This book reveals the remarkable life of a Renaissance New Yorker sustained by the play Hamlet. Craven’s detective work finds for the first time Apostle Paul’s ethical principles integrated throughout the play. The insights that emerge from this discovery reverberate throughout American culture today, explaining dramatic shifts in values that have cascaded down the generations. These dynamics reflect Craven’s lineage: a fascinating mix of genial humanists, fiery ideologues, and effective, business-minded Yorkers traced back to Shakespeare’s London. Craven melds groundbreaking literary insight with reflection on his own life, a continuing search for and demonstration of executive power.
Editorial Reviews
Review
In the most compelling conjunction of Hamlet of Morningside Heights, Craven discusses the establishment of Polonius’s advice to Laertes as a touchstone of American education … Craven explores the ironies by which the self-righteous words of a partly duplicitous and bumbling figure have become a motto of the Establishment. … [The book reveals] an extraordinary and fascinating career. … [Some might wish] this to have been two separate books a memoir of a career in Cold War telecommunications and a book about the centrality of Paul’s epistles to Hamlet. –Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Times Literary Supplement
‘Nobody beside Dr Craven ever studied the way that Paul’s Epistle to the Romans affects the play Hamlet. It has staggeringly wide-ranging implications, many of which are identified in this account of how and when these thoughts resounded in Dr Craven’s mind.’ –Andrew Gurr, Director of the Renaissance Texts Research Centre
Kenneth Craven s Hamlet of Morningside Heights is a brief, but engaging and understandable autobiography of intellectual development and literary discovery. Craven reflects on the similarities between himself and Shakespeare, and himself and Hamlet, as humanist and as soul-searcher….Woven throughout the book, Craven analyzes the influence of St. Paul s epistle to the Romans on Hamlet. This autobiography is a fascinating window into the relationship between person, knowledge, and art, and demonstrates how reflection reveals the threads tying them together. –Paula L. Gallagher, The Christian Shakespeare
About the Author
Kenneth Craven, an authority on Shakespeare, Swift, Locke, Sterne, and Tolstoy, is also a humanist, intellectual historian, corporate planner on infrastructure, psychotherapist, and Kremlinologist. He holds a PhD from Columbia University, New York, USA, and served on the faculty of the City University of New York. He has worked as a consultant for AT&T, Xerox, and IBM. In 1961, Dr Craven published the landmark study Science Information Personnel for the National Science Foundation that created the first doctoral programs and schools in information and computer science.
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