Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century

ISBN: 0226847993

Author: Summers, John

Condition: New

An essential collection of Dwight Macdonalds prophetic essays on politics, art, and violence in twentieth-century America.What does extreme violence do to human values? Does the concept of collective guilt make sense in assessing responsibility for genocide? Has modern mechanized society forever destroyed the possibility of peaceful resistance through art and civil disobedience? Atrocities of the Mind presents anew Dwight Macdonald, one of Americas foremost literary journalists and political activists, grappling with the hard questions of his time-and ours.In this collection, Macdonald writes about major events-the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhis assassination, the Vietnam War, and social phenomena such as mass shootings, campus protests, and police brutality-with clear-sighted and buoyant prose. He writes incisively about the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski, praises Dorothy Days pacifism, and reports circulating an antiwar petition in the White House Rose Garden. And not without effect: his essay Our Invisible Poor is said to have spurred the Johnson administrations War on Poverty.Norman Mailer memorably called Macdonald a man with whom one might seldom agree but could never disrespect because he always told the truth as he saw the truth-a man therefore of the most incorruptible integrity. In our America, reeling from political violence, Macdonalds truth-telling reminds us how we got here and whom we might still become.