Rating: 
Summary: Long-winded Lit Review
Review: A deeply disappointing book. Despite the misleading marketing of "Forbidden Knowledge" as some sort of broad exploration of the limits of human inquiry, it's essentially just a quite limited book of literary criticism -- with a brief and very shallow side-trip into the human genome mapping project. It's a very long-winded read trying to make just three real arguments (that aren't supported by much of anything in the way of real evidence): 1. Censorship is sometimes perfectly OK, at least for violent pornography (the author almost completely ducks the issues posed by any other kind of pornography or erotica). 2. Genetic research is pretty scary (the author is clearly out of his literary element in trying to make this argument stick convincingly). 3. The Marquis de Sade was a darn sick guy (weirdly, to make the not-exactly-difficult argument that people shouldn't be reading de Sade's stuff, Shattuck excerpts or summarizes at considerable length some of the very worst parts of de Sade's stuff for people to read). Unless those three arguments somehow strike you as wildly novel territory, don't waste your valuable reading time on this book. And if the genetic research debate does provoke your interest, read a REAL book on the controversy, not one that backs into the topic via a rather superficial look at Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and then abruptly drops the point to go on at tedious length about sadomasochism in French literature). But, if for some twisted reason, you need a Reader's Digest condensed version of distasteful de Sade, there's a chapter in this book that, oddly enough, might suit your purpose.
Rating: 
Summary: Ad Hominem Per Astra
Review: A rare and wonderful argument, written with verve and considerable moral urgency, Forbidden Knowledge frames the question of whether there are some things we should not know. The subtitle "From Prometheus to Pornography" points to the middle ground Shattuck ultimately takes.The first half of the book sets up the opposition in literary terms. Untrammeled exploration is the taking of what cultural institutions say must not be taken; Shattuck traces this exploration from the myth of the fire stealer Prometheus, through Eve's eating of the interdicted apple in the Bible and Paradise Lost, Ulysses' illicit voyage (Book XXVI, Dante's Inferno), and many other literary representations. The opposing way of approaching prohibitions is found in two instances (both written by women, a point Shattuck could make more of) of liberation that comes through self-limitation: La Princesse de Cleves and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The second half of Forbidden Knowledge applies these oppositions to life, as in the social consequences of violent pornography (e. g., De Sade's influence on Ted Bundy) and scientific exploration (the human genome project) that seems to promise complete control over human existence. Shattuck's range of literary reference is divertingly breathtaking: Socrates and rap, Aeschylus and Woody Allen, Goethe, Ghandi, Melville, Maimonides, Walter Pater, Democritus, Roland Barthes, Perrault--aw, hell, everything: if you've taken Western Literature at any quarter-baked college or university, you'll come upon something you've read. And Shattuck will illuminate it from the alternative perspectives of pleonexia vs. portee. It would have been simple-minded, easy, and instantly suspect to compose a polemic for intellectual freedom. This Shattuck does not do. He argues instead that philosophical and scientific thought--the law of infinite regress, for instance--affirms the impossibility of complete knowledge. Although human nature is such that exploration cannot be stopped, the ways in which knowledge is applied can be controlled. Incompleteness is inevitable--and humanizing. "Be lowly wise" (Paradise Lost, Book VIII). I summarize shamelessly because I am confident that anyone who reads this will want the book. It is learned, original, many-sided, allusive without crowing, invigorating, earnest yet sophisticated, written with humor and grace. In our age, when science and art have displaced religion, only scientific and aesthetic arguments can hold weight. Forbidden Knowledge is the largest and most valuable contemporary book I have read to address in large, relevant compass the question of moral responsibility. And it is the only one to do so convincingly.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference Book on The Study of Knowledge
Review: A Very Enlightening book. I recommend this book as it covers many different areas very useful in contributing to the overall question of knowledge in Western civilization. Shattuck relates his thesis to a lot of different literary works that pertain to his subject, which I found extremely beneficial in understanding many other books I have read and continue to learn about.
Six Types of Forbidden Knowledge as outlined in the Appendix:
1. INACCESSIBLE, UNATTAINABLE KNOWLEDGE Many of the mystics have related this, the idea that human knowledge can only point to the ineffable, the nameless, the unexpressible, a continual rediscovery experience that cannot be contained within the mind, and yet this knowledge is real. Some aspects of the cosmos - or "reality" - cannot be reached by human faculties. That inaccessibility springs either from the inadequacy of human powers or from the remoteness of realms presumed to exist in ways inconceivable to us. In this, Socrates goes deeper than Einstein. As Socrates' words prepare the way for Pascal's wager and Huxley's coinage of agnostic. Einstein's words draw a comic paradox out of Pascal's insistence that we know our reach, our portee, between the two infinities that escape us. My third epigraph for this book - Individuum est ineffatible - restricts us even more severely by implying that we cannot know even the particulars that lie closest to us, including ourselves.
