All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity - Softcover

Berman, Marshall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140109625 ISBN 13: 9780140109627

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1988

Synopsis

"A bubbling caldron of ideas . . . Enlightening and valuable." —Mervyn Jones, New Statesman.

The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old—all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.

From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

About this title

About the Author:

Marshall Berman was an American philosopher and Marxist humanist writer. He was a distinguished professor of political science at City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air and wrote the introduction to Penguin Books’ edition of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. He died in 2013.

Review:

"With shattering grace Giangrande divines catastrophic grief, the redemptive power of ephemeral joys, and the interconnectedness of all things as past and present conflate in terrorism's chaos. Memory becomes balm as life, all life, is porous. Exquisite, devastating, this book is a bomb."--Carol Bruneau.

"With shattering grace Giangrande divines catastrophic grief, the redemptive power of ephemeral joys, and the interconnectedness of all things as past and present conflate in terrorism's chaos. Memory becomes balm as life, all life, is porous. Exquisite, devastating, this book is a bomb."
--Carol Bruneau, author of These Good Hands

"An elegy for lost innocence, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is at once extremely sad and exquisitely hopeful. Its hopefulness resides mainly in thestubborn resonance of the quotidian, and in the kind hearts and good wills of those who refuse to accept evil, no matter how often it crashes into their lives. Carole Giandgrande has achieved a great deal in this short, beautiful book; confronting the incomprehensible without despair and describing profound grief without sentimentality."
--Susan Glickman, author of The Tale-Teller and Safe as Houses

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140109625
• ISBN 13: 9780140109627
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 383