Culture
The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
"A mighty, polymathic work, equally at home in all four corners of the globe.…It is a gift to be savored." —Chris Vognar, Boston Globe
In Culture, acclaimed author, professor, and public intellectual Martin Puchner takes us on a breakneck tour through pivotal moments in world history, providing a global introduction to the arts and humanities in one engaging volume.
What good are the arts? Why should we care about the past? For millennia, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the “know-how” of life, but the “know-why”—the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, architecture, religion, and philosophy. This crucial passing down of knowledge has required the radical integration of insights from the past and from other cultures. In Culture, acclaimed author, professor, and public intellectual Martin Puchner takes us on a breakneck tour through pivotal moments in world history, providing a global introduction to the arts and humanities in one engaging volume.
From Nefertiti’s lost city to the plays of Wole Soyinka; from the theaters of ancient Greece to Chinese travel journals to Arab and Aztec libraries; from a South Asian statuette found at Pompeii to a time capsule left behind on the Moon, Puchner tells the gripping story of human achievement through our collective losses and rediscoveries, power plays and heroic journeys, innovations, imitations, and appropriations. More than a work of history, Culture is an archive of humanity’s most monumental junctures and a guidebook for the future of us humans as a creative species. Witty, erudite, and full of wonder, Puchner argues that the humanities are (and always have been) essential to the transmission of knowledge that drives the efforts of human civilization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The circuitous paths by which art, literature, customs, and ideology diffuse through and transform the world are traced in this exhilarating treatise. Harvard English professor Puchner (The Drama of Ideas) spotlights works that crystallize episodes of cultural cross-pollination, including the famous bust, discovered in 1912, of ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, leader of a monotheistic religious movement that influenced early Judaism; a medieval Japanese noblewoman's diary, which reveals the deep imprint of Chinese poetry and manners on Japanese society; enigmatic Aztec picture-writing books and contemporary Albrech Dürer prints, which exemplify the incipient gulf between books as objets d'art and as commodities; a portrait of Haitian statesman Jean-Baptiste Belley and its link to Parisian salons; and the resonances between British colonialism and post-independence Nigerian literature apparent in Wole Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman. Along the way, Puchner analyzes the ingenious mechanisms by which culture is stored, transformed, and spread. (By carving his Buddhist ethical precepts onto giant stone monoliths, the ancient Indian philosopher-king Ashoka cannily assured that they would not just persuade his subjects but tempt scholars thousands of years later into deciphering and discussing them.) Elegantly written and full of erudite lore, this vibrant history illuminates the inveterate human yearning for expression. Photos.
