Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit

As we approach the new millenium, the moral, intellectual,and spiritual crisis of our time is visible most plainly in the sickness of the arts. The "postmodern" cultural establishment is philosophically empty and esthetically corrupt. But no one has been able to explain this decline or give a satisfying answer to the question of the proper role of the arts in our society. Now, in The Culture of Hope -- a manifesto for a new vision of culture that is both radical and classical -- Frederick Turner goes beyond the stale dichotomies of Left and Right to take the "third side" in the culture war: the side of art itself. Great art can never be politically correct, Turner reminds us, whether the correction comes from Right or Left, because its sources are deeper than politics. The visionary modernists (Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky) understood this, but their successors today, as well as their conservative opponents, have forgotten. Turner sharply indicts the bankrupt tribe of venal mediocrities who now infest the arts, citing their naive rejection of morality, their ignorant denial of scientific truth, and their lazy dismissal of the Western cultural heritage. On the other hand, conservatives who call for a return to traditional values seek a socially "safe" vision of art that has never existed and never can. In the past, the arts have flowered when they drew their inspiration from new scientific visions of the cosmos. Thus Turner argues that the revolution in cosmology that is occurring today in the frontier fields of scientific thought will powerfully invigorate the artists of the future. A new esthetic synthesis arising from the unexpected convergence of religion, art, and science will restore a hopeful vision of the cosmos as intelligent, creative, and self-ordering and provide the missing ground for the recovery of classical values in the arts, such as beauty, order, harmony, and meaning. Turner points to new developments in chaos theory, neurobiology, evolution, and environmental science, among other fields, to offer us a guide to the emerging art of the "radical center" which he predicts will shape the culture of the future.

Arts & Photography

Turner, Frederick

History & Criticism

Free Press

Francis Muldoon is a special policeman in the notorious Storyville District of New Orleans in 1913. His job is to see that the District’s volatile mixture of sex, alcohol, and gambling doesn’t boil over but instead rolls along at a continuous simmer. Once a member of the city’s regular police force, he now works for the District’s vice lord, Tom Anderson, patrolling his patron’s honky-tonks and saloons and whorehouses—both the high-priced bordellos and the coffinlike cribs where the girls work with only a cot and a washbasin. When Adele, a beautiful singer at the Tuxedo dance hall, draws Francis into a contentious rivalry for her affection, a fatal shootout is the inevitable conclusion, sending the District into a scalding eruption and revealing the central characters for what they are. Filled with the rich atmosphere of America’s most colorful city, Redemption is the powerfully told tale of a man’s efforts to restore the integrity of his soul.

Redemption

Literature & Fiction

United States

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

A faded newspaperman downs a double Maker’s Mark and contemplates life as a “ham-and-egger,” a hack. Then one day he finds the scoop of a lifetime in a Chicago basement: diaries belonging to the infamous Judith Campbell Exner. Right,that Judy, the game girl who waltzed into the midst of America’s most powerful politicians, entertainers, and criminals as they conspired to rule America.
When Frank Sinatra flew Judy to Hawaii for a weekend of partying, she could hardly have imagined where it would lead her: straight to the White House and the waiting arms of Jack Kennedy. And then came the day that JFK and his brother Bobby asked her to carry a black bag to Chicago, where she was to hand it off to the boss of bosses, Sam Giancana. As our Narrator pieces the notebooks into a coherent story, he finds mob connections, rigged primaries, assassination plots, and trysts—and begins to see beyond the tabloid fare to a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where the fates of nations are at stake. As one by one the men Judy loved betrayed her and disappeared, and as the FBI pursued her into a living hell, her diary entries disintegrate along with the beautiful, tough, sweet woman the Narrator has come to know. Who was Exner, after all? Just a gangster’s moll? Or a bighearted woman who believed the sky-high promises of the New Frontier—and paid the price?

