skopia
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.
Late medieval France and the Netherlands ran on public weeping, elaborate tournaments, and constant awareness of death. Huizinga paints this as no Renaissance dawn but a culture worn out by its own forms.
At eighteen in 1933 Fermor set off on foot from Holland for Constantinople, sleeping in barns one night and in castles the next, and caught central Europe in its last clear light.
Culture is not what people do, Geertz argues, but the meanings hung on it, and thick description means reading a Balinese cockfight the way you would read a poem.
A sixteenth-century Italian miller told the Inquisition that the world formed as cheese forms from milk, and the angels were worms in it. From that file Ginzburg reconstructs an entire peasant mind.
Myths and marriage rules work like languages, Lévi-Strauss argues, built from unconscious oppositions. His dissection of the Oedipus myth taught Paris to treat culture itself as a code.
Mexicans wear masks, Paz argues, because the Conquest left them sons of a violated mother, heirs to two pasts they refuse to join. Mexico has quarreled with these essays for seventy years.
Life on the plantation seen from the slave quarters outward: Genovese shows how the enslaved turned the master's claim of paternal care into leverage and made Christianity mean what the master never intended.
No English-language essayist of his generation wrote with more range or less caution. These 107 pieces run from Orwell and Jefferson to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hitchens had himself waterboarded before writing one.
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal met in a tank in 1945 and are still arguing in North London, while their children reject every inheritance on offer. Smith made multicultural Britain a comic epic.