Waking the Dead

A Review of The Grateful Dead and Philosophy: Getting High Minded About Love and Haight, edited by Steven Gimbel (Chicago: Open Court, 2007).

Appropriately enough, I learned about The Grateful Dead and Philosophy: Getting High Minded About Love and Haight not through any academic conference or high-minded scholarly journal but through Daily Kos, the premier liberal group blog... a place of popular discourse well beyond the academy. Editor Steven Gimbel, aside from being a Philosophy professor at Gettysburg College, is a dedicated Kossack. Following the philosophical lead of The Grateful Dead, he wants to move his work beyond library walls and book covers, just as the Dead did, opening their work, providing accessibility beyond concert halls and album jackets.

Part of a series called “Popular Culture and Philosophy” that covers everything from Seinfeld to Star Wars, this volume contains 19 essays by a motley group of academics who seem prouder of their histories as Deadheads than of their academic credentials, impressive though the latter are. All of them are trying the tricky task of writing inclusively on an academic topic for, yes, even though this volume is tied to the Dead, the discussions on philosophy are serious, not ironic or simplistic. As Gimbel writes:

When you put the words “philosophy” and “Grateful Dead” in the same sentence, you run the risk of invoking precisely that sort of image—vapid, silly statements that collapse into the triviality of something you'd find in a fortune cooking when you take the time to think about it with a sober mind. (xvii)

But trivial this book is not. As Gimbel goes on to say, some of those Deadheads who argued all topics into the wee hours while listening to traded tapes of Dead shows went on to study philosophy seriously. This volume is the result.

What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics Edited by András Szántó, with an introduction by Orville Schell (Public Affairs, New York) $14.95, 256 pp.

George Soros, billionaire founder of the Quantum Fund and reportedly the 80th most wealthy person in the world, is a major sponsor of liberal causes through the Open Society Institute (OSI) which he founded and chairs.

Learning the lessons from the failure to defeat Bush in the 2004 election — a campaign that he supported with large donations—he focuses this time on exposing how totalitarian propaganda methods are gaining a foothold in our ostensibly open society.

Soros' Open Society Institute sponsored the book What Orwell Didn’t Know — a collection of 20 articles by experts in the fields of journalism, cognitive psychology and popular culture. The authors have diverse backgrounds and impressive credentials, typified by Farnaz Fassihi, senior Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.