Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Public Planet Books)
A principal public monument in Budapest, Hungary, and a monument to Confederate dead in Austin, TX, provide departure points for an extended essay by Levinson (law, Univ. of Texas). Levinson rambles through semiotic issues around the ideological use of public commemorations as devices of political-cultural discourse. The Confederate flag, highway and battlefield names, holidays, social heroes, and a selection of stone monuments are stirred indiscriminately into the mix, with the monuments mostly providing random points of departure for Levinson's meditations. This book is a personal reflection on the role of public art within the social order but is not written well enough to bring together its seemingly disparate parts. What results is a book for the reader interested in the hermeneutics of culture, "museumization" of history, and social cleavage, longer on reveries than analysis. An optional purchase.?Scott Hightower, New York Univ./Gallatin, New YorkCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.