Doug's Good Books

Nice style, again. But more than that ... a good tonic to jolt us all awake to the impoverished scope of our current knowledge of history. Mr. Gay was an historian first, and a Freudian second. And once he learned a thing or two about psychology, it changed fundamentally his way of writing his craft. This book is a kind of tentative salvo coming from the lonely corner of academia into which his intellectual honesty has boxed him. With my timeworn recollection of it, I'd highlight his notion that we can't really be serious about understanding men and events of our pasts ... not on the usual grandiose and positivistic scales ... if we can't even understand our own individual and personal pasts; the one's that are so largely submerged in the subconscious; the most important ones.