How can we keep faith in the idea of the United States, whose economy and government seem so thoroughly possessed by what White calls the Barbaric Heart? With his trademark wit, White argues that true resolution of our climate change crisis is likely to come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination more generally.

Acclaimed social critic Curtis White describes an all-encompassing and little-noticed force taking over our culture and our lives that he calls the Middle Mind: the current failure of the American imagination in the media, politics, education, art, technology, and religion. Irreverent, provocative, and far-reaching, White presents a clear vision of this dangerous mindset that threatens America's intellectual and cultural freedoms, concluding with an imperative to reawaken and unleash the once powerful American imagination.

The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right's narrowness, and incredulous before the Left's convolutions. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way how that very SUV spells the Arctic's doom.

Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

Trained relentlessly to work and consume, we make daily lifestyle decisions that promote corporate profits more than our own well-being. We also find ourselves working more, living in fragmented communities, and neglecting our most basic spiritual and political values. As Curtis White puts it, In order to live, you will be asked to do what is no good, what is absurd, trivial, demeaning, and soul killing. Although we belong to the world s most affluent society, somehow we never have the chance to ask: How shall we live?With his trademark humor and acerbic wit, White raises this impertinent question. He also debunks the conventional view that liberalism can answer it without drawing on spiritual values. Surveying American popular culture (including "Office Space" and "The Da Vinci Code") to illustrate his points, White urges us to renew our commitment to human fundamentals as articulated by Henry David Thoreau-especially free time, home, and food-and to reclaim Thoreau s spirit of disobedience.Seeking imaginative answers to his central questions, White also interviews John De Graaf ("Affluenza"), James Howard Kunstler ("The Long Emergency") and Michael Ableman ("Fields of Plenty") about their views of the good life in our time."

Only in America, and only since the 1950s, has the watching of television become the communal ground, often the battleground, of fathers and sons, as well as the place through which the rest of family experience is played out, fought out, remembered, misremembered, and made into myth and trauma--the shows watched and loved, the shows that became the trigger for resentments, the box of shadowy caves that washed over mute bodies in the "TV room" (formerly known as the "living room"). In the background, as children fit or did not fit into the family mythology of good and bad TV, their budding imaginations recorded every hurt, near hurt, or imagined hurt which silent, depressed, nearly catatonic fathers could inflict upon them.

"Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat," "Highway Patrol," "Bonanza," and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s.

Comic in many ways, "Memories" is finally a sad lament of a father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

In Monstrous Possibility Curtis White provides a unique collection of essays written in styles ranging from the criti-fictional to the deeply theoretical. These essays are often funny, usually polemical, and always urgent. White creates in these essays a lucid perspective on what it means to be a writer and a human being in the so-called postmodern moment.

Intent on describing and accounting for the impact of theory and pomo on contemporary fiction writing, White contemplates the coincidence of the simultaneous arrival in the 1960s and '70s on American university campuses of writers, poets, continental literary theory and that monstrous creature "Postmodernism."

White's efforts lead him in surprising directions: revealing arguments about postmodernism's politics and ethics; telling critiques of the anti-humanist theories of Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard and post-Marxism; trenchant appeals for the continued relevance of Marcuse and Theodor Adorno; and a funny but finally dead-serious reinvocation of the idea of Beauty.

A contemporary version of Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain, Curtis White's new novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this book though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, totally unlike all other rehab centers. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves of their addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. Filled with many compelling, outrageous, and comic voices, White's novel is disturbing, charming, and biting. It is about a weird and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognizable as our own.