Rating: 
Summary: If White could communicate his thoughts.....
Review: ....we might have a cultural revolution on our hands! It's clearly a deeply thoughtful work, and moments of brilliant insight....almost...occur. A very smart guy who writes poorly. Almost unreadable, though I forced my way through it. If you like Radiohead and Wallace Stevens (I do), and you can't stand "Fresh Air" (I can't), then you might like this book as much as me. Which isn't saying much. White makes a maniacal attempt to subvert almost everything, and the small but eclectic group of survivors he mentions are not enough to support his assertions. Actually, by the end of the book, it's fairly difficult to recall what his assertions may have been....
Rating: 
Summary: The Tedious Mind
Review: A cover blurb by Molly Ivins urges us to take up this book by a delightfully cranky academic. The author's jacket photo certainly looks cranky enough, but, alas, the text is as tedious a performance as you are likely to come across. I doubt that Molly ever read it. White's premise is that we need a social imagination that is freer, more liberating and more democratic than our own. He repeats this idea frequently, perhaps as a substitute for developing it. White is never far from castigating President Bush, who he refers to as George II, establishing that his wit rivals that of the president. White mixes Derrida quotes with allusions to rock stars with a hilariously wrong-headed reading of Saving Private Ryan. Just as White's prose is about to collapse of its own weight, he tosses in an F word or two, trying to keep the sophomores awake. He flays the cherubic Harold Bloom, claiming that the non-political Bloom offers solace to the Right Wing. Elsewhere, White commends the imaginative social vision of Karl Marx, missing, perhaps, its collapse, which was partially triggered by the distaste most adults hold for imagining themselves stuck for a lifetime in an environment that reminds them of their days in a committee ridden public high school. I can't think of better Saturday night reading for a socially backward sophomore who's been stood up by his date.
Rating:
Summary: Thanks for giving us a bad name.
Review: After reading this book and seeing the author lecture on C-SPAN, I can honestly say that I am embarassed to be pursuing a PhD with hopes of becoming an academic. White is the caricature of an academic: pompous, arrogant, incessantly dogmatic and intolerant of those who aren't academics, and even pushy. Will I ever be like that? I hope not. What I thought I'd get is a treatment on how, say, public discouse has degenerated so as of late and what we might be able to do to rectify it. What I got instead was Mr. White telling us how it is a shame that more people don't think like he does, how everything that is commercial is worthless, and hiow the world would be much better if everyone was Noam Chomsky. In other words, this book is completely mislabeled. Rather than having a subtitle of "why americans don't think for themselves", it should read: "why americans should think like Curtis White." In fact, Mr. White ends up caricaturizing his own position somewhat by setting such a slanted agenda towards the anti-corporate left, that I came away from the book (as I'm sure others did) thinking: "I'd rather see a 'dumbed down' america than subscribe to the utopian mind-control that Mr. White is sneaking in through the back-door." In other words, his position - that americans don't think for themselves - is undercut by the realization that Mr. Curtis wants to literally tell us what to think, buy, read, listen to, and want. (I'm not exaggerating. He is really that bad!) Don't buy the book; I'll sum it up: Don't shop at wal-mart, even though they have good prices and merchandise. Don't watch TV, because despite the fact that it is entertaining, it is not deep. Instead, read poetry or philosophy (but only by leftists). Don't buy anything from a company that owns more than 2 stores. Oh...and...don't question why you are doing all of this. Only then, will your life be truly free. This book is awful.
Rating: 
Summary: The Joy of "Reading"
Review: As other readers have commented, White does a poor job of giving a precise meaning to "the middle mind," and he actually fails to tell us why Americans don't think for themselves. He gives plenty of examples of Americans not thinking for themselves, but provides little in the way of explanation. Nonetheless, a prescription, and a valuable one, can be abstracted from this rather scattered and wide-ranging work of social criticism: let us critically examine our cultural, political, aesthetic and social worlds with an eye to the possible alternatives and open possibilities. White performs evocative readings of disparate social artifacts, ranging from Saving Private Ryan, The Accidental Buddhist, and Radiohead's music to political efforts co-opt "stupid smart" gen-Xers for business revitalization. Some of these readings miss the mark while others are quite perceptive; I suspect every reader will find occasion to agree and to disagree. I would suggest that far from attempting to feed us "correct" opinions, White is telegraphing a critical stance to the world whose absence he rightly deplores. By analogy, if this book were about the state of the culinary arts, it would not be a cookbook of tried-and-true recipes, but a call that we should challenge ourselves to discover the joy of cooking, with all the risk and mess it entails. Who knows what new culinary creations might come of it? This is an extremely ambitious short work -- a book that ultimately points to a world of thought and engagement far beyond its own pages. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Joy of "Reading"
Review: As other readers have commented, White does a poor job of giving a precise meaning to "the middle mind," and he actually fails to tell us why Americans don't think for themselves. He gives plenty of examples of Americans not thinking for themselves, but provides little in the way of explanation. Nonetheless, a prescription, and a valuable one, can be abstracted from this rather scattered and wide-ranging work of social criticism: let us critically examine our cultural, political, aesthetic and social worlds with an eye to the possible alternatives and open possibilities. White performs evocative readings of disparate social artifacts, ranging from Saving Private Ryan, The Accidental Buddhist, and Radiohead's music to political efforts co-opt "stupid smart" gen-Xers for business revitalization. Some of these readings miss the mark while others are quite perceptive; I suspect every reader will find occasion to agree and to disagree. I would suggest that far from attempting to feed us "correct" opinions, White is telegraphing a critical stance to the world whose absence he rightly deplores. By analogy, if this book were about the state of the culinary arts, it would not be a cookbook of tried-and-true recipes, but a call that we should challenge ourselves to discover the joy of cooking, with all the risk and mess it entails. Who knows what new culinary creations might come of it? This is an extremely ambitious short work -- a book that ultimately points to a world of thought and engagement far beyond its own pages. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: the middle mind
Review: as we gasp for air, as we struggle to make sense of the inanity that is the colossus we call america, let us give thanks that out of the fertile loins that is the american critical mind the likes of Curtis White arise to give us hope and vision for a better non-mc-world....more power to him...all power to the energy that is imagination....to use the australian vernacular...curtis white...you little beauty...you ripper...you are a true blue grafter!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Loved It
Review: Curt White is the real deal. The Middle Mind is an important work that urges us to escape the entertainment is art mentality. Anyone interested in moving beyond status quo America will love this. It is not only an eye-opener --it is also a fast paced and compelling read.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, inspiring, enlightening
Review: Curtis White puts in words the acute intellectual and moral struggle that to me represents life in America, something I as a European expat face every day here but can't express. I could not put this book down. Considering it deals with some complex ideas of philosophy it is surprisingly readable. I am buying it for everyone. On my to-do list: read all the books mentioned in The Middle Mind, starting with Theodor Adorno's. Curtis White is my new hero, after Chomsky.
Rating:
Summary: Original, thoughtful critique of contemporary culture
Review: Despite its flaws (which many other reviewers were quick to spot), I found The Middle Mind to be a refreshing look at the bland mediocrity of contemporary American culture. This book may be better appreciated as a collection of essays (which, to a large extent, it is: some of the material has already been published in Harper's) than a book with a unified theme. If you judge it by its title and expect a focused discussion of the middle mind you will be disappointed. If you take each chapter on its own merits, however, you can admire the style, scope and originality of Curtis White's writing.
The middle mind is that superficial, politically correct, nonthreatening cultural terrain that is all around us today. It is, as White tells us, prevalent in the media (especially the supposedly liberal media such as NPR), academia and politics. To the right of the middle mind are the cultural conservatives who want to turn back the clock to a mythic America of the past; to the left are the "tenured radicals" whose criticism of society seldom reaches beyond the university. Steven Spielberg (whose Saving Private Ryan is methodically criticized; White does a good job in exposing it as a simplistic, anachronistic piece of pro-war propaganda), Charlie Rose and NPR's Terry Gross are given as examples of the middle mind in action. I am not familiar with the latter two, but White portrays them as pseudo-serious talk shows full of celebrity gossip. There are a couple of problems with this book. One is the insufficient attention given to the central topic of the middle mind itself. White gives some good examples of it, but never really pins down the middle mind and its relationship to the extremes. Another, related problem is that White, especially in the last few chapters, get bogged down in a complicated technical discussion of metaphysics which, if I understand it correctly, undercuts the book's premise to some degree. For one thing, these highly theoretical arguments are the very kind that the aforementioned tenured radicals are so fond of. White discusses the theories of Derrida and Hegel. Derrida was a postmodernist who helped to start the trend of "deconstruction" so hated by conservatives like Harold Bloom. Hegel was, among other things, the philosopher who used the device known as dialectic. Although White doesn't get into this, dialectic --with its thesis, antithesis and synthesis-- is closely related to the problem of the middle mind. I'm not saying Hegel was an advocate of White's middle mind, but if you are going to bring in Hegel's extremely complex thinking, you should at least address the part of his philosophy that most closely relates to your topic. As for Derrida and postmodernism, White first seems to imply that they are part of the academic tendency to fall prey to the middle mind. But then, in the later chapters, he returns to Derrida and tries to use him to further his argument. I found White's final chapter, in which he advocates a culture that embraces the imagination, admirable in its intent but a little too abstract to be convincing. The limitations of this book do not take away from its value. White is an intelligent and entertaining writer; his style ranges from serious to cantankerous to tongue-in-cheek. I agreed with most of his criticisms; where I found him lacking were in his attempts to suggest positive alternatives. Yet the book's main focus is one of criticizing the status quo, and there is much value in that. His approach is non-dogmatic, so we can forgive him for not entirely succeeding in giving us the Final Answer to the problem of the middle mind. This is the kind of book that can stir readers out of intellectual complacency and remind them that creativity and the imagination lie outside the boundaries of today's pop culture.
Rating:
Summary: IT'S NOT ALL MIND
Review: Despite some occasional solid zingers and one-liners this plunge into the Middle Mind takes one to the edges of the mind. It is often just a critique of other critics, scholars, and analysts. Harold Bloom gets some interesting coverage, but the reader ultimately has to dig through the prose to find out : What's the point?"
Discussions are initiated, then digress into abstruse and pedantic argumentation. For example, in the section on the polemic concerning the Literary Canon, White makes the point that the central question in this dispute, is not really the political badminton that goes on in accepting or rejecting a book for inclusion; but is defining " What is Great?" He starts the discussion, then never gives and answer.
In addition to being hopelessly turgid and overwritten, it's main flaw is that it assumes all media and entertainment should be an intellectual exercise. I would respond that it's not "all mind." We dont need to be cerebrally challenged in every mundane activity or mindless diversion. I agree with the central thesis that much entertainment and what passes for culture is lowbrow and pathetic, but I dont the think the author's approach of total cynicism and ridicule does much to correct it.
There is some interesting commentary on cultural icons like Jimmi Hendrix et al, but overall it is too disjointed and cumbersome to enjoy fully.
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