Adam DeVille on Christopher Bollas’ “Meaning and Melancholia”
From Adam DeVille’s Eastern Christian Books blog: In this short book, Bollas imitates Freud in some ways insofar as he engages in broad cultural analysis of many themes of…
Tag: complex society
2001: I am not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. Review of “The Tipping Point” from The Lancet.
I actually quite enjoy Gladwell’s articles – a bit solutionist at times but he can tell a story well. Like many other books by New Yorker writers whose New Yorker…
“Whether our work leads to victory becomes irrelevant to us” Jeffrey Bilbro on the happy loser
I am not (yet) familiar with the work of Wendell Berry, though I think I am going to make it my business to be. Berry is the inspiration of this wonderful…
The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph Tainter
Somewhere along the way I came across references to Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies and finally read it in recent weeks. Tainter’s prose style reminded me a little of John…
From “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph A Tainter
The citizens of modern complex societies usually do not realise that we are an anomaly of history. Throughout the several million years that recognisable humans are known to have lived,…
Séamus Sweeney 