Reviews for The experience of culture

The average rating for The experience of culture based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-28 00:00:00 Charlein Lemmon a good book for the postmodernist wondering how we got to this mad, mad world. a good book for anyone who has ever felt confused by the seemingly unlimited choices available in life. a book for all the hamlets who think more than they act. if you've ever felt that making up your mind is difficult, it's true. but take your time. rosenthal explains why: "We are not merely placed in the world. Our existence is finite. We are free. Free to make choices, although we realize that our boundedness spurs us to make these choices count. To do this, we have to consider our personal and unique relationship and discourse with the larger world. In carrying out our lives, we can trivialize this relationship by either going through the motions or conforming socially. That is, we can live inauthentically. Or, we can take care as to how we confront our choices in relating to the world. We can strive for understanding and create our own opinions and solutions; that is, we can live authentically. To live authentically is to make oneself vulnerable, to accept the angst that permeates us. In our acceptance of inevitable death, in the suffusion of our being with nothingness, our actions, which allow us to take our fate into our own hands as individuals, are what enable us to transcend the void and create a life worth living."

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-01 00:00:00 Garry Olson The only thing more disappointing than me choosing to finish this book was Ed Rosenthal's choice to write it. Or perhaps the truly bad choice was MIT Press's choice not to edit it. Whatever the lapse, this is a truly terrible book (with an admittedly great cover). Imagine the worst TED talk ever, recapped by David Brooks on a bad day, with research assistance from Malcolm Gladwell -- that's how "The Era of Choice" reads. It's all dressed up as a bold statement on our contemporary experience but it's essentially a hackneyed skimming of the last, oh, forty years of cultural criticism. The book has literally nothing new to say, and in fact badly mangles most of its sources. Worst of all is that Rosenthal doesn't even manage to say much about "choice," his proposed unified field theory of our times. He never really defines it, never supports his contention that "we" have more choice now than ever, and never explores the different choices available to different groups. It fails on its own terms, its style is rambling and maddening (lots of "as we shall sees" and "as we have seens"), and its arguments uniformly unsupported. Choose not to read it.