Holding Up A Mirror

by Anne Glyn-Jones

Book by ANNE GLYN-JONES

Genres: History, Cultural, Research

400 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1996

Reviews

[Jacob Lehman]

Fascinating application of Sorokin's contrasts of ideational, idealistic, and sensate societies. Her pessimism around British crime rates is hard to reconcile with the overall decline in violence globally but maybe there's just so much less inter-national violence that it more than compensates for a rise in intra-national violence/crime?

I read this as part of my project to read one book from every aisle of Olin Library at Cornell; you can read my reactions to other books from the project here: https://jacobklehman.com/

A fuller review/reaction will follow on my website.

[William Kohl]

Unlike histories of Western Societies filled with facts, dates and academic conclusions such as this,

"Government corruption, political dispute, and power struggle all weakened the empire. ... Rome eventually collapsed under its own bloated empire, losing its provinces one by one."

Glyn Jones work, “Holding Up a Mirror”, is pointing to the "signs" signifying social and cultural changes taking place within these societies which led to government corruption, political dispute, etc. Signs such as decline in religion and family and with those declines, loss of those binding values and traditions necessary to sustain a culture. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how social dynamics affect the life cycles of great cultures.