John Grey, Straw Dogs Review

Overall Rating

Gray writes like a man with a gigantic chip on hs shoulder. His self-satisfied shadenfruede at the human condition makes him sound like someone who's wife has just run off with hs best friend. His pompous assertion of a 'deluded humanity' infers he is above such error. As a misanthropist and reductionist, he disparages everything from Socrates to modern Humanism like a bad tempered drunk. Just about every 'insight' on the human condition from genocide to evolution are hardly original. He makes glib assumptions about how we 'homo-rapiens' wallow in ignorance, whilst self-appointed seers like him condescend to pass sanctimonious judgement. It is nothing but a narrow subjective polemic against everythng he owes his living to - not a barrel of laughs, but a good earner.