The Dictionary of Global Culture: What Every American Needs to Know as We Enter the Next Century--from Diderot to Bo Diddley - Softcover

Appiah, Kwame Anthony Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679729852 ISBN 13: 9780679729853

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998

Synopsis

Reference/World History

"Consistently informative, lively, and accurate . . . a pathbreaking achievement."                 --The New York Times Book Review

s the world's axes of population, power, and commerce shift from North to South and from West to East, the old Eurocentric model of culture is giving way to a new global paradigm. This dictionary, which has been compiled by two of our most esteemed scholars, is the first work of its kind to devote equal emphasis to the cultural contributions of the non-Western world alongside those of Europe and North America.  
        Prepared by regional experts from five continents (including both scholars from other cultures and Western scholars of other cultures), the book's more than 1,200 entries include:
Chinua Achebe  ¸  Aeschylus  ¸  Bo Diddley   ¸  Denis Diderot   ¸  Martha Graham  ¸  The Great Leap Forward  ¸  Igbo  ¸  Inanna  ¸  Jainism  ¸  Henry James  ¸  John Milton  ¸  Yukio Mishima  ¸  Ramayana  ¸  Raphael  ¸  François Toussaint L'Ouverture  ¸  Trail of Tears  ¸  Zionism  ¸  Zydeco  
Vast in scope and lucidly written, The Dictionary of Global Culture is an indispensable reference for students, businesspeople, or anyone seeking a foothold in the civilization of the next millennium.

"Detailed, accurate and solid. . . . It contains much to interest and inform."                                                       --Baltimore Sun

About this title

Review

This work, edited by two of America's most accessible public intellectuals, from Harvard University's Afro-American studies department, is a scholarly yet easy-to-read reference that serves as a cultural-literacy primer for the third millennium. Multicultural in scope, it contains concise and timely essays on everything from the Islamic origins of algebra to Chinua Achebe, the Dalai Lama, John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Gates and Appiah also include figures of popular culture such as Amy Tan and J.R.R. Tolkien. What makes the work most impressive is the editors' search for "an understanding of other cultures that enriches without displacing" the achievements of Western civilization, showing how African, Afro-American, Hispanic, Asian, and European writers, politicians, and artists have all contributed. --Eugene Holley Jr.

About the Author

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code, and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently a professor at Princeton University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679729852
• ISBN 13: 9780679729853
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 736