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3.0 

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

By Clive James
Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it." —Jacob Weisberg, Slate

This international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.

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10 Reviews

3.0
“I'm going to stop trying to kid myself that I'm ever going to finish this book. I'm typically not a non-fiction reader, which probably exacerbates the issue, but man, if James isn't the most pretentious asshole to be narrating this novel. Constantly chiming in to say how he knew the person, or to spout some philosophical non-sense for pages at a time, to the point I simply think he forgot what he was writing about midway through a chapter. One of the chapters is supposedly about Louis Armstrong (which by the way, NOBODY has forgotten), and he spends the majority of that chapter talking about another jazz performer, who was white, and how white people are allowed to like jazz and be jazz performers and that is not stealing from Black Americans, which is exactly what I would expect a white man to try and do in a chapter that was supposed to be about the accomplishments of a very famous Black musician. Anyway, I can tell this isn't worth my time, DNF'd at ~13% in.”

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