Issue No.
3
July 2007
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Nature’s terror
You think the world would be better off without humans? Think again.
by Josie Appleton
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| Welcome to the July Review of Books |
 Tim Black
‘What character- ises man is his extreme abundance of imagination.’ So said José Ortega y Gasset. This issue of the spiked review of books is a celebration of that imagination - and a call for it to be liberated from the ball-and-chain of today’s misanthropic outlook. Josie Appleton dips her toe into Alan Weisman’s intriguing thought experiment: his study of what the world would look like without the guiding hand of human rationality. Frank Furedi, taking on two new heavyweight books on the crisis of moral authority, says political thinking should strike free from the ‘prison of the present’. The studies of the lives and works of Thomas Jefferson and Henryk Grossman show that different men in different times, through preparing for war or applying analytical tools, have been able to imagine, and make, better worlds. Please enjoy the abundance of ideas herein.... [Cover picture by Jan Bowman.] |
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