A helpful and intermittently revealing (if scarcely essential) gloss on both Eco’s unusual fiction and his knotty...
“Occasional pieces,” all dating from the 1990s, that include essays, speeches, and revised correspondence from the erudite novelist-philosopher-semiotician Eco (Kant and the Platypus, 1999, etc.).
Eco speculates (in “When the Other Appears on the Scene” and “Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable”) that the bases of moral actions that not specifically grounded in religious belief arise from an acknowledgement of “the importance of the other.” The former piece is quite closely reasoned, but the latter (which meanders between assessing the influence of “migrant” populations on settled societies and condemning the “Eurocentric” nature of what might be called millennial chic) is rather less focused. Elsewhere, Eco considers the relationship of the “intellectual community” to the (arguably now obsolete) phenomenon of military conflict, concluding (in “Reflections on War”) that “It is an intellectual duty to proclaim the inconceivability of war.” In “On the Press,” he analyzes the impact of instantaneous communication and “the dynamic of provocation” (especially as perfected by television interviewers). And in “Ur-Fascism,” which offers a series of keen discriminations between Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism, he makes a convincing case for using the former word generically, as “a synechdoche . . . for different totalitarian movements”—while simultaneously sketching in an illuminating piecemeal memoir of growing up in Italy during WWII. Most persuasive when (as here) most personal, Eco attempts in these brief arguments to create a convincing impression of a conscientious intellectual earnestly addressing contemporary social and moral crises as a means of understanding “what we ought to do, what we ought not to do, and what we must not do at any cost.”
A helpful and intermittently revealing (if scarcely essential) gloss on both Eco’s unusual fiction and his knotty philosophical and semantic studies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100446-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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