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This book should come with a warning label on it. If you are anything like me, reading it will make your to-read shelf grow tremendously. Clive James is a well-known Australian writer, critic, broadcaster, and poet; he has often been described (in the US) as a public intelectual. Cultural Amnesia spotlights his comprehensive and deep knowledge is of Western culture, with a special focus on 20th-century Europe. The volume is comprised of 106 biographical profiles of a wide range of writers, music...
A bulletproof tome of time from the smartest man to ever be named Clive. A compendious compilation of cultural and historical monsters and man-stars (and women-stars), the volume swings with opinions on literature, the nature of evil over the century (the book’s kernel is a philosophical exploration of the holocaust), Clive’s own obscure literary heroes, and a unsummarisable outpouring of anecdotes, ramblings, opinions, and endless stream of erudition that leaves the reader in awe. I would award...
I was lucky enough to see Clive at the Garrick in Lichfield a few years ago. He signed my copy of this book 'To Brian', but I'm willing to let that go. In many ways it's a follow-up to his TV series Fame in the Twentieth Century. It is also, to paraphrase J. M. Coetzee, a crash-course in civilisation. I found the essay on the Jean-Paul Sartre - the man who spent a lot of time denying the existence of the gulags, and even more time sweeping all mention of them under the rug - long overdue. It’s n...
Wowing, breathtaking, challenging, provocative, pedantic, enervating and frustratingI could write pages on end about this book: it is so rich and challenging (with more than 800 pages of dense text) that it certainly does not leave you indifferent. For all clarity: this is not an encyclopaedia. It may be built around a little more than 100 historical figures, but it offers only a limited amount of biographical material. James uses the figures as an occasion to convey his personal opinions on a w...
Shocking sophistry Masterclass in arrogance (Ph)allacies abound.An original haiku to commemorate my inability to complete this irritating tome. I had earnestly embarked on the promised 'crash course in civilization' as advised by J.M.Coetzee, or as 'Notes in the margin of my time' as my second edition offers, not 'Necessary Memories....' together with the same lightbulb picture. I had known Clive James as a TV & media pundit, lugubrious celebrator of the weird & wonderful, and master of the witt...
maybe 2 1/2Even when I was rather enjoying a few pages of one of these essays, a feeling kept lurking in the background that James expected me to be taking notes - both so I wouldn’t forget the pearls of wisdom he was scattering, and so I wouldn’t forget who gifted them to me.Why I didn’t like the book at all.First let me admit that I only read about 25% of the book, plus the Introduction. James talks down to his reader. How does he do this? The most obvious sign is when he over and over says so...
This is not a work for reading quickly. Unless you're an "Oxbridge" grad, in which case, you might not need it at all. In the form of alphabetically-arranged biographical sketches, the Australian social and media critic James offers the short course on both the literary canon (remember that?) and political themes of the last 150 years. As other reviewers noted, reading "Cultural Amnesia" is sure to expand your TBR list--but also to enhance your stock of bon mots. Copious notes are compulsorily -...
Cultural Amnesia is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read ever. It is thoroughly enjoyable (funny, thoughtful, incisive, generous in many senses of the word), even when it is pondering the recent century’s most awful evils. It is an illuminating read on topics familiar and unknown.James wrote Cultural Amnesia as a defense of liberal democracy, humanism, and art and culture that supports freedom, tolerance, and understanding. Organized as an alphabetized series of thematic essays, each o...
A Critic For All AgesI once met Clive James, on the raised pavement of the Barbican in London. We both had weekday flats there and I had seen him before in his daily pedestrian commute. Encountering him one day, I stopped abruptly and greeted him effusively as if an old friend. I probably had interrupted a reverie, so looking up and seeing a face that might have been vaguely familiar, he stopped to chat - about the weather, and the state of the Barbican landscaping as I recall. We parted with ne...
