Maybe Sean Penn has a point. The San Francisco Chronicle seems a little dazed and confused these days, especially after reading Simon Maxwell Apter's bizarre review of Mark Booth's The Secret History of the World this weekend. Apter, an assistant editor at Lapham's Quarterly, seems most offended by Booth's wide-ranging survey of the influence of Secret Societies: "Concocting a sort of literary Long Island Iced Tea, Booth throws every liquor he can find into his cocktail. The predictable result is overwrought, overflavored and overblown. A Long Island Iced Tea can be an entire night's worth of drinking in one glass; Booth's history is an attempt to cram an entire library's worth of scholarship into a single volume."
Sunday, January 20, 2008
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD in The San Francisco Chronicle
Maybe Sean Penn has a point. The San Francisco Chronicle seems a little dazed and confused these days, especially after reading Simon Maxwell Apter's bizarre review of Mark Booth's The Secret History of the World this weekend. Apter, an assistant editor at Lapham's Quarterly, seems most offended by Booth's wide-ranging survey of the influence of Secret Societies: "Concocting a sort of literary Long Island Iced Tea, Booth throws every liquor he can find into his cocktail. The predictable result is overwrought, overflavored and overblown. A Long Island Iced Tea can be an entire night's worth of drinking in one glass; Booth's history is an attempt to cram an entire library's worth of scholarship into a single volume."
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Simon Maxwell Apter
Booth's book is daring precisely because he takes such an earnest, honest, and penetrating look at the world that he's inherited, and whenever you do that, you're bound to look between the cracks of history and then far beyond the surface of things, which inevitably subjects you to the (quite literally) shallow criticisms of bystanders like Simon Maxwell Apter. Now, in Apter's defense, one must readily admit that crackpots are as bound to look beyond the surface of things as geniuses are, and thereby imagine all sorts of lunacy. However, that's as far as a Apter's defense goes, because enlightened individuals (including book reviewers) ought to be able to discern the difference between the two. Apter clearly is not such a man, and most ironically, he himself never looks beyond the surface of Mr. Booth's work, or for that matter, his own superficial commentary. If he did so, then he at least would have been fair enough to note that Mr. Booth not only is an extremely learned man and unpretentious writer, but more to the point, from the very outset he quite explicitly yet quite humbly invites the reader to re-IMAGINE history. Far from being a condescending, combative, demagogue or intellectual bully, he starts chapter after chapter by respectfully asking the reader to join him in a journey of the imagination. He never asserts that his interpretation of history will be, or possibly can be, verified through conventional means alone, such as with slavishly materialist mindset and related approach that relies strictly on artifactual "hard" evidence, but rather he is ever-MINDful that his "view" of history necessitates a journey of the imagination (grounded in all sorts of artifactual evidence, mind you), all of which dovetails perfectly with what is THE main point of the book, namely, that all of history itself is ultimately a product of the mind. This might appear absurd to some, such as dull-minded folk like Apter, but it's certainly not a a shocking revelation to anybody familiar with cutting-edge physics, and as Booth so brilliantly and convincingly demonstrates in his book, it has been a key insight of hidden wisdom traditions from time immemorial. And if Apter wishes to insist that such notions are somehow fit for the lunatic fringe, then I would respectfully suggest that he revisit the asylum of history and ask if they have any spare copies of Plato (or Berkeley or Kant or Buddha or countless other apparently insane folks who have expressed more than a bit of skepticism about a purely materialist view of the world). For that matter, he might try reading Booth once again, and this time, well, simply open his eyes.
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