Culture of Complaint: Fraying of America

by RobertHughes (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $3.25

  This is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America. It is a passionate book, filled with barbed wit and asides on public life, both left and right of centre. To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Reagan and the Reaganites. To the left, he skewers political correctness, Afrocentrism, and academic obsession with theory, often totally remote from living issues. With the long retreat from public responsibilities that marked America in the 1980s Hughes sees hollowness at the cultural core - a nation obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; sceptical of authority and prey to superstition, its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism . Hughes dismantles and inspects the core elements of the contemporary American ethos offers signposts on the way to a genuine non-ideological multi-culturalism, and to a political life realized (in Vaclav Havel's words) not as the art of the useful but as practical morality, as service to the truth . The author also wrote The Fatal Shore and Barcelona .

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $5.20

  In this examination of the contemporary American ethos Hughes emphasizes the hollowness at the cultural core of the country, criticizing trends from across the political spectrum including political correctness, Afro-centrism and the Reaganite demagogy.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1993

  $3.25

  In this radical account of the decline of twentieth-century American culture, Time art critic Robert Hughes insists that the politicization of almost every area of American culture has resulted in quarrelling, infighting, and a fall in the standards needed to hold such a diverse nation together. Based on a series of lectures sponsored by the New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, Culture of Complaint asserts that the melting pot of America has never melted, and that American mutuality has always existed in a recognition of differences. The blame for the fraying of the American sense of collectivity and mutual respect is laid at many doors: demagogues who claim there is only one path to virtuous Americanness, multiculturalists who seek to rewrite history, advocators of political correctness, and sociologists who see the dysfunctional family as the cause of most personal problems. The book is an extraordinary statement of the times, and a clarion call for the rebuilding of America.

• New

  Hardcover
  1993

  $49.32

  In this radical account of the decline of twentieth-century American culture, Time art critic Robert Hughes insists that the politicization of almost every area of American culture has resulted in quarrelling, infighting, and a fall in the standards needed to hold such a diverse nation together. Based on a series of lectures sponsored by the New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, Culture of Complaint asserts that the melting pot of America has never melted, and that American mutuality has always existed in a recognition of differences. The blame for the fraying of the American sense of collectivity and mutual respect is laid at many doors: demagogues who claim there is only one path to virtuous Americanness, multiculturalists who seek to rewrite history, advocators of political correctness, and sociologists who see the dysfunctional family as the cause of most personal problems. The book is an extraordinary statement of the times, and a clarion call for the rebuilding of America.