Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts

Rating

9.0

The Pequod Review:

Clive James's Cultural Amnesia is an intelligent collection of 106 biographical essays on a wide range of cultural, intellectual and political figures – Camus, Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Tacitus, Dick Cavett, Evelyn Waugh, Miles Davis, etc. James writes in a tone that is serious and incisive, yet modest and down-to-earth, on subjects such as Norman Mailer (“Everything that the cult of celebrity can do to destroy an artistic gift has been done to Mailer”) and John-Paul Sartre (“He pretended that he had been brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price”). Highly recommended.