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GINSBERG, Robert. The Aesthetics of Ruins. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. xx + 538 pp. Cloth, $144.00-Bibliographically, this book is outstanding. Ginsberg knows much and tells it all. The generous last chapter (pp. 449-538) contains solid commentaries on books, besides ample indexes of names, titles, and other clues. The illustrations are numerous, diverse in their cultural and geographic choice, and capably selected for their suggestiveness. More generally, the book is encyclopedically conceived: I can hardly remember a work in which sections on "cinema and television as ruin," on music, literature, even nature as ruin coexist sideby-side with philosophical and aesthetic chapters, as well as with more predictable considerations on ruins in the narrower traditional sense: buildings, architecture, and the like.
Ginsberg's style is self-indulgent and usually amusing: it bursts every now and then in verse, is full of puns, playful, often witty, more than once irritating. The reader is certainly not faced with the habitual grave and heavy analytical style of professional aestheticians.
The reverse side of this procedure is soon noticed. The encyclopedic approach limits the systematic. Ginsberg's book cannot...