Product Description

"If you have finally had it with CNN and Hollywood and John Grisham and New Age 'spirituality,' then pull up a chair, unplug your phone (beeper, TV, fax machine, computer, etc.), and give me a few hours of your time. I promise to do my best not to entertain you."

A slightly forbidding introduction to a book, but indicative of its author's disgust at the homogenized McWorld in which we live, and an enticing challenge to read on. As the title The Twilight of American Culture suggests, Morris Berman's outlook is somewhat bleak. Analogizing the contemporary United States to the late Roman Empire, Berman sees a nation fat on useless consumption, saturated with corporate ideology, and politically, psychically, and culturally dulled. But he believes that this behemoth--what Thomas Frank called the "multinational entertainment oligopoly"--must buckle under its own weight. His hope for a brighter tomorrow lies in a modern monastic movement, in which keepers of the enlightenment flame resist the constant barrage of "spin and hype." Ironically, despite his disdain for "the fashionable patois of postmodernism," he approvingly quotes poststructuralist theorist Jean-François Lyotard's maxim "elitism for everybody" in describing this cadre of idiosyncratic, literate devotees, these new monks.

Berman is plainspoken and occasionally caustic. The Twilight of American Culture is an informed and thought-provoking book, a wake-up call to a nation whose powerful minority has become increasingly self-satisfied as their stock options ripen, while an underclass that vastly outnumbers the e-generation withers on the vine and cannot locate itself on any map. It is a quick and savage read that aims to get your eyes off this computer, your nose out of that self-help book, and send you back to thought and action. --J.R.

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Product Details

Publisher	W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN	039332169X
Format	Paperback
Author	Morris Berman
EAN	9780393321692
Label	W. W. Norton & Company
Dewey Decimal Number	306
Studio	W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Pages	224
Title	The Twilight of American Culture
Publication Date	2001-06
Manufacturer	W. W. Norton & Company

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Customer Reviews

Insightful, but some caveat lectors.

Review by David G. Moore, 2009-09-17

This is a thoughtful and literate book. The author is off in his understanding of Christianity (e.g. p. 81), he seems to make a religion out of literature, and may overstate economic concerns, though there is definitely injustice with the latter and the author is correct to address it. Still, there is much to benefit from in Berman's trenchant critique.

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By the skin of our teeth?

Review by Kerry Walters, 2008-10-06

In his "Civilisation" series, Kenneth Clark noted that western civilization just managed to escape total eclipse in the medieval dark ages "by the skin of [its] teeth." An influential factor in toughing out those centuries of ignorance, fear, violence, and superstition was the painstaking preservation of classical learning by monks, a salvaging of light in the midst of the encompassing darkness.

Morris Berman takes that earlier example of monkish preservation and transmission of tradition seriously in his examination of what he sees as the coming of a new dark age. The growing gap between wealthy and poor, the corrosion of culture and literacy, the corruption of political leadership and the moral callousness that accompanies it: these are the indicators of the beginning of the end.

Berman suggests the "monastic option" as a way of saving something from the collapse that's already started. Individuals, usually anonymous but dedicated individuals who say no to the culture of kitsch in which we dwell and who pass on the "treasures of our heritage" to others, will be the new monks in the contemporary and future dark age. Reminiscent of the book-savers in Bradbury's Farenheit 451, these new monks are content to work quietly and behind-the-scenes in order to keep the candles of civilization burning safely (hence, in response to an early reviewer, the cover illustration of Berman's book). With luck--with fortitude and resolve--we just may make it through the new dark age by the skin of our teeth.

A provocative and important book. Readers may also wish to consult Berman's Dark Ages America, Andrew Bacevich's Limits of Power, Susan Jacoby's The Age of Unreason, and Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead.

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what about the cover?

Review by B.Friendly, 2008-08-30

Sorry to be nitpicking here, but who allowed this ghastly cover to blanket such an important book? W.W.Norton or the man, Berman, himself? What do brand new candles have to do with the collapse of a society, or the dawn of the same? This cover must be changed, thus giving the content a new push towards a well deserving readership; after all this is not a book about power outage or wax making!!!! Please!

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Really cannot be denied

Review by Spanish student, 2008-07-07

There is nothing I can add save to say the deed is done: America has entered terminal decline. Four short decades of unhinged liberalism and mass immigration (the latter would have done the job all by itself, btw) is all it took. To those who long sought this outcome, enjoy your victory. To those blind that the battle was fought and the outcome decided, I envy your blissful ignorance.

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feel-good pseudo-rebellion

Review by Owen Lloyd, 2008-03-07

The author is far less profound than he seems to think. He evidently takes pride in being pompous, looking down with a scowl on those he finds inferior, i.e. the populace at large. He derides multiculturalism because it infringes on the legacy of his favorite white male writers. I'm not someone to attack writers as pretentious, but Berman would wear the term with pride on a merit badge. I won't say that I didn't get anything out of this book, and altogether I agree with him on a number of things, much of this book is just the author spitting on people, with a few vague rants against corporations and the American political system.

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