Customer Reviews
Rewarding but flawed - By: Lee, 25 May 2008 
I picked this book up having been recommended the authors previous effort "Straw Dogs" by a college. Though I haven't read straw dogs, I was attracted by the discussion of Utopia.
The book is well written & most of the central ideas of Utopia, Religious Apocalyptic History & political ideals are communicated well. The author takes time to develop his ideas & provides well drawn examples supporting his interpretation. In particular, his discussion on the USA's use of "facts" in certain ways to justify means is very interesting & entertaining. In addition to this, the book is enjoyable in that regardless of whether or not you agree with the authors conclusions, he is certainly not overly dogmatic.
For me, what stood out was the books willingness to engage with the reader & get them to think. It is a book that asks many questions, more than it answers & reallly got me thinking about how to interpret history. For me, though the factual / historical focus of the earlier chapters was hugely entertaining, the final chapter was probably the most engaging. While I disagreed with certain aspects of it, that the author took the time to make conclusions that actuallly derived from his discussion, rather than simply being a restatement of what he thought, was particularly interesting & rewarding.
My criticism of the book would be that some liberties with interpretation are given. The author is prone to oversimplifying ideas for the sake of expediency & on one or two occasions this seemed to me to be slightly misleading. For example, one of his descriptions of Aristotle's thought is far too reductive to do justice to Aristotle's thought. However, I understand that this was for obvious reasons concerning the flow of the book.
All in alll, a very entertaining & thought provoking read which takes time & effort to engage the reader, & I would heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest interested in the world & our interpretation of it.
DD
Difficult, but gripping. - By: Mr. N. T. Baxter, 20 May 2008 I found this book extremely interesting although sometimes it was quite heavy going. The book looks at how the idea of a perfect world/state developed as an unachievable ideal, & how the attempts to realise it in later times have caused so much suffering & pain in the world but have achieved so little. Whether communism, Nazism or the current American Christian model of a world of democratic capitalist nations alll attempts to remodel the world have ended in disaster.
This utopian thinking has a resonance for alll of us, I think. It's easy to believe we can reach a state of perfection in our personal or professional lives where we will be happy & live in harmony, but our very natures make this impossible. We are always reaching for something - it's human nature - utopia for ourselves & for society as a whole is unachievable & we would do better to take a more pragmatic approach to the world's problems.
The other thing I got from this book was the idea that human beings are not rational creatures, nor are we going to become so in the future. We will always fight, compete, envy & believe in things we cannot possibly know. That is what it is to be human. Most of the decisions/beliefs of most of the people of the world are made & held because of emotion, belief, culture & the influence of others; not through rational analysis. There is no point attempting to develop conceptions of a better world that do not take this into account at their very core.
On the down side, this book was heavy going at times, & a little too focused on the recent Iraq war later on in the book. However, I'd certainly recommend it.
A forceful analysis of modern politics - By: J. H. Bretts, 27 Apr 2008 John Gray's central thesis is that both liberal & neoconservative politics are flawed because they think forms of democracy are both attractive & historicallly inevitable.And in this they have merely taken on the mantle of religion,with democracy a secular version of the dream of utopia or heaven.Such simplicity & certainty is dangerous & not unlike commununism & fascism. Well-written & well-argued, I found myself agreeing with much of what Gray says. What stopped me giving him five stars was some carelessness here & there:a certain amount of repetition & the fact that in one chapter he says that there were no concentration camps in Russia, while saying the exact opposite in another. But these are reallly smalll gripes. The analysis of Blair's stance on Iraq is particularly good.
