Simon is an erudite, insightful guide to a story that spans centuries but still speaks to our times.
Devilish deals always end badly, but people continue to make them, according to this wide-ranging study of the Faust legend.
Most readers are familiar with the story of Faust, the scholar who makes a pact with the devil, trading his soul for knowledge, power, and riches. Simon, an essayist and editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine, believes that many people don’t fully understand the story’s depth and complexity, and this extensive cultural history goes a long way to prove his point. While the first appearance of Faust as a character was in 1592, in a play by Christopher Marlowe, the idea goes back much further, and Simon tracks through the antecedents, including the temptation of Christ. Goethe’s version, the first part of which was published in 1808, was enormously influential, sparking many other tales that picked up the theme. Thomas Mann reinvigorated the story as a novel in 1947, using the concept of a satanic pact to try to explain why the German people followed Hitler. In Roman Polanski’s 1968 movie, Rosemary’s Baby, a struggling actor offers his wife to be the bearer of the devil’s child in return for fame. Simon argues that the Faust legend draws its modern resonance from the idea of the contract—not just as a legal agreement, but as a moral choice. In the closing section of the book, the author suggests that some of the problems of the contemporary world, from screen addiction to climate change, represent Faust-style bargains. In this section, the logic is unclear, and there is a sense that Simon might be stretching the metaphor too far. Nonetheless, the book is an undeniably fascinating read, as the author weaves literary and intellectual strands into a colorful tapestry.
Simon is an erudite, insightful guide to a story that spans centuries but still speaks to our times.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781685891046
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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