Review by Choice Review
How do Angry Birds connect to Thomas Carlyle's heroes? Editors Kinser and Sorensen bracket the 19th-century polemicist's work with articles that give his ideas context, show their subsequent effect, and gesture toward their current enactments. A Goethe scholar (Terence James Reed) indicates how Carlyle extrapolated in discussion with German thinkers; Owen Dudley Edwards and Christopher Harvie explicate his ideas' Scottish context; scholars of Ruskin (Sara Atwood) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Beverly Taylor) show how successors to the Scottish "Sage of Chelsea" embraced and critiqued them; Kinser projects Carlyle's hero into the age of the Internet (hence Angry Birds), the perplexity of Steve Jobs, and the democratized heroism of tweeting in today's Middle East. Such energetic speculation makes this book thought provoking but also overwrought. Sorensen confronts the decline of Carlyle's reputation, and chapters provide lively reconsiderations of Carlyle's meanings and effects, but the introduction offers no programmatic link between chapters and the text that anchors the volume. Edwards perhaps fills the gap. Still, the volume's indirections and celebrations amount to a Carlylean experience. Sorensen and Kinser bring the reader difficulty and challenge--like Carlyle's work itself. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. C. McCracken-Flesher University of Wyoming
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
