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: 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: 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: From Scary to Sacred to Secret--Essential Insights
Review: Beyond the mundane discussions about secrecy versus openness, or privacy versus transparency, there is a much higher level of discussion, one about the nature, limits, and morality of knowledge. As I read this book, originally obtained to put secrecy into perspective, I suddenly grasped and appreciated two of the author's central thoughts: knowing too much too fast can be dangerous; and yes, there are things we should not know or be exposed to. Who decides? Or How do we the people decide? are questions that must be factored into any national knowledge policy or any national information strategy. This book left me with a sense of both the sacred and the scary sides of unfettered knowledge. This is less about morality and more about focus, intention, and social outcomes. It is about the convergence of power, knowledge, and love to achieve an enlightened intelligence network of self-governing moral people who are able to defend themselves against evil knowledge and prosper by sharing good knowledge.
Rating: 
Summary: Limits and Liberation
Review: Despite the complexity of the subject he assumes, Shattuck's narrative is lucid and gripping. One could easily see the Table of Contents as a college course syllabus, and you will learn as much. Shattuck is a most knowledgeable teacher. Expect a deeper understanding of Milton and Camus. Watch as Shattuck's academic intimacy with other classic thinkers delivers them life. Though his expertise on the literary stage is evident, the scientific fields he examines seem slightly over his head. He is even more lost when he devotes his longest chapter to the titillating (read: "dry") discussion of the life and works of Marquis de Sade. Rather than separating the literary study from the scientific and historic case studies, if Shattuck had integrated these aspects and followed the structure of his Appendix I, the book would have a more cohesive, and perhaps more poignant, effect. In Appendix I, he meticulously defines "forbidden knowledge" and breaks it into six illuminating categories. Reading the appendix brought the whole book together for me. Aside from an improvable format, the book is comprehensive and bold-the most serious piece of modern anti-intellectualism I know. I was thoroughly persuaded that the individual's pursuit of forbidden knowledge might be individually destructive. Yet, one man's destructive discovery often leads to progress for humanity. History has shown man to be adaptable, and usually prosperous, when introduced to previously "forbidden knowledge." From Eden to Copernicus, knowledge defiantly persists outside all restrictions. Roger Shattuck's task is daunting: Convince freedom-loving, restriction-denying modern man that there should be (or simply are) limits to knowledge. That certain knowledge has the potential to disillusion or even to destroy. Shattuck's triumph is that the reader will realize the validity in considering the dangers of limitless knowledge. However, he neglects to offer a practical solution and thus does not succeed in persuading the reader to surrender the pursuit of the "forbidden."
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: Shattuck is a fascinating writer and thinker
Review: I came to "Forbidden Knowledge" via my appreciation of the author's earlier book, "The Banquet Years." Both books are truly intellectual treats. And wonderful to read and to think about. Strongly recommended.
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