The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years

"I love you according to my bond," says Cordelia to her father in King Lear. As the play turns out, Cordelia proves to be an exemplary and loving daughter. A bond is both a legal or financial obligation, and a connection of mutual love. How are these things connected? In As You Like It, Shakespeare describes marriage as a "blessed bond of board and bed": the emotional, religious, and sexual sides of marriage cannot be detached from its status as a legal and economic contract. These examples are the pith of Frederick Turner's fascinating new book. Based on the proven maxim that "money makes the world go round," this engaging study draws from Shakespeare's texts to present a lexicon of common words, as well as a variety of familiar familial and cultural situations, in an economic context. Making constant recourse to well-known material from Shakespeare's plays, Turner demonstrates that the terms of money and value permeate our minds and lives even in our most mundane moments. His book offers a new, humane, evolutionary economics that fully expresses the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic relationships among persons, and between humans and nature. Playful and incisive, Turner's book offers a way to engage the wisdom of Shakespeare in everyday life in a trenchant prose that is accessible to lovers of Shakespeare at all levels.

Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

Shakespeare and the nature of time: Moral and philosophical themes in some plays and poems of William Shakespeare

Clarendon Press

“The best assembly of Turner’s essays now available. Faragher’s introductory and concluding commentaries add considerably to the import of the book.”―Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles
“Still ranks as the most influential piece of writing on American history.”―Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer, A Notable Book of 1994
“Faragher’s invaluable afterword . . . provides a judicious introduction to the issues that divide the revisionist New Western Historians from Turner and his disciples.”―Michael Kammen, FanFare
Frederick Jackson Turner is often considered to be the most influential American historian of the century, and his views continue to shape the controversial field of Western American history. In this book, John Mack Faragher introduces and comments on ten of Turner’s most significant essays, concluding with a comment on the recent debate over Turner’s legacy and his effect on Americans’ understanding of their national character.

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Other Essays

History

Americas

Yale University Press

The untold story of Henry Miller’s explosive 1934 novel, banned in America for more than a quarter century Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tropic of Cancer's initial U.S. release, Frederick Turner investigates Miller’s unconventional novel, its tumultuous publishing history, and its unique place in American letters.
Written in the slums of a foreign city by a man who was an utter literary failure in his homeland, Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by a pornographer in Paris, but soon banned in the United States. Not until 1961, when Grove Press triumphed over the censors, did Miller’s book appear in American bookstores. Turner argues that Tropic of Cancer is “lawless, violent, colorful, misogynistic, anarchical, bigoted, and shaped by the same forces that shaped the nation.” Further, the novel draws on more than two centuries of New World history, folklore, and popular culture in ways never attempted before. How Henry Miller, outcast and renegade, came to understand what literary dynamite he had within him, how he learned to sound his “war whoop” over the roofs of the world, is the subject of Turner’s revelatory study.

Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (Icons of America)

The untold story of Henry Miller’s explosive 1934 novel, banned in America for more than a quarter century Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tropic of Cancer's initial U.S. release, Frederick Turner investigates Miller’s unconventional novel, its tumultuous publishing history, and its unique place in American letters.
Written in the slums of a foreign city by a man who was an utter literary failure in his homeland, Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by a pornographer in Paris, but soon banned in the United States. Not until 1961, when Grove Press triumphed over the censors, did Miller’s book appear in American bookstores. Turner argues that Tropic of Cancer is “lawless, violent, colorful, misogynistic, anarchical, bigoted, and shaped by the same forces that shaped the nation.” Further, the novel draws on more than two centuries of New World history, folklore, and popular culture in ways never attempted before. How Henry Miller, outcast and renegade, came to understand what literary dynamite he had within him, how he learned to sound his “war whoop” over the roofs of the world, is the subject of Turner’s revelatory study.

This work covers turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the formative years for jazz, from Buddy Bolden's aboriginal rise and fall to Jim Robinson's funeral. The author writes of figures like Freddie Keppard and Bunk Johnson. This expanded edition includes 16 pages of rare photographs and a new chapter on Allan Jaffe and Preservation Hall.

Remembering Song

Music

Da Capo Press

A double shadow: Fiction

Berkley Pub. Corp. : distributed by Putnam

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Turner, Frederick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Turner, Frederick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Turner, Frederick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit

Redemption

The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years

Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money

Shakespeare and the nature of time: Moral and philosophical themes in some plays and poems of William Shakespeare

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Other Essays

Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (Icons of America)

Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (Icons of America)

Remembering Song

A double shadow: Fiction