Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses - Softcover

Dalrymple, Theodore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 156663721X ISBN 13: 9781566637213

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 2007

Synopsis

This new collection of essays by the author of Life at the Bottom bears the unmistakable stamp of Theodore Dalrymple's bracingly clearsighted view of the human condition. It suggests comparison with the work of George Orwell. In these twenty-six pieces, Dr. Dalrymple ranges over literature and ideas, from Shakespeare to Marx, from the breakdown of Islam to the legalization of drugs. Informed by years of medical practice in a wide variety of settings, his acquaintance with the outer limits of human experience allows him to discover the universal in the local and the particular, and makes him impatient with the humbug and obscurantism that have too long marred our social and political life. As in Life at the Bottom, his essays are incisive yet undogmatic, beautifully composed and devoid of disfiguring jargon. Our Culture, What's Left of It is a book that restores our faith in the central importance of literature and criticism to our civilization.

About this title

About the Author:

Theodore Dalrymple is a British doctor and writer who has worked on four continents and now practices in a British inner-city hospital and a prison. He has written a column for the London Spectator for thirteen years and is a contributing editor for City Journal in the United States. His earlier collection of essays, Life at the Bottom, was widely praised.

Review:

Dalrymple writes a clear and considered prose that makes him formidable indeed. (David Pryce–Jones Book Review Digest)

Theodore Dalrymple has succeeded (once more) in publishing a book that is both thoughtful and absorbing. (Paul Hollander New York Sun)

The brutal, penetrating honesty of his thinking and the vividness of his prose make Theodore Dalrymple the George Orwell of our time. (Denis Dutton, Editor Arts and Letters Daily)

His gift for storytelling will keep readers turning pages. (The Christian Century)

Theodore Dalrymple is the best doctor-writer since William Carlos Williams. (Peggy Noonan)

There is so much learning and unconventional wisdom in it that you want to make the reading last. (Norman Stone)

Theodore Dalrymple is the Edmund Burke of our age.... Our Culture, What's Left of It is not simply an important book, it is a necessary one. (Roger Kimball)

Dalrymple's moral courage shines through the most. Compelling reading; highly recommended. (Library Journal)

Engrossing. Dalrymple is intelligent, witty, uncommonly perceptive about human affairs, and scathingly honest about human folly. (Edward J. Sozanski The Philadelphia Inquirer)

It's rare for someone to produce a work on social issues that is so readable. (Kevin Walker Tampa Tribune)

About this edition

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 156663721X
• ISBN 13: 9781566637213
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356