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The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West Hardcover – May 29, 2018
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Enhance your purchase
- Print length280 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEncounter Books
- Publication dateMay 29, 2018
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.3 x 1 x 9.1 inches
- ISBN-101594039453
- ISBN-13978-1594039454
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Editorial Reviews
Review
―Mollie Hemingway, Senior Editor of The Federalist and Fox News contributor
“From Aristotle to The Marriage of Figaro, Michael Walsh seeks light in these dark times in the deepest sources of our culture and its most illuminating works of art. From the divine to the erotic and from the contemplative to the heroic, it’s all there, waiting, in The Fiery Angel.”
―Kevin Williamson, author of The End Is Near and It's Going To Be Awesome
“This unique book teaches Western civilization and its agonists by acquainting the reader with the fundamentals of western art―music, literature, and painting. Walsh reminds us that the arts are the basic means by which any and all peoples interpret the experiences of life. The arts are civilization’s substance. Empires are epiphenomena. Shakespeare counts for more than Elizabeth I and Solzhenitsyn more than Brezhnev. Politicizing the arts destroys civilization, understanding them preserves it. Read this book. You will learn from it.”
―Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston University
“In his magisterial defense of Western Civilization, Michael Walsh shows how the cultural Marxist Left’s war against human nature, virtue, norms, and a nation’s culture is actually a war against God’s creation. It will ultimately be trumped by honest history and art that faithfully reflects the human condition―our perennial struggle between the better and worse angels of our nature. Ultimately, when we seek beauty and reject Promethean ugliness, we will come closer to basing our society on goodness and truth―and our civilization may even survive.”
―Dr. John Lenczowski, Founder and President of The Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C.
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Encounter Books (May 29, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 280 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1594039453
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594039454
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1 x 9.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #388,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #33 in Cultural Policy
- #797 in History of Civilization & Culture
- #1,946 in Art History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

With six critically acclaimed novels, as well as a hit TV movie, journalist, author and screenwriter Michael Walsh has achieved the writer's trifecta: two New York Times best-sellers, a major literary award and, as co-writer, the Disney Channel's then-highest-rated show.
The 1998 publication of As Time Goes By -- his long-awaited and controversial prequel/sequel to everybody's favorite movie, Casablanca -- created a literary sensation; translated into more than twenty languages, including Portuguese, Chinese and Hebrew, the story of Rick and Ilsa landed on best-seller lists around the world.
His first novel, the dark thriller Exchange Alley, was published by Warner Books in July 1997. Hailed by critics for its moody depiction of a crumbling Soviet Union - which Walsh covered first-hand as a correspondent for Time Magazine - and a violent, dangerous New York City during the darkest days of the early 1990s, the novel was picked by the Book-of-the-Month Club as an alternate selection.
Walsh's third novel, the gripping gangster saga, And All the Saints, was named a winner at the 2004 American Book Awards; even before publication, the movie rights to this fictionalized "autobiography" of the legendary Prohibition-era gangster Owney Madden was bought by MGM.
His 2009 novel, Hostile Intent, the first in a series of five thrillers about the National Security Agency to be published by Kensington Books, was an Amazon Kindle #1 bestseller, as well as a New York Times bestseller. The eagerly awaited sequel, Early Warning, will be published in Sept.
In the spring of 2002, the Disney Channel premiered Walsh's original movie (co-written with Gail Parent), Cadet Kelly, starring teen idol Hilary Duff of "Lizzie McGuire" fame. Until High School Music, the two-hour film reigned as the highest-rated original movie in Disney Channel history, as well as the Disney Channel's highest-rated single program ever.
Walsh is also the author of Who's Afraid of Classical Music (1989) and Who's Afraid of Opera (1994) for Fireside Books, and Andrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works, a critical biography of the composer for Harry M. Abrams (U.S.) and Viking Penguin (U.K.), published in the fall of 1989; an updated and expanded edition appeared in 1997. With fellow TIME Contributor Richard Schickel, he is the co-author of Carnegie Hall: The First One Hundred Years, a cultural history of the great American concert hall published by Abrams in November 1987. His most recent book about music is So When Does the Fat Lady Sing?, published by Amadeus Press.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2018
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As I mentioned in my review of The Devil's Pleasure Palace, the degree to which you enjoy this book, and indeed whether or not you buy it at all, will depend in part on your political leanings. Michael Walsh is a music theorist by training and spent much of his journalistic career as a classical music critic. He is also a prolific conservative columnist and makes no bones about where he stands in the culture wars, so with all due respect to those reviewers who complained about the political content of this book (and especially the person who hysterically shelved it under "far-right"), complaining about his politics is a bit myopic.
