At the Edge of History [Paperback]

William Irwin Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1989

Seminal works of cultural history that changed the way we think about ourselves.

Product Details

• Paperback: 446 pages
• Publisher: Lindisfarne Books (June 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0940262320
• ISBN-13: 978-0940262324
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,203,709 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, but moved to Southern California in 1945, where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. In 1972, his second book At the Edge of History was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 1986 he won the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award for his novel, Islands Out of Time.

Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995 he designed an evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York and serves as a Founding Mentor, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ross_School). Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in 1972 and served as its Director until 1997. He has now retired from Lindisfarne and teaching and lives in Maine and devotes himself to writing essays and poetry; he often contributes to the Wild River Review. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/) and the Seven Pillars Review.(http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must For Every Library, May 19, 2005

By 

City Boy "RPM" (Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: At the Edge of History (Paperback)

William Irwin Thompson is one of the truly great minds of our time. These two early works (which were originally published separately) are the perfect introduction to Thompson's opus. While some of the pop culture references may seem dated, passed over by events, the basic world view presented here remains valid.

Thompson, riding on the shoulders of such as Jean Gebser and Marshall McLuhan, illuminates the transitional period we are undergoing, as we move out of the modern era into ... whatever is coming -- we don't really know yet, but the so-called "postmodern" isn't the future, it's just a replay of isolated elements of the modern. Thompson sees signs of one possible future in the emerging planetary consciousness where thinking globally while acting locally is more than a pop phrase but a new way of perceiving our oneness with a sacred world. Thompson looks at signposts all over the planet which, taken individually might seems interesting, but taken together begin to form a picture that inspires either hope or dread, depending on your attachment to the prevailing consciousness. (You'll have to read his more recent books to get his take on capitalism's latest phase of globalization.)

I won't give any more away as I don't wish to spoil the intellectual feast that awaits the reader. I urge anyone interested in the history of ideas and in understanding the changes taking place in the world around us to read Thompson, starting with this publication. Then work your way through the rest of his books. It's a journey that can change your worldview and your life.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outside the Academy, April 25, 2004

By 

Allan J. Cronin "francis gerard" (Alameda, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: At the Edge of History (Paperback)

These two books neatly collected into one volume are written by a man who was a traditional academic but chose to work outside the academy and it is this that he discusses in these books. Trained as a historian Thompson takes a mythical view of history informed both by his own views and those of W.B. Yeats whose "A Vision" is interpreted here. To classify Thompson as simply "new age" would be to dismiss him too easily. While his work does fit at times with that nebulous genre he wrote these before that term was coined. This is a different take on history and on the academy. I regularly give copies of this one to my academic friends to keep them from getting stagnated by the university system. Essential reading.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Myths That Keep on Giving..., October 20, 2008

By 

james warren "former axe murderer" (here) - See all my reviews

This review is from: At the Edge of History (Paperback)

William Irwin Thompson is a cultural historian and one of the few writers who pay attention to the myths of humankind that wash within us, over us and through us in this strange epoch of existence we now find ourselves.

Thompson has written that we are like ants crawling across an oil painting: our limited consciousness can sense a series of changes and colors but it is only the poet, the mystic or the artist who is able to glimpse and describe the bigger picture. Thompson uses his nimble, eclectic intelligence to reveal the larger patterns of history that narrate and guide the complex unfolding of human existence in context with both culture and cosmos.

We only see through a glass, darkly. And there is much more than meets the eye. To use another metaphor, the night sky we stare up into reveals the light from stars that left deep space aeons ago. We are truly living in a different universe than the one we can perceive.

Thompson takes the reader on a journey that connects cultural dots that we rarely acknowlege to illuminate our journey to and through the future of our human heritages, our civilizations and our species. This book of essays is no guru romp through the New Age, but a work of serious historical scholarship that is both readable and penetrating.

It is a mythic manual for the new world and can be read, enjoyed and marveled at again and again.