A well-informed, engrossing consideration of the significance of vitalist ideas.
How ideas about the blending of spirit and materiality have influenced American thought and life.
In his latest book, history professor Lears explores the American evolution of so-called animistic thinking, “a loosely defined outlook acknowledging the centrality of spontaneous energy in human experience,” or a somewhat more formalized “metaphysical worldview…known as vitalism.” The author first covers some key British expressions of vitalism in such figures as John Donne, Daniel Defoe, and Laurence Sterne, who “epitomized the lingering and lurching of the patriarchal ethos in a world where male authority was becoming detached from its traditional sources in dogmatic religion and landed wealth.” Then he moves on to a series of American exemplars, including both the well known (Timothy Dwight, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt) and the more obscure (Andrew Jackson Davis, Helen Wilmans). As Lears memorably demonstrates, the belief in the significance of pulsing flows of energy that move through minds and objects has played a profound, if not often well-acknowledged, role in American philosophy and lived experience. The author makes a convincing claim that vitalism remains relevant not just in popular, but also scientific discourse and has in fact “begun to acquire new legitimacy in our own time as scientists have rediscovered the uses of animist-derived ideas in physics, botany, geology, and epigenetics.” Such recuperations will continue to be crucial, the author argues, in