The Devil's Pleasure Palace fixed its crosshairs on the so-called Frankfurt School whose influence in Western (and particularly American) academia has been so baleful, and did a poor job of explaining how and why the Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School had such a huge impact. The Fiery Angel, however, focuses much more heavily on the cultural side of the discussion, with far fewer segues into politics than the first book. This is for the better, not only because there is less meandering and a clearer thread to follow in each chapter, but also because when Walsh does delve into politics, the impact of his points is much stronger and more relevant to his broader argument.
The organisation of the book is also far better. One of my complaints about The Devil's Pleasure Palace was that it read like a collection of essays that rehashed the same themes over and over again, albeit with reference to different pieces of music, and leaving little or nothing to distinguish one chapter from another. The Fiery Angel is much better in this respect, with each chapter themed around a particular piece of art depicted at the beginning of each chapter (where the epigraph would be) and kicking off the discussion from there.
The book is far from perfect, however. For one thing, it needed an extra round of proofreading. I counted over a dozen misspellings or cases of incorrect wording, mostly in the early chapters, and some of these appeared in the course of quoting other sources. Near the very end, the prose starts to slip back into the confusing, rambling style of The Devil's Pleasure Palace where he would bounce very quickly back and forth between cultural commentary and politics. Also, the weird passage from the first book about women's entry into the workforce reducing household incomes makes a reappearance near the end of the final chapter on page 216:
"The famous 'labor-saving' devices advertised as the housewife's best friends in the 1950s merely displaced women enough so that, after a brief period of putting their feet up before hubby and the kids came home, they were in the official labor force two decades later. The results, for whatever personal satisfaction some women may have gained by emulating men, were an effective halving of the family's per-capita income; the incurrence of additional expenses in the realm of child care, meals, etc.; and several generations of latchkey kids."
On the whole, this is a much better book than The Devil's Pleasure Palace, and it plays much more explicitly to the author's area of strength and expertise. It's less polemical than the first book (although, as stated earlier, how much you object to the politics in this book will depend a lot on your own), but its arguments are much stronger as a result.
Did you ever notice how art transcends conventional intellectual processes, thus creating lasting emotional impressions where the whole is greater than a sum of singular notes, brushstrokes, or words? I don't intend that as a rhetorical question: It is – sadly, and in pat historical contravention – too seldom reflected upon these days.
Traditionally, art was a springboard for social and cultural cohesion; a heroic narrative diametrically opposed to the moral bankruptcy promoted surreptitiously by destructive influences, to wit: Progressive Marxism's on-going war upon Western civilization.
Put another way, art was historically not so much a reflection of society – drifting in some haphazard cultural wake, like flotsam and jetsam; art was a preeminent, powerful influence on thought and behavior, more similar to a cultural “steering current.”
Quality art moves us, inspiring us; it can work on a level we may not fully comprehend, yet one we intuitively desire, and to which we should aspire through its contemplation.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it this way:
"…a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them."
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech
How can anyone defend our history by critiquing the present without knowing what actually happened? Is there a more compelling vessel for the examination of Western cultural history than its art?
It's imperative – if the West will survive – to know how we arrived at this cultural-historical place in time, and also what may be done individually to alter the current trends of wholesale culture-rot; specifically, knowledge – what we need to adequately explain our cultural decline to the like-minded yet uninformed – begins with true understanding of how we became who we were “culturally” not so long ago.
The Fiery Angel liner notes succinctly phrase why culture – and art – matters:
“Without an understanding and appreciation of the culture we seek to preserve and protect, the defense of Western civilization is fundamentally futile; a culture that believes in nothing cannot defend itself, because it has nothing to defend. The past not only still has something to tell us, but it also has something that it must tell us...if only we will listen.”
In closing, a more important and timely work will not be found, as no one writes with greater insight on cultural matters – or with more stylish, substantive elan – than does Mr. Walsh. The Fiery Angel is riveting; it is a book you will cherish, and remember.