Culture of complaint : the fraying of America / Robert Hughes.
This book is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America--a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center. To the right, the author fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Oxford University Press,
1993.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Contributor biographical information |
| Summary: | This book is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America--a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center. To the right, the author fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald Reagan. To the left, he skewers political correctness, Afro-centrism, and academic obsessions with theory. PC censoriousness and "family-values" rhetoric, he argues, are only two sides of the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present--and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold War. This book is fired by a deep concern, but it is not a relentless diatribe. While the author lambastes some aspects of American politics and denounces political correctness, he offers a heartfelt defense of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to Americans' difficulty in imagining the rest of the world--and other Americans. |
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| Item Description: | Based on a series of lectures. |
| Physical Description: | xiii, 210 pages ; 22 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-210). |
| ISBN: | 0195076761 9780195076769 |