In 12 wise, stimulating essays and lectures, a noted Columbia University scholar examines today's declining culture. Ours, he observes with disgust and discernment, is a period of specialization in which the "torrent of information" compiled is unnecessary, in which college students are diverted to the "minutiae of analytic methodism," in which the over-production of art has made us into "gluttons who gorge and do not digest." Barzun examines aspects of literary and art criticism, retrospective sociology, the abandonment of intelligibility, the "rhetoric of numbers," the effects of relativism on moral behavior and the differences between Art with a capital A , "high art," public art and domestic art. He avers that the oversupply of fine art increases the need for subsidies; yet, although we pay farmers not to grow crops, we do not pay artists to stop making art. Still, Barzun is consoled by the realization that as long as humans exist, there is hope for "new" civilization and all its works.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Most of these dozen essays offer cultural history and polemic directed against the intellectual Establishment. Barzun laments the degree to which the humanities have lost their humanity, their moral coherence, at the hands of the professional academics. He makes a familiar case when he charges experts and systematizers with reducing history to patterns of data, literature to language, and language to a behavioral science. And he questions our patronage of the arts as he does our penchant for "studying" them. Many a reader, persuaded already, could feel numbed by Barzun's more sweeping indictments of modern culture. But his reputation and his powerful grasp of history will recommend this title to a variety of libraries.
- Donald Ray, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.