The Birds of Prey

Science & Math

SAUL, John Ralston

Biological Sciences

Arrow Books

The Next Best Thing

Collins

Offers critical definitions and discussions of various topics from air-conditioning and bankers to the war on drugs and zap

Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Free Press

In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards" - whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerrilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to "solutions," he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis.

Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Elegant and enigmatic journalist Charles Stone discovers the mystery behind the plane crash which killed the French Army's Chief of Staff and enters a world of old debts, hatreds, and sworn vengeance

Contemporary

McGraw=Hill

The Paradise Eater

Drunk, businessman, journalist, John Field finds his life becomes much more purposeful when he investigates the death of an ex-lover in steamy Bangkok, Thailand

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Arrow Bks.

Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West is a sweeping and provocative exploration of nothing less than the political, economic, social, and cultural origins of Western society. With great daring and originality, John Ralston Saul dissects the contradictions, delusions, and illusions that have brought the world to the brink of confusion and crisis, and shatters the myths surrounding the icons and institutions that we have been taught to revere and cherish.

Voltaire's Bastards : The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

History

World

Penguin Canada

"How are citizens to enter into a public debate if the concepts which define our society and decide the manner in which we are governed are open neither to understanding nor to questioning?"According to bestselling novelist and essayist John Ralston Saul, the ramifications of asking this question are enormous. We live in an era of specialization, where decision makers, administrators, and process-minded experts have fortified their positions of authority by insulating themselves from public accountability. An important instrument in their ascension has been language; or more precisely, a language so technically specific and laden with jargon that it has isolated the individual citizen.

The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Agressive Common Sense

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, Saul turns his eye from a reinterpretation of the Western world to an examination of Canada itself. Caught up in crises—political, economic, and social—Canada continues to flounder, unable to solve or even really identify its problems. 
Instead, we assert absolute differences between ourselves: we are English or we are French; Natives or Europeans; early immigrants or newly arrived; from the east or from the west. Or we bow to ideologies and deny all differences in the name of nationalism, unity, or equality. In a startling exercise in reorientation, John Ralston Saul makes sense of Canadian myths—real, false, denied—and reconciles them with the reality of today's politics, culture, and economics.

Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century

Americas

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Books by SAUL, John Ralston