The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
October 13, 2003
Co-author with the late Richard Herrnstein of the neo-racialist book The Bell Curve
, Murray returns with a mammoth solo investigation that is less likely to spur controversy than provoke a simple "so what?" The book attempts to demonstrate, through the use of basic statistical methods such as regression analysis, that Europeans have overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in the arts and sciences since about 1400. To this end, he has assembled a laundry list of people and events from various reference texts, and generated numerous graphs and rankings of genius figures: is Beethoven "more important" than Bach? Leonardo Da Vinci than Michelangelo? A major problem with this approach—beyond equating "importance" with the number of times an artist or work is referenced in texts—is that the reference texts used as data sources do not themselves seem free of cultural bias or chauvinism: without asking "important to whom," the Western-centric data are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Another problem is that other, less affluent cultures may have had many plundered or lost works, or may not have a tradition of naming writers and other luminaries—or keeping track of and promoting their works through secondary material. Further, plenty of attention is lavished on forms such as painting but comparatively little to architecture or to non-Western forms of music. The book's cursory treatment of Africa (outside of Egypt) also leaves more to be desired. Murray claims to have corrected for these factors, and finds that Western culture still dominates "accomplishment" either way. The chapters describing achievement at the book's beginning are, at many points, well-written and informative, but they end up clouded with the latter part of the book's numerical hubris and grand pronouncements.
July 1, 2003
The coauthor of The Bell Curve considers individuals in history (4,139, to be exact) who have made a difference in art and science.
Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 1, 2003
Polemicists generally favor brevity, hitting their targets with surgically precise (or broad, near- slandering) bon mots. The prolific Murray (coauthor, The Bell Curve), consistently libertarian champion of all that is Western and elite, here opts to overwhelm with data and extended example in this history of the best ideas and the humans who made them. In the tradition of Daniel Boorstin and Paul Johnson, he has produced a very long narrative most likely to engage those readers conditioned to a priori agreement. This need to produce such an ultimately orthodox reaffirmation of the status quo assessment of human accomplishment running up to 1950 is a bit puzzling. Yet even more surprising is how interesting and worthwhile a book has resulted. To be sure, Murray's logic is at times transparently circular, with the significant intellectuals he ranks drawn in some cases from millennia of received wisdom. But if his case for overall intellectual decline since at least the 19th century is ultimately unpersuasive, his demonstration of how greatness, once established, limits room for innovation is just as persuasive. The statistics will dazzle or bore, and Murray's justification for disregarding the social sciences may be unconvincing, but nonetheless this is a book every library collection needs, perhaps especially those with a minority of readers who will warm to its author's biases. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/03.]-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll., PA
Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.