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SHAKESPEARE LIED

Name: SHAKESPEARE LIED
Author: Sky Gilbert
ISBN: 9781771839037

by Sky Gilbert ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024

Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.

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No moral lessons, just gorgeous language and vibrant voices lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays.

So argues Canadian multihyphenate Gilbert (a novelist, playwright, and founder of a gay theater in Toronto), who also argues that “the recent intrusion of the woke left into aesthetics…threatens to destroy art.” This mindset, he states, has transformed artistic works into vehicles for didactic and/or propagandist ends. In this collection of essays, Gilbert, working from the premise that the analytical, “left brain cultural takeover” began during Shakespeare’s life, analyzes how the Bard’s plays and poems reveal a rejection of reason and empiricism. He begins by observing that Shakespeare’s writing style is as complex as it is heavily connotative, which he sees as atypical for an era when most writers followed one of three styles: “grand, middle or low.” Indeed, the Bard often adopted a variety of styles within single passages of text. His stylistic “slipperiness” extends to how he played arguments and counterarguments against each other to create works “steeped in paradox.” That, Gilbert suggests, marks Shakespeare’s plays as amoral and the playwright as a skeptic. He further argues that the playwright’s commitment to rhetoric and language before all else placed him in a position where he could simply allow his characters to speak and act rather than use them to reveal any particular social or political bent. Working during a time when theater was under attack by Puritans, who favored plays that moralized, the Bard chose instead to follow a Classical aesthetic grounded in the thinking of philosophers like Gorgias, who believed that “what is real is defined by the artist in collaboration with the audience.” Shakespeare, then, was not only a literary craftsman but also an early modern aesthete dedicated to creating beauty rather than delivering messages for the ages. This view of Shakespeare is hardly new, but its application to today’s woke culture is stimulating, if not necessarily persuasive.

Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9781771839037

Page Count: 150

Publisher: Guernica Editions

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL NONFICTION

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.