However, there's nothing intellectually dishonest about saying that, for instance, One Dimensional Man and Guns, Germs, and Steel are very different types of books. As the essay said, one is a book filled with ideas, and the other is a book about an idea. They're both good books, but there's a big difference in range, depth, nuance, scope, and insight. One Dimensional Man takes the ideas of institutional agenda-setting, commodity fetishism, hierarchical organization, mass-media influence, the concentration of resources, the sociological need to fit in, the profit motive, industrialization, false consciousness, and social marginalization and weaves them into an insightful description of a society which appears to offer freedom, but really exercises an almost totalitarian amount of control over it members, their lives, and even their thoughts. It's generally seen as a seminal text in Critical Theory, or the Frankfurt school of philosophy, and it sparked and guided the counter-cultural movement of the 60s. Guns, Germs, and Steel posits that material wealth is the end result of living on a continent that is oriented horizontally, giving the people who inhabited its biomes a greater number of resources to make use of. It's generally seen as an interesting essay, that attempted to revive the debunked theory of geographical determinism, which was unnecessarily expanded into a book. Again, they're both good books, but there's nothing remotely dishonest about saying that they're different types of books. One weaves together many ideas, the other (over) explains only one idea.
How keenly condescending of you. One Dimensional Man is a Cold War polemic against both sides of the Berlin Wall. More than that, it's a necessarily myopic interpretation of the facts on the ground for half of its subject matter, having been written less than 20 years after the Kennan Long Telegram. Guns, Germs and Steel is a post-Cold War rumination on the impacts of geography, timing and biology as it relates to anthropology. "It's generally seen as an interesting essay" is academic-speak for "it's good enough for the proles, but smart people like myself generally don't bother to discredit it because people in-the-know already know better." To say that "one weaves many ideas" while the other "explains one idea" is perspective, and flawed perspective at that. More than that, you initially started out trying to say that, somehow, a book about one idea (presuming this is one) "really can't provide much of an understanding of anything" and that this was somehow the fault of the publishing industry. I've seen nothing that defends either point, just an attempt to discredit my arguments through condescension. Which I don't deserve, and I'd hoped you'd be above. And now, thoroughly embarrassed by your scathing critique, I retire, cowed, and promise to never open my mouth again, massa.
Actually, it's just English for "an essay which was interesting." > I've seen nothing that defends either point, just an attempt to discredit my arguments through condescension. What you've seen is someone trying to explain the point the author was trying to make while someone else was ranting at him. And your arguments were: if someone failed to get his book published, it could only be because he's a failure and bad writer; the publishing industry couldn't possibly be uninterested in multiple-idea books, because single-idea books have been around for a long time; and, the multiple-idea books of the past and single-idea books of the present are exactly the same thing. At the risk of sounding condescending, I really didn't think the best thing to do, at that point, was point out the flaws in your arguments. Instead, I thought it would be more helpful to explain what the author was trying to say, since you didn't seem to get it. > I retire, cowed, and promise to never open my mouth again, massa. Or, you could just try posting while calm, instead of spewing venom everywhere.