Clive James’ massive tome Cultural Amnesia was a great disappointment to me. The format is straightforward enough: take those authors, politicians, arts and entertainment figures that have meant the most to James (good or bad), put them in alphabetical order, provide a biographical sketch, then a quote (or two), and then riff intellectually on that quote. This is a fine way to do an intellectual memoir. But this book is a genial, sprawling mess. Here's why: ***Staying on topic, bragging: James
I had a tough decision in deciding to read this seemingly inspiring, knowledgeable essays by Clive James since I have never read him before; however, I made sure to be familiar with his writing style by reading his Unreliable Memoirs (Pan Books 1981) first as a supporting strategy and I found it arguably and challengingly readable. Before starting reading this hefty hardcover, I hoped I could make it from my self-motivation after reading this interesting recommendation: A lifetime in the making,...
Have you ever met one of those people who seem to know just about everything about everything and, moreover, who can talk about everything without making you feel like a complete idiot? I've been fortunate to meet two, maybe three people like that in my life. Clive James, I suspect, is NOT one of those people. His erudition and self-assurance--though not always off-putting in the reading--might grate at a cocktail party. But he writes with such limpid precision that a lazy reader like myself wou...
Wow,. RIP Clive, one of our great devotees to the arts and culture. A tour guide to the intellectual pathways that lie behind us, this is his epic collection of essays on individual people that he deems worth remembering. Having said that, I was brought to the rude awakening that this version of mine was only the heavily abridged audiobook, whereas the original work is a tremendous 900+ pages. In this case though abridged simply means 'a selection of' as apposed to text being edited out. It's al...
(Edit November 2019: Oh, Clive…rest in peace, you magnificent bastard. You brought me innumerable moments of pleasure and inspiration. Here's to a life well lived and I sincerely hope Margarita Pracatan will be singing at the funeral. Cheers!)There is a moment in the Bond film You Only Live Twice where Moneypenny throws Sean Connery a teach-yourself-Japanese book before he leaves for a mission in Tokyo. Bond tosses it back to her with the admirably curt reply, ‘You forget I got a First in Orient...
I was wrong in my initial assessment of this book, I am reading it straight through and there is certainly a linear thread winding through the essays. I'm in the M's and it is phenomenal. The essay on Egon Friedell keeps orbiting my thoughts throughout the day. Really, everybody, go find a copy of this book and read it. I didn't think people wrote like James anymore.
Please read my complete review here. It begins, inflammatorily enough:Is it possible to ask, without sounding like a morbid troublemaker, why the death of Clive James last November was not greeted with the outpouring of vituperation that marked Harold Bloom’s demise the month before? Granted, Bloom celebrated Milton’s Satan and took a certain delight in playing the villain, as opposed to James’s avuncular televisual charm, but still—don’t the politically fastidious take politics seriously?Read m...
I didn't read this book. I read the 30+ pages of introduction and some entries here and there. Man, James really loves to talk about himself, doesn't he? You'd think he'd have gotten that out of his system with those multiple volumes of autobiography. There is also something old-curmudgeonly about the tone. "Kids today, no culture, end of society as we know it, blah blah." Which, I'm in a way sympathetic because yeah, most people are alarming ill-educated and uncultured. But I think they always
Like others who rated this book highly, I regard this as a contemporary classic which places James amongst significant intellectual figures of the twentieth century. As the title indicates, his focus is on culture rather than politics or economics, though the horrors brought about by the extremist politics of fascism, Nazism and Communism are themes to which he returns throughout. He is unforgiving towards writers and intellectuals who have slid away from confrontation with the enormity of the d...
My original review at the Irish Left Review: http://www.irishleftreview.org/2008/1...As a teenager watching Clive James on the TV of a Sunday night, I was never quite sure what to make of his combination of sparkling wit and sneering sarcasm. He was undeniably funny and reassuring yet at the same time somehow unable to disguise his discomfort at fronting a show composed of short, superficial witticisms on the quintessential mass medium of the second half of the 20th century. He seemed to feel it...
Now I get why people are enthusiastic about Clive James. I first tried Latest Readingsand found it flat, but these brief profiles of writers, politicians, scientists, etc are gems. Beautiful turns of phrase. The only problem is my To-Read list grew exponentially while I was reading it. I really enjoyed finding out about some Viennese writers and thinkers I didn't know about--James is marvelous on the cafe culture.