2. KNOWLEDGE PROHIBITED BY DIVINE, RELIGIOUS, MORAL, OR SECULAR AUTHORITY Adam and Eve, Prometheus, and Psyche contravened a prohibition. These classic stories relate the consequences of powerful impatience struggling against even more powerful interdiction. Similar motifs recur in modified forms in most quest stories including Dante's Divine Comedy (Peter Damian's warning in the Paradiso's and the tales of King Arthur and his knights (Perceval is too obedient). One of the most compact versions of this form of knowledge emerges from Hawthorne's short story "Ethan Brand." That intrepid figure sets out to seek the unpardonable sin; he discovers that he has already committed it by undertaking such a quest. It is in this category that the Wife of Bath effect (the desire brought on from restrictions and prohibition) comes into play. the second epigraph for this book points with a smile to the perverse human tendency to transform prohibition into temptation.
3. DANGEROUS, DESTRUCTIVE, OR UNWELCOME KNOWLEDGE Nuclear weapons, bio-genetic cloning, stem cell research to name a few. Playing with fire - or firearms - provides the most obvious and urgent example of dangerous knowledge. In Chapter VI, I consider the atomic bomb, recombinant DNA, and the Human Genome Project as representing this category of forbidden knowledge. We have learned to fear the effects that developing technology may have on the Earth's environment. In writing Frankenstein, still close to adolescent fantasy, Mary Shelley aimed not at the environmental but at the human depredations of scientific hubris. In comparison to her insistently cautionary tale, Goethe's Faust floats in ambivalence. Faust's appetite for sheer experience made him into a Frankenstein, in the Gretchen love episode and his technological experiments in draining swamps strew damage and suffering in his wake. Yet despite this, the Lord saves him at the end - the reason: for always striving. How shall we read this immense patchwork of a play? The over indulgent Faustian man properly has as many detractors as admirers in our day.
4. FRAGILE, DELICATE, KNOWLEDGE Words must be used like stepping-stones: lightly and with nimbleness, because if you step on them too heavily, you incur the danger of falling into the intellectual mire of logic and reason. -Balsekar
Like a mirage in the desert, get close and it is no longer there. Look at the stars with peripheral vision and see another aspect of the light, unlike direct vision, which cannot detect this. Sensual desires are said to more intense when the line of physical indulgence is not crossed, as there is this quiet, silent center apart from the physical senses. The story of La Princesse de Cleves and Emily Dickinson's veil poem examines forms of knowledge so sensitive that they may crumble and disappear in the moment of realization. One must approach one's own and other's deepest feelings and yearnings with circumspection for fear of driving them into hiding. The symbolist and decadent aesthetic at the close of the nineteenth century favored withdrawal from full-fledged experience and took refuge in a refined realm of language and imagination. In the poem "Art poetique" Verlaine chooses musicality, nuance, and veiled beauty out of which to compose his chanson grise. For certain men and women, the sexual response falls into the delicate area far removed from conquest and aggressiveness. Some highly responsive men, for whom rape is unthinkable, reach full sexual arousal and circumstances that never exclude the possibility of fiasco. Not violence tenderness serves appetites.
5. KNOWLEDGE DOUBLE BOUND Objective and Subjective Knowledge.
Camus' story of Billy Budd's deadly blow to his superior can be interpreted either from subjectivity or objectivity, from the eyes of Billy Budd, to be pardoned or from Captain Vere, to be executed. Both common sense and the history of philosophy recognize two kinds of tendencies of knowledge. We may approach, enter into, sympathize with, and unite the thing known in order to obtain subjective of knowledge. Or we may stand outside, observe, and anatomize, analyze, and ponder the thing known in order to obtain objective knowledge. Subjective or empathetic knowledge causes us to loose judicious perspective on the object; objective knowledge, in seeking to maintain that perspective, looses the bond sympathy.
We cannot know something by both meetings at the same time. The attempt to reconcile the two or to alternate between them leads to great mental stress. Orestes recoiled from his objective duty to avenge his father, Agammenon, because of the subjective revulsion to killing his mother, Clytemnestra. In explaining how best to comprehend sublime magnitude of the great pyramids in Egypt, Kant wrote with startling simplicity, "We must avoid coming to near just as much as remaining too far away" (Critique of Judgment, 1, 26). Flaubert was less judicious. "The less one feels a thing the more apt one is to express it as it is" (letter to Louise Colet, March. 4th, 1852).
6. AMBIGUOUS KNOWLEDGE - This is when the knowledge hits a reversal, a paradox, as in John Swift's, Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver, who instead of gaining his mind, loses his mind on his fourth voyage to the purely reasonable society of the Houyhnhnms.
Take the end of Milton's Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve have repented of their sin, and in paradox, have been granted 'many days' of mortal life, not in Paradise, but in joy, wonder and blessing, as the angel Michael leads Adam to a hilltop and shows him the future, including the coming of Christ and his redemption of Adam's sin, who states "O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good, what a reversal, a paradox!
The Wife of Bath effect, the Eldorado reaction, as in the utopian of Eldorado, Candide cannot abide the absence of outward conflict and the tranquility of mind that characterizes that sheltered land, what a paradox!
In these cases, respectively, poison or infection turns into remedy; what is forbidden becomes desirable; the ideal becomes intolerable. We come up against a pun or ambiguity in the very nature of things. These forms of double meaning leave us confounded by paradox. Our mind reckons uncomfortably with contradiction affirmed.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult to take seriously.
Review: A very well written book with a bias so severe you'd think one of the author's legs was a foot shorter than the other. I struggled to get through this nonsense and was thoroughly disappointed with the end result. Shattuck's Kissingerian attitude of "I know all and you should simply accept my word as truth" gets grating after about a half a page. I have a very difficult time taking seriously someone who contends that they understand a writer's work better than the writer (case in point being his critique of Camus, wherein he contends that Camus' description of what he was writing about is wrong). I also find it difficult to take seriously a discussion of the limits of knowledge that openly states on multiple occasions that the Catholic Church is true authority on where the limits of knowledge should lie. This is the same authority that caused so much trouble for Michelangelo, as well as many other leading scientists. Sadly, I found this book to be a waste of precious natural resources and a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Forbidden Knowledge: Its true perspective
Review: I agree with the premise of this book about limiting knowledge, given the extent of the debauchery and dangerous circumstances of dissolution to be seen around us in contemporary developed society, as a result of the extremes of the concept of "right" to "liberty" in expression.
The author Shattruck has not suggested this but I will, that reality takes into account at both sides of the coin of existence; that the beautiful pair of expensive, exquisitely tailored pants of a famous brand, for example, invariably has an unpleasant seamy side inside of it, known only to its wearer; or that the bodies of handsome people do indeed rot after death.
So what we view as debached expression is indeed that, but in the past 50 or so years, it has come out into the social and cultural mainstream because of technological and socio-political developments. The consequences, as Shattruck points out, are there for all who "have ears to hear and eyes to see" - to contemplate. But then the only probable alternative, the suggestion of keeping reality and profound knowledge "in place" and secure at the level where it really belongs and has always been - will be unpopular to say the least, and go against the grain of nowaday's populist and democratic Western freedom of expression and knowledge tendencies: such arcane knowledge can never be eliminated, but should be the domain of a certain level ("elite") of people, who by virtue of training, experience, initiation or divinity, are strong enough to possesss it without it unbalancing them and overturning the conventional reality the "normal" world always runs on. Its possession is a grat responsibility and gift. In turn, it should be put to regulated use for the greatest benefit of society, which is the job of such people to guide, as possession of this knowledge results in great strength. That is what knowledge, like medicine, is for: use. But not abuse. Now this suggestion of universal truth and wisdom will be met with accusations of "elitism" against me, even "Illuminism" and "Masonism" and whatever nowaday's eager "conspiratorialists" have in their lexicon. Precisely. I think Roger Shattruck has done a service in writing and publishing this book - but he should keep this inevitable corrolary which I have highlighted - in mind, too. Proper use and abuse of the power derived from the strength given by such knowledge is a separate issue, and is often confused. In fact its proper management could spell the difference between a "Golden" social era and a dark one. Nowaday's developed-world elites are certainy corrupted and evil, and irresponsible as to their social obligations; they are living in exactly such a dark age - and need excision to save the world - but that doesn't mean at all that elites were always so, or that the institution of elitism is always socially obnoxious, irrelevant and evil.
Rating: 
Summary: Forbidden knowledge or forbidden literature.
Review: I had a hard time with this book. As some of the previous reviewers have noted, Shattuck seems to have a problem with where he wants to go with this book. It would have been great if he stuck to how some things should not be known by man. However Roger gets mucked up and first describes man's yearning for the unknown, then talks about his liberal viewpoints on nuclear weapons, and then talks about sex and violence. This book went all over the place, and I wonder what he was trying to prove. There must be better books on this topic but I just don't know where. This was not a great read, but the subject is important.
Rating:
Summary: Forbidden knowledge or forbidden literature.
Review: I had a hard time with this book. As some of the previous reviewers have noted, Shattuck seems to have a problem with where he wants to go with this book. It would have been great if he stuck to how some things should not be known by man. However Roger gets mucked up and first describes man's yearning for the unknown, then talks about his liberal viewpoints on nuclear weapons, and then talks about sex and violence. This book went all over the place, and I wonder what he was trying to prove. There must be better books on this topic but I just don't know where. This was not a great read, but the subject is important.
Rating:
Summary: Forbidden Knowledge - Shattuck's lesson
Review: Just one year ago, I was sitting in Prof. Shattuck's class at Boston University listening as he read from a manuscript he was in the midst of writing. The class was called "Forbidden Knowledge," and the manuscript became, well, I suppose that's obvious. By the time the book was published, I had graduated. I eagerly absorbed the text, and was amazed at how clearly I heard Prof. Shattuck's voice in the prose. It was like sitting in on his discussions once again. And, like his classroom debates, Shattuck comes across not as a man who has all the answers, but as a man who questions. I can't help but notice the irony in what I am doing. I am writing a review on the internet about limits of knowledge - when it seems that information is unbound in cyberspce. But, I think this book makes it clear that information readily available is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge requires responsiblity. Roger Shattuck is a responsible and wise guide through centuries of literature and scientific breakthrough. He explores the work of questioners, all the while mindful of the fragile boundries between knowledge and hubris.
Rating:
Summary: Forbidden Knowledge: Says Who?
Review: Roger Shattuck in FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE raises on a scholarly level that which previously had been raised mostly by white-smocked monster-creating mad doctors who were warned about venturing into areas where Man Must Not Go. Shattuck explores the full range of human knowledge as he postulates what sorts of knowledge are inherently forbidden. Most of his attention focuses, however, in areas of his expertise:literature. He considers the negative ramifications of Eve's eyes being opened to evil in the Garden of Eden; of Satan's questing for knowledge reserved only for His boss; of Faust's seeking knowledge that he transmutes into power; and of the Marquis de Sade's questing for the limits of pain and pleasure. As Shattuck progresses from one consideration to another, he makes clear his belief that humanity is fatally flawed in the moral/ethical department. According to Shattuck, whenever humanity pursues an area of knowledge that has the potential for evil, humanity, following Murphy's Law, will turn potentiality into reality. Literature, he notes, is replete with examples of men and women who could not resist a bite from the Apple of Knowledge. There is no way to prove him wrong, of course, and it is a most depressing thought that he might be right. If one does not look too closely at the proofs that Shattuck offers, then a complete reading of his book sounds superficially reasonable. Yet, I dare to ask questions that go unasked in FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE. Is the knowledge that man should question the limits of knowledge itself forbidden? How can one measure the surety of the potential dangers of delving into potentially harmful knowledge?
And if one can measure these dangers, how can one measure or balance the corresponding benefits? And finally, the kicker: exactly who will be the one to affirm that this knowledge is forbidden while that one is not? These questions almost certainly have no definite answer that will satisfy the reasonable mind, suggesting that the quest for answers to fuzzy questions ought not to stop that reasonable mind from posing them in the first place.
Rating: 
Summary: Knowledgeable Study Of Pursuit of Experience
Review: Roger Shattuck poses a very interresting question as the thesis to this book. What ought we as a society ought not to know? Is any knowledge Forbidden? In this day and age where science and technology make learning easier than ever are there still taboos in society?
He answeres these questions by anaylzing art and science from (as title says) Prometheus to Pornagraphy(although his main examble of latter is de Sade which is debatable today after his "ehabilitation" how pornographic de Sade remains.) He dissects various literary examples of his theme.
Shattuck does an excellent mini survey of classics such as the Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost citing examples relelvent to forbidden knowledge. It is obvious he did his research before undertaking to write this book.
This is not the easist read. Shattock does an excellent job writing on this topic yet already some of his material seems dated or irrelevent through no fault of his own. It just seems like in the twenty-first century the author has a uphill strugle convincing any reader who has access to the internet that certain experiences and fruits of knowledge should be left alone. Aloso Shattock does not dumb down his tome at all which is another reason for it not being easist read. As a layperson and not expert in literature or science I found myself really having to concentrate, and in cases re-read passages to understand what he was saying.
However all that said this book is really interesting and made me think about the topic in ways unbefore thought.
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