Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

Curtis White is a professor of English at Illinois State University. A novelist and essayist, he has written several widely acclaimed books, including The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves. His essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Orion, Playboy, and The Village Voice.
 
 

“The Barbaric Heart of an adolescent nation stews in its own entropy, and we wonder why the center does not hold. Our mind games stand behind the devastation of place and economy. I’ve been an admirer of Curtis White for many years, and this book is a brilliant summation of his message.”
-James Howard Kunstler, Author of World Made By Hand and The Long Emergency

“Splendidly cranky.”
-Molly Ivins

“Witheringly smart, grotesquely funny, grimly comprehensive,and so moving as to be wrenching.”
-David Foster Wallace

“Refreshing malevolent irony . . . absolutely indispensable.”
-Slavoj Zizek

“White brings a great light into the darkness that has descended
upon the hope of a decent American future.”
-Lewis Lapham

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Author of the Controversial Bestseller The Middle Mind Advocates “Self-Overcoming” and a Return to the Aesthetic as Remedies to Save the Planet

THE BARBARIC HEART
Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature
by Curtis White

September 1, 2009—Never before has American capitalism been more broadly scrutinized for its moral failings. Its primary sin, we are told, is greed. But in his radical, intellectually adventurous, and witty new book, The Barbaric Heart (PoliPointPress, September 2009), Curtis White argues that the problem with capitalism is not in its sins but in its virtues.

These virtues come originally not from within capitalism itself, but from what White calls the Barbaric Heart, an ancient—even primitive—ethic. The virtues of the Barbaric Heart are familiar and still very much alive for most Americans who, like athletes, Darwinians, military commanders, and businesspeople, believe that winning, surviving, triumphing, and accumulating great wealth are virtues. Tragically, all of these familiar qualities are dependent on the ultimate “virtue of necessity”: violence.

Searching deeply within the worlds of finance, environmentalism, and religion, White’s moving and often witheringly funny account is a summons to understand what virtues threaten us and what alternate virtues offer us hope.

Among the subjects White discusses in The Barbaric Heart:

• How Americans worship Hot Air Gods.
• The Idols of Environmentalism.
• The relationship of human work and ecology.
• Sustainability as a “Good without light.”
• How Beauty, not technology, is the best response to environmental destruction.
• And an inspiring description of a “tree-hugger’s faith.”

The Barbaric Heart has been praised as “intellectually acrobatic” and will leave readers with the hope that humans might someday create a more “thoughtful” world, in which we will no longer be “slaves, and not instruments of violence, but beings intent upon the beautiful as a social principle.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Curtis White is a novelist and social critic living in Normal, Illinois. Among his recent books are Requiem, The Middle Mind, and The Spirit of Disobedience. He is also a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Orion, and Playboy. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Illinois State University.

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THE BARBARIC HEART:
Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature
by Curtis White
$16.95, PoliPointPress, September 8, 2009, Trade Paper
ISBN: 978-0-9817091-2-3, 181 pages, 5 1/2”x 8 1/2”

For more information please visit p3books.com/thebarbaricheart