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Title: Anglomania : A European Love Affair by Ian Buruma ISBN: 0-375-70536-8 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 11 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The best civilization?
Comment: This is simply a delightful book,in which Dutchman Buruma (whose grandparents were German Jews who fled Germany)intertwines his and his family's experiences with England with the experiences of many Anglophiles and Anglophobes. It makes for a very easy, rewarding reading. Buruma talks about many Europeans who loved or hated (and frequently loved and hated at the same time) England. First he deals with that most acute of observers, Voltaire, and his question of why can't the world be more like England?, the land of liberty, the rule of law, tolerance and restraint. Marx, Pevsner, Herzen, Kaiser Wilhelm II and many other politicians, philosophers and artists are portraited here in their relationship with these crucial island.
The book is fast, sharp, funny, erudite, full of interesting anecdotes, and most of all a book about ideas and attitudes. it is one of the best books I've read recently and it is totally recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: Splendid!
Comment: This has to be one of the most delightful books I have read in recent years. When I picked it up, I thought it was going to be about the American obsession with all things British in popular culture. You know, the glut of Jane Austen movies, Masterpiece Theatre, BBC productions, etc. But that's not what this book is about at all. It is a highly refinded examination of European attitudes toward England as found in the writings of politicians, political philosophers, and artists and as reflected in the experiences of Buruma himself.
I was thoroughly impressed by Buruma's ease in discussing the political ideologies of the 18th and 19th centuries. I was also particularly delighted to read the chapter that discusses the lives and work of Nikolaus Pevsner and F. A. Hayek, two favorite authors from my college days. Buruma is a lively and engaging writer who is sure to please anyone with the least bit of curiosity about the past and with a love of England and what it represents in its deepest and most profound senses.
Rating: 4
Summary: Liberal Coconuts
Comment: Like coconuts, Voltaire believed that English free institutions could and should be transplanted everywhere. This has special appeal to Americans who also hold strongly to this belief about their political institutions. Bunuma's book ranges to other Anglophiles up to Isaiah Berlin, taking in other figures like the soured -philes who turned into -phobes like Kaiser Wilhelm and Karl Marx.
The book sparks like an intellectual firecracker - varied characters like Voltaire, Alexander Herzen, Nicklaus Pevsner, inhabit the pages. Overall the book will fascinate anybody who might even have just a minor interest in the history of ideas.
The book is at his best when covering Bunuma's own experiences and those of his own family - his greandparents were German Jews who moved to England early in the 20th century. These were remarkable people - in the 1930s, they took in 12 Jewish refugee children, yet in 1945 at the first family Christmas after the war, they shared their Christmas meal with two German prisoners-of-war from the local camp.
Sadly, examples of forebearance and humanity like this are all too scarce now in a world where violence and brutality seems to be daily celebrated in the mass media. Bunuma's anglophile love of English commonsense and pragmatism leads to fear for the future of English liberalism. In an acute observation, he recalls how the liberal Kingdom of Bavaria became the breeding ground of Nazism.
His account of a Tory party conference and the perversion of old English values that went on, is scary. However, personally I feel his fears may not come to pass, since I write after the wipeout of the Tory party in the recent English election (2001). But anyone who has encountered a squad of English football fans on the rampage will know exactly where Bunuma is coming from.
As an Irishman, I can relate to Bunuma since his juvenvile favourites of English public schoolboy adventures exactly mirror my own. While recognising English hypocrisy aboout class boundaries and its former exploitative Empire, I can see where British stubborness made the difference between liberty and those who sought to destroy it. For Britain to lose the great tradition of tolerance exemplified by Locke, Burke, Mill and Orwell would be an awful tragedy. Thanks to Bunuma, that may now be much less likely.
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Title: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing by Ian Buruma ISBN: B00008NRHO Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Missionary and the Libertine : Love and War in East and West by Ian Buruma ISBN: 0375705376 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles) by Ian Buruma ISBN: 0679640851 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Robert E. Lee: A Penguin Life by Roy, Jr. Blount ISBN: 0670032204 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 08 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0670031860 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 10 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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