A serious look at communal celebrations, well documented and presented with assurance and flair.
In what may be seen as a companion piece to her Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), social commentator Ehrenreich takes a long view of the human impulse to “seek ecstatic merger with the group,” an act that takes the form of dancing, feasting and artistic embellishment of the face and body.
Going back to the prehistory of our species, she speculates about the possible value of rhythmic dance and music in holding early human groups together, in boosting a group’s effectiveness against large prey. From there, she moves to what is known about ritual dancing in ancient China, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Ehrenreich compares the followers of Dionysus, whose worship involved frenzied dancing, with early Christians, who worshiped with singing, leaping and prophesying in tongues. But as early Christian communities became institutionalized, she reports, such enthusiastic behaviors were censured by ecclesiastic authorities, and by the 12th and 13th centuries, dancing was restricted to Church holidays and not permitted inside churches. Ehrenreich traces the status of traditional festivities through the 16th to 19th centuries, when they were increasingly being seen by the upper classes as wasteful of human labor. Calvin’s form of Protestantism condemned all forms of festive behavior, and among Muslims, the Wahhabi movement launched reforms condemning ecstatic forms of worship such as singing and dancing. Meanwhile, colonizing Europeans, encountering exuberant rituals among native peoples around the world, categorized them as superstitious, savage and repugnant. Analyzing the mass staged spectacles of the French Revolution and those of Nazi Germany, she sees the role of people reduced to mere audience. However, in rock-’n’-roll, she finds a rebellion against that reduced role, and in recent decades she sees a convergence of rock and major league sports, with fans becoming exhibitionists and participants, dressing up, painting their faces and dancing in the stands. The capacity for collective joy, she concludes, is encoded in our genes, and to suppress it is to risk “the solitary nightmare of depression.”
A serious look at communal celebrations, well documented and presented with assurance and flair.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-5723-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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