Brief Reviews, VOLUME 7

Gandhi’s Printing Press [Review]

[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”0674072790″ locale=”us” height=”333″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51TxXvIlNwL.jpg” width=”220″ alt=”Gandhi’s Printing Press” ]On the anniversary of Gandhi’s death, I thought I would post my recent review of

Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading
Isabel Hofmeyr

Hardback:  Oxford UP, 2013
Buy now:   [ [easyazon-link asin=”0674072790″ locale=”us”]Amazon[/easyazon-link] ]   [ [easyazon-link asin=”B00FZKA7PS” locale=”us”]Kindle[/easyazon-link] ]
 

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This review originally appeared on the Books And Culture website, and was later shared on Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish.

With the emergence of the Slow Food movement, as well as Slow Money, Slow Cities, and a host of other counterculturally Slow ventures over the last three decades, one might be tempted to assume that such opposition to a culture of speed is a relatively new historical development. The industrial age, however, has since its origins been marked by individuals and groups who have adamantly voiced their opposition to the overweening rise of speed and technology. Journalist Nicols Cox has traced this history in her 2004 book, Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives. One important figure who receives only brief mention in Cox’s book is Mohandas Gandhi. In Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr recounts a little-known aspect of Gandhi’s story that will undoubtedly serve to raise his historical profile as an opponent of fast, industrial culture. Gandhi’s Printing Press is, among other things, a monograph in the history and culture of the book, and there are parts of it that do get a bit technical, but a deeper narrative flowing through the work particularly caught my interest, one centered around questions about the practices through which a faith community can resist, or be liberated from, the powers of speed.

[ Continue Reading on the Books and Culture Website… ]

 

[ David Mikics’s Rules for Slow Reading ]

 




C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com


 
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