cover image Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy

Finding Hope in the Age of Melancholy

David S. Awbrey. Little Brown and Company, $32 (276pp) ISBN 978-0-316-03811-9

Awbrey's thoughtful and engaging book is partly a narrative of his own depression and how he emerged from it. But the nature of his view of depression goads him to write much more than a confessional, purely subjective account. Resisting what he terms ""the medicalization of melancholy,"" Awbrey offers a wide-ranging and intelligent appraisal of the social and cultural forces that can, without warning, bring debilitating depression down on accomplished, thriving people like himself. ""Few Americans,"" Awbrey contends, ""see melancholy as a spiritual or moral crisis."" Like many moderate-to-conservative cultural critics, he laments the ""spiritual wasteland"" of modernism and postmodernism, blaming them for our estrangement from ""a core of values"" and for creating a culture marked by ""randomness, relativism, nihilism, marginality."" But unlike many coroners of 20th-century culture, Awbrey doesn't wag his finger at the wholesale decadence of the country. The weakest part of his book is its historical specificity, which leads Awbrey to imply a distinction between melancholy on the edge of the millennium and melancholy throughout history. When, really, has there not been more than ample cultural dislocation and reason for melancholy? Still, it's difficult to counter his assertion that ""human reason and scientific enquiry"" have become ""the primary standards for truth"" and that, by themselves, they provide insufficient nourishment for the spirit. And Awbrey's exhortation to readers to cultivate their spiritual lives is buttressed by the fact that, in these sensitive pages, he makes a reader respect the depth and sensitivity of his own spirituality. (Jan.)