Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Perfect Father's Day Gift

The paperback of The Threat to Reason comes out this week. The keen-eyed among you will notice that we've ditched the b-movie aesthetic and gone for something a little more, how shall we say, serious.

Many, many people praised the book (sometimes on their way to putting the boot in, but I am hustling here, so you can't really expect full disclosure). It is about the form of our uses of the Enlightenment and the substance of the concept. It is a miracle that I managed to write the damn thing, looking back. And it looks like the sort of book you can read on the bus without excessive embarrassment. Whether you think that the Enlightenment was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, or that it might have contained Elements of Both, you owe it to yourself to read it. Maybe.

So go and buy it. Or borrow it from a library if you prefer.

Rod Liddle, Sunday Times
Fine, lucid and sharp ... well written and worth reading before the next wave of western tanks crosses a border, somewhere in the Middle East.

James Harkin, Independent
Since September 11 2001, the idea of Enlightenment has been ripped from university textbooks and airlifted into battle between the West and its irrational enemies. In this elegant polemical essay, Dan Hind rightly quibbles with this supposedly Manichean tussle between the guarantors of Enlightenment in the West and everyone else. Hind wants to rescue the idea of Enlightenment from its usurpers, while pressing it into the service of something better.

Harry Eyres, Financial Times
In this thoughtful polemic Dan Hind argues that we are being misled by a debased "Folk Enlightenment" which has little in common with the Enlightenment initiated by Bacon and championed by Voltaire, Hume and Kant.

Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation.
The Threat to Reason is in the tradition of those great works that ask big and fundamental, yet curiously unexamined, questions. A profound and much-needed contribution ... In the spirit of Enlightenment thinkers, he both reveals the contradictions and hypocrisies of contemporary politics, and also points a way forward.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My father believes in practical life and I know his choice. I got a meaningful gift from Things Remembered for my dad.

2:51 AM  

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