Bøker av Arthur Wenk

A series of essays on aspects of American history and culture, encompassing History (The American Revolution; Nation of Immigrants); Literature (The Great American Novel; The Detective Novel); Art (American Modern); Music (All That Jazz; Ten Decades of Popular Music); and Film (The Hollywood Musical; Through the Lens-Westerns; Comedies; The Art of Alfred Hitchcock). Dr. Wenk has pursued careers as a musicologist, calculus teacher, and psychotherapist. He has published books on music history and bibliography, choral conducting, bookstores, western culture, and a series of mystery novellas with a musicologist as sleuth.

This book treats twelve subjects from The Matrix of Western Culture, expanding them chronologically and geographically: tales of King Arthur from Chrétien to Camelot; the Celts from pre-Roman times to the present day; geometry from Euclid to Einstein. Other essays include Marco Polo, the Silk Roads and the Great Divergence; the House of Wisdom: the Arabic Golden Age; High Gothic: the Age of Great French Cathedrals; J. S. Bach and the Mystery of the B Minor Mass; the World of Jane Austen; Beyond Darwin: Evolution, Ecosystems and Extinction; the Music of Ulysses; Understanding Economics; and Why Does the World Exist? Dr. Wenk has pursued careers as a musicologist, calculus teacher, and psychotherapist. He has published books on music history and bibliography, choral conducting, bookstores, western culture, and a series of mystery novellas with a musicologist as sleuth.

Art, music, literature, philosophy, science, history: how do they all fit together?The Matrix of Western Culture presents a framework for seeing the "big picture." Imagine a grid with these cultural categories on one axis and time, marked in centuries, on the other. The interior of the matrix comprises a representative repertoire described in a series of brief, readable essays.Well-read adults will, over the years, have encountered individual works in each of the categories that make up the matrix. Many readers will share my interest in organizing this knowledge into a coherent framework. The Matrix of Western Culture offers an accessible overview that one can keep in mind all at once.