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Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 700.10309730904
EAN: 9780446670340
ISBN: 0446670340
Label: Grand Central Publishing
Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: September 01, 1994
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Studio: Grand Central Publishing
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Editorial Review:
Concerned about America's future, the author of The Fatal Shore examines the fragmentation of society through multiculturalism--with its destructive effects in the social, political, and moral arenas--and pointedly criticizes extremists on both the left and right. Reprint. NYT.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A rare thing....a political book that hasn't dated....
I bought this book years ago, and surprisingly, it holds up very well for a political/current affairs book. Most political stuff is immediate and topical, and dates withing hours nowadays. But Robert Hughes, an Australian that has been living in the US for a while now, has managed to make a book that's lasting in its critiques of America, its government, its liberal and conversative elites, and its electorate. He blasts both the left and the right, but it's not just the easy "they're all corrupt" ... Read More
Rating:  - Rambling diatribe that picks up toward the end
Robert Hughes takes aim at Americans' preoccupation with victimhood, the battleground of multiculturalism, and the mediocrity of modern art in this collection of three essays expanded from speeches that he had given. I basically agree with him, but the first two sections of this book read like the ramblings of a grouchy old man, albeit a very well-educated one. It comes alive in the final section, in which Hughes laments that Americans have come to see art as something therapeutic, that the intention ... Read More
Rating: - A call for skilled, complex, and eclectic thought
Granted, attacking contemporary America's cultural love for the debased, the self-indulgent extreme, the hapless and unskilled mediocrity as well as the insipid cults that have risen around exhalting the helpless victim, nurturing the stunted "inner child" and bandaging the wounded self-esteem seems too obvious.
Fortunately TIME Magazine Art Critic and writer extraordinaire Robert Hughes laces his acid-dripping pen with adroit observations and incredible verbal acrobatics in an all-out attack that ... Read More
Rating:  - Creature of Complaint
Funny, when I think of the term "culture of complaint", this book is the first thing that comes to mind as being a document belonging to that culture.This book is motivated less by thought than by curmudgeonliness. Hughes is a poor thinker and an abominable art critic. He consistently mistakes artistic innovation as "poor quality", often evaluating art which occupies an interstice between established forms by rigid and inappropriate terms.(His particular condemnation of certain artists ... Read More
Rating:  - Hughes delivers again
Robert Hughes is one of my favorite writers on history and art, and I also enjoyed his book, The Fatal Shore, a history of the Botany Bay colony in Australia. Hughes has always had an interest in modern art (many of you may recall his great TV series, "The Shock of the New," back in the 80's), and since much of modern art has come out of America, perhaps it's no surprise he wrote this book, which takes a broader look at American culture.
Hughes's devastating critique of the foibles of modern American ... Read More
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