The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
“Gray’s godless mysticism asks us to look outside ourselves and simply see. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds . . . Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism.”—Simon Critchley,The Los Angeles Review of Books “[Gray's is] a powerful message, and not without elements of profundity. And it is conveyed with eloquence of language and dignity of thought.”—Robert W. Merry,The National Interest “Gray’s fans should find much here to please them. The range of literary, historical and philosophical extracts—from Conrad and Zweig to Borges and John Ashbery, and from Nietzsche and Freud to Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz, to name only a few—is broad and deep. Gray’s own utterances are by turns characteristically dark, audacious and outrageous.”—Caspar Henderson,The Telegraph “Silence of Animalsis a beautifully written book, the product of a strongly questioning mind. It is effectively an anthology with detailed commentary, setting out one rich and suggestive episode after another, each of which becomes only more suggestive by the juxtaposition.” –Philip Hensher,The Spectator