Jonathan Keates
An Appreciation of Emilie
Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair
By David Bodanis
Little, Brown 314pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
Whether by the American religious Right or the gloomier sort of Catholic reactionary on this side of the Atlantic, the Enlightenment has lately been given rather a hard time. Those Fellows of the Royal Society in seventeenth-century London, innocently propounding theories of gravity and laws of physics, or those bewigged Parisian philosophes deriding the excesses of blind faith and calling for a little more in the way of rational discourse and civilised enquiry, are seen as demon harbingers of almost everything disagreeable or disastrous overtaking humanity during the last hundred years. From Galileo to the gulags, we are asked to believe, is but a short step.
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The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties