Reviews for Encyclopedia of government and politics

The average rating for Encyclopedia of government and politics based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-27 00:00:00 Timothy Stevenson The vastness of the cosmos is something we in the early twenty-first century take for granted, though it isn't something we always comprehend. In her slim volume of essays, Science and Imagination, Marjorie Hope Nicolson studies the impact the discovery of its vastness had on the first several generations of people to live through it, those whose world suddenly became both much larger and smaller than it was thanks to the invention of the microscope and telescope, respectively. Nicolson examines the ways in which the discoveries achieved through the telescope and microscope lodged themselves in the European literary imagination in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The longest essay is on the "scientific background" to Gulliver’s Travels. Swift, as Nicolson amply demonstrates, knew exactly what he was satirizing: travel literature, reports of scientific experiments, and learned bodies such as the Royal Society. Another essay explores the impact that an early example of science fiction, if it can be called that, had on John Donne. Johannes Kepler, of three planetary laws of motion fame, wrote a book called the Somnium in which he imagines himself traveling to the moon. This work, in manuscript form, somehow reached Donne, who then incorporated some of its ideas in his own work, especially the "space travel" elements in "Ignatius His Conclave." As it turns out, the moon voyage was a popular literary genre, one that got new life from the renewed attention the Moon received thanks to Galileo. Another essay makes a convincing case that Milton was profoundly influenced by the new astronomy when he wrote Paradise Lost. His descriptions of the planets and Satan’s perspective on the cosmos as he travels to Earth would have been impossible before the new astronomy of Kepler, Galileo, et al. transformed the universe into something nearly infinite in scope. In other, more general essays, Nicolson details how telescope and microscope altered the English (she mostly looks at England) literary imagination by altering what it became possible for English writers to imagine, and therefore write. Donne's "First Anniversary," where he laments the disordering of the old, static understanding of the universe, is probably the best known example, but Nicolson offers many, many more. Nor were all reactions as negative as Donne’s. The people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were just as captivated by the wonders of the universe as we are, and their wonder and awe comes across vividly. Except in Shakespeare. For whatever reason, and Nicolson can offer no more than conjecture, the Bard was immune to the new science. Whenever he speaks of the heavens, planets, and stars, he does so in the terms of the old Ptolemaic conception of the universe. Time fascinated him, but space to him remained empty, even after Galileo had filled it beyond comprehension. The essays collected here were written in the 1930s. Their style and methodology, from the perspective of 2015, cannot but seem outmoded, if not obsolete. They are very old-fashioned, relying almost exclusively on description and narration. They are "positivist," to coin a phrase. There’s no theoretical apparatus, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In a book like this, I'm most interested in learning what the people involved thought and had to say, and less so what it means from a theoretical or historiographical perspective. (And given how such a book might read if a contemporary English professor wrote it, that's no small mercy.) One might wish for more authorial intervention, but ultimately it's unnecessary to have Nicolson pronounce that the scientific discoveries of the microscope and telescope utterly transformed man's understanding of the cosmos and his place in it. That is abundantly clear on every page of this fine little book. Posted 23 July 2015

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-25 00:00:00 Jessica Hampton I'm not sure what annoys me more - the play that elevated a story about two teenagers meeting at a ball and instantly "falling in love" then deciding to get married after knowing each other for one night into the most well-known love story of all time, or the middle schools that feed this to kids of the same age group as the main characters to support their angst-filled heads with the idea that yes, they really are in love with that guy/girl they met five minutes ago, and no one can stop them, especially not their meddling parents! Keep in mind that Juliet was THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. (Her father states she "hath not yet seen the change of fourteen years" in 1.2.9). Even in Shakespeare's England, most women were at least 21 before they married and had children. It's not clear how old Romeo is, but either he's also a stupid little kid who needs to be slapped, or he's a child molester, and neither one is a good thing. When I was in middle school or high school, around the time we read this book, I remember a classmate saying in class that when her and her boyfriends' eyes met across the quad, they just knew they were meant to be together forever. How convenient that her soulmate happened to be an immensely popular and good-looking football player, and his soulmate happened to be a gorgeous cheerleader! That's not love at first sight, that's lust at first sight. If they were really lucky, maybe as time went on they would also happen to "click" very well, that lust would develop into love (it didn't), and they would end up together forever (they didn't). But if they saw each other at a school dance, decided they were "like, totally in love," and then the next day decided to run off and get married, we shouldn't encourage that as a romantic love story, we should slap the hell out of them both to wake them up to reality. For what it's worth, my cynicism doesn't come from any bitterness towards life or love. I met my wife when we were 17, and we've now been together almost 10 years, married for a little over 2. Fortunately for me, she turned out to be awesome. If we had decided the day after meeting each other that we were hopelessly in love and needed to get married immediately, we would have been idiots, and I hope someone who I trusted and respected would have slapped me, hard. If we were 13 at the time, that would be even worse. Enlightened adults injecting this into our youth as a classic love story for the generations, providing further support for their angst-filled false ideas of love and marriage, is probably worst of all.