On the Shoulders of Giants
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
The final collection from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture.
In this collection of essays we find Umberto Eco’s perennial areas of interest explored in a lively and engaging style, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. In these wide-ranging pieces he explores the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies and the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics.
Umberto Eco was one of the most influential, and entertaining, intellectuals of the last century, as well as being a critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of both fiction and non-fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This delightful collection assembles 12 essays by the late Italian novelist originating in lectures he delivered between 2001 and 2015 at the annual La Milanesiana cultural festival. Eco's remarks on such broad topics as "Beauty" and "Ugliness," "Some Revelations on Secrecy," and "Representations of the Sacred" reveal his astonishingly wide range of interests, encompassing such varied subjects as linguistics and chemistry. At times, his erudition might lose some American readers how many will be familiar with the po tes galants movement, or the literary character Jacopo Ortis? But his skill in making unexpected connections as when he applies T.S. Eliot's critique of Hamlet as a "poorly made patchwork of previous... material" to explain why Casablanca's "hundred clich s" resulted in a much-loved film whose viewers can "quote the classic lines even before the actors do" and, especially, his wit will win his audience's attention back. Of Thomas Aquinas, for example, Eco notes that since the great medieval philosopher believed that resurrected bodies in the afterlife would retain their hair, but not genitals, "This would suggest that in heaven you can get a shampoo and set, but you cannot have sex." If Eco often leads readers down a not easily followed intellectual path, they are usually well rewarded for persisting on it.
