From Publishers Weekly
In a span of 50 years in the late 18th century, Edinburgh, a city of merely 40,000 inhabitants, contained some of the Enlightenment's most important thinkers, such as philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, biographer James Boswell and scientist James Hutton. Buchan, a Whitbread-winning novelist and critic, brings this remarkable era to life, opening with a brief history of the failed rebellion of 1745 and the romanticism that lingered in the Scottish psyche. He also stresses the importance of the Presbyterian Church, but emphasizes that it lost much of its power over Scottish intellectuals. One such intellectual was the influential philosopher David Hume, who was attacked as a heretic but being, in his own words, "naturally of cheerful and sanguine temper," he "soon recovered the blow." A similarly sharp portrait is painted of the life and work of Adam Smith, whose work expressed the rise of the power of commercialism. Buchan also devotes some of his narrative to science, examining Edinburgh as a global center of medical education, and to literature, in which Scotsmen such as novelist Henry Mackenzie and poet Robert Burns would blaze the way for the Age of Romanticism. Throughout, Buchan writes well and does a fine job arguing the case for Edinburgh's disproportionately large impact on 18th-century intellectual history. Yet much of this material has been covered before, most recently in Arthur Herman's enjoyable How the Scots Invented the Modern World, which many readers might find more accessible on complex matters like Hume's philosophy. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Nothing surprised eighteenth-century residents of London and Paris more than the unexpected emergence of Edinburgh as a center of cultural illumination. Critic and novelist Buchan recounts the ascendance of the Scottish capital in a spellbinding chronicle of municipal renascence. Curiously, that renascence begins with the disaster that Scottish forces bring upon themselves in 1745 by rallying around the Young Pretender. In that debacle, Buchan identifies the shock that emboldens a long-benighted people into breaking with a past of kirk and clan. The subsequent narrative--alive with personalities, rich in ideas--introduces readers to the philosophers who transform a defeated city into a triumphant new Athens with powerful theories in ethics (Hutcheson), economics (Smith), logic (Hume), and natural history (Hutton). And while Scottish philosophers instruct the world in principles of wealth and geology, Scottish literary artists thrill the globe with unparalleled works of sentiment (Mackenzie) and sublimity (MacPherson). At home, proud Edinburghers stroll streets lined with buildings of admirable new architecture (Craig), including an imposing new hospital providing the laboratory for daring experiments in medicine (Cullen). But the Edinburgh miracle cannot last: the supreme Scottish bard, Robert Burns, sings the swan song of the epoch when he visits the city shortly before the horrors of the French Revolution plunge all of Great Britain into chill conservatism. An impressively sophisticated and multilayered cultural history. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
