The Cultivation of Hatred (Gay, Peter//Bourgeois Experience)

Pleasure Wars is the fifth and final volume in The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Peter Gay's searching inquiry into the ideas and sensibilities that dominated nineteenth-century culture. Richard Sennett, referring to the series as a whole, wrote that Peter Gay's "magisterial portrait of the Victorian bourgeoisie makes the past make emotional sense."

This current edition contains text that has not been significantly altered since the 1992 edition, if not earlier. If you are looking for a text with easy to follow chronological format--move on. This book provides the reader with diluted and out of order history which does nothing except grace a classroom with twenty-five confused faces. For students to easily grasp the events of the past and the time periods between them, chronological order is vital. For example, Farah and Karls have created units that overlap significant periods of time where the "Royal Power and Conflict" chapter covers 1500-1750 and then the next chapter "Empires of Asia" covers 1350-1850. The subjects are completely different, yet they cannot be easily compared as being in the same time period because of the arrangement of the text.

Asides from giving a total Eurocentric view (this book is really a basic Western Civilization text that was made for the standard high school student), what is mentioned about Asia is minor with major points of history being left out. If the history of Africa, Asia, or Latin American is part of your lesson plan, I would recommend an outside source.

Finally, this text lacks the depth that I have encountered with others (i.e. West Educational Publishing's World History: The Human Odyssey). It is truly a sad day when students complain about the heaviness of the book and the teacher responds it's all the pictures. When comparing the past editions, one can see that the book was obviously enlarged to have more pictures and the "extra stuff" mentioned above.

Overall, for the average reader, World History: The Human Experience's reading experience is a bearable one. But, if you're looking for depth or enrichment--go elsewhere. I give the work 2 of 5 because it meets the expectations for a standard reader, yet falls far short of its potential.

Sex is beyond reason, and yet we constantly reason about it. So, too, did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome. But until recently there has been little discussion of their views on erotic experience and sexual ethics.

The Sleep of Reason brings together an international group of philosophers, philologists, literary critics, and historians to consider two questions normally kept separate: how is erotic experience understood in classical texts of various kinds, and what ethical judgments and philosophical arguments are made about sex? From same-sex desire to conjugal love, and from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, the contributors demonstrate the complexity and diversity of classical sexuality. They also show that the ethics of eros, in both Greece and Rome, shared a number of commonalities: a focus not only on self-mastery, but also on reciprocity; a concern among men not just for penetration and display of their power, but also for being gentle and kind, and for being loved for themselves; and that women and even younger men felt not only gratitude and acceptance, but also joy and sexual desire.

Contributors:
* Eva Cantarella
* Kenneth Dover
* Chris Faraone
* Simon Goldhill
* Stephen Halliwell
* David M. Halperin
* J. Samuel Houser
* Maarit Kaimio
* David Konstan
* David Leitao
* Martha C. Nussbaum
* A. W. Price
* Juha Sihvola