitted that the book is dedicated not to personal, but to public life. The second half of the book is fragmentary and resembles a collection of essays on a variety of topics. His second wife Marlene and children look like this background with some shadow characters."
"Sometimes Hobsbawm's politics and private life are still intertwined - for the first time when he describes Berlin in the early 1930s, another time - his student years at Cambridge. But very soon the reader understands what really worries the author: his eternal the fight against the ghost of Stalin, the desire to cope with the disappointment that came after the Hungarian events of 1956, and, finally, the need to at least partially admit the collapse of one’s ideals . "
Just Being Difficult? : Academic Writing in the Public Arena edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. - Stanford University Press, 240 pages
A collection of articles by refined intellectuals, representing the flower of Western humanitarian thought, is devoted to a pressing problem: why is academic discourse so incomprehensible to a mere mortal? Is scientific clutter a necessary evil, or is it an artifact that belongs in the dustbin of history? The topic is by no means a far-fetched idea, given the inexhaustible desire of academic humanities scholars to break through the mass media to the general public, soften cruel morals, become rulers of the thoughts of the crowd - in a word, to ensure that the rough inanimate matter that contains the existence of the average person can finally - it’s a poor thing to think about yourself. The utopian nature of such dreams is completely obvious: everyone knows that scientists - philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, etc. - have long been writing exclusively for each other. However, as one might expect, "bad writing" upon closer examination turned out to be a murky matter. Its inaccessibility to the broad masses is not the result of pride or other malicious intent, the authors of the collection prove: the material itself, with which scientists deal, sometimes has no other way of expression than a complicated academic language, replete with folded propositions nested within each other, like nesting dolls. On the other hand, their opponents object, he who thinks clearly, expresses clearly. Any, even the most intricate idea can be expressed in accessible human language. And on the third hand, the desire to “be simpler” turns into muteness, the inability to express a judgment that goes beyond the boundaries of the stove pot. Authors gathered under one cover in Just Being Difficult?, showed the world a striking example of metatext: they have to talk about the vices and virtues of academic language, firmly stuck in abstract theorizing and biting its own tail, like the proverbial snake, in nothing other than the same language. It may be dark, but it is dear. They don't have anything else.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
"In the minds of most academics, bad academic writing is an axiom, a taken-for-granted fact. It's about the same as everyone's default idea of bad academic sex."
"Some essayists with a penchant for collecting historical facts have cited examples of the impasses into which this sacred simplicity can lead. Robin Walesa of the University of Chicago and John Bender of Stanford drew attention to David Hume's remark about the difference between the "scientific" and the "everyday." worlds. These researchers believe that Hume's recourse to a "conversational style" led to the fact that in his last works he simply could not reflect all the nuances of his own epistemological calculations . "
"Recognizing that some texts generated by academic science (including the own texts of the participants in the collection) are, in fact, often indigestible, the authors of the book try to prove that the primary goals of science push them to such a choice . "