Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
The Way We Live Now
By Alfred Kazin
Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
by Robert Hughes
Oxford University Press/The New York Public Library, 210 pp., $19.95
Robert Hughes, the Australian who arrived here in the late Sixties to become Time's art critic, doesn't like what Americans have become since Ronald Reagan, 'with somnambulistic efficiency…educated America down to his level.' In Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America we find a brilliantly mocking cultural criticism in which social history is for the most part implied, not described in detail. Hughes is less concerned with the causes of American cultural breakdown than with the symptoms, more with the complaints of our many tribes everywhere separating by race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual inclination than with the president who early in his first term made greed respectable when he announced 'What I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich.'
Review, 2315 words
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