I don't dispute Mr. Reeves' review. If it is a reference you want, this is not your book. But, if you are an older person who is some distance from your liberal arts under-graduate days and haven't given up the curiosity you had in a sweep of world cultures back then, it's a book which will give you some fun, leisurely reading.
I mean, don't approach this book seriously. Priestly writes, as Reeves points out, in long-winded sentences, the sort of conversational sentences we use around the kitchen table over a cup of tea late in the evening when the TV is dysfunctional. Let me give you an example of a 100-word sentence that is typical. It reminds me of evenings I sat with a French maiden at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village back in my twenties, a couple of beers and belly-laughing reading Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantegruel.
Here's Priestly on the "monk-turned-wandering-scholar-turned-physician above all a life-enhanser:"
"We cannot begin to understand and enjoy Rabelais, for example, if we accept the view that he was a serious satirist, an anti-clerical reformer, a Protestant, or even an agnostic or rationalist, who to escape charges of heresy disguised himself as a buffoon, hid himself and his purpose behind a carnival display of giants, dwarfs, freaks, wild clowning and obscenity."
Or this one: "Yet, ironically enough, this robust masculine genius, this mad wag whose cheap cynicism about woman is his weakest feature, makes war everywhere on what is patriarchal, whatever is dominated by the masculine principle, whatever is one-sided, intolerant, harsh, bigoted, fanatical, pedantic, legalistic, tyrannical, life-denying, to defend and to celebrate what is in effect matriarchal in its values, owing allegiance to the feminine principle, whatever makes for a free and joyful acceptance of life in all its genuine manifestations, of nature as well as culture, of man as body, mind and soul."
I expect that maybe the reason I find Priestly's writing so much fun is that it is just so iconoclastic with regard to the academic world, which in my opinion takes itself far, far too seriously and self-important. Mind you, some of my best friends have been or are professors or working scientists. And thank God, they do have a sense of humor.
It is the kind of book I read late at night when I can't sleep or in the John, when I am truly not looking to be serious about anything. My wife reads murder mysteries for this purpose. I read books like Priestly's Literature and Western Man.
I find the short twitter spin inane and boring. But this may just be a generational thing.
