The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited Review

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(More customer reviews)There are lots of decline-of-Western-Civ books. This one is brilliant.
Carroll's basic point is that man needs a place to stand, and humanism--putting man at the center of things--can't give him one. So the book recounts 500 years' worth of attempts to fill the hole, either consistently with humanism or in opposition to it.
The analysis rings the changes on a very few themes, like reason and honor and death, which it traces in their various permutations throughout the 500-year humanist period.
The presentation is based on close analysis of literary and artistic works: Holbein's Ambassadors (on the cover) as a representation of the failure of Renaissance humanism, Vermeer's interiors as a depiction of Puritan domestic inwardness, Cezanne's landscapes as a last-ditch attempt to save natural order, and so on.
I found the interpretations--Velasquez's Las Meninas as radically subversive and so on--both startling and persuasive. Sometimes I had my doubts, though. Is Rembrandt's David and Uriah really David and Uriah? Someone's being sent his death, as the author says, but is he an innocent? And was Poussin really the Catholic Counter-Reformation prophet who, had we but followed him, would have saved us through the restoration of liturgical community?
Be those things as they may, the analysis is clear and cogent, and the examples are fascinating in themselves and the use made of them at least plausible and often strikingly illuminating. So read it.
One issue I should mention: the illustrations aren't up to the text, so you should read the book with a computer at hand so you can look up the images on the net.

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