Theories/Hypotheses Record Type: Review   ID: 324
The Truth About Truth: De-Confusing and Reconstructing the Postmodern World Anderson, Walter Truett (Ed.).
This anthology brings together key works on postmodernism, illustrating his thesis that "we are in the midst of a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with a change not so much in what we believe as in how we believe" (p. 2). And: "People all over the world are now making ... shifts in belief about belief" (p. 2). Anderson chose the documents collected here not only because, as is the case of much postmodern writing, they "describe the world in terms of what it has just now ceased to be," but they can "help us understand the world in terms of what it is struggling to become" (p. 11). If nothing else, it is worthwhile to read Anderson’s introduction to each of the book’s four parts. The parts are entitled "In and Out of the Grand Hotel," "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air," "Self, Sex and Sanity," and "Faith and Freedom." Also important is his "Epilogue: The End and Beginning of Enlightenment." There are 33 selections in this anthology. The authors are the big names: Steinar Kvale, Charles Jencks, Umberto Eco, Ernest Becker, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Michael Isaiah Berlin, Roy Wagner, Werner Sollors, Richard Shweder, Jean Baudrillard, Ernest Sternberg, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Katz, James Davidson Hunter, Richard Rorty, Pauline Marie Rosenau, a plea by Anderson entitled "Four Different Ways to be Absolutely Right," Bell Hooks (not "hooks," as she herself spells it), Robert Jay Lifton, Kenneth J. Gergen, Connie Zweig, Maureen O’Hara, William Simon, Stanley Krippner and Michael Winkler (an important essay for this Journal: "Studying Consciousness in the Postmodern Age"), Maureen O’Hara’s and W. Anderson’s "Psychotherapy’s Own Identity Crisis," Howard Gardner, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Huston Smith, Martin Marty, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Václav Havel. This book makes real whatever reality you choose for today!
Publisher Information:	New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995. 260p. Chap. notes: 245-252; Contributors: 257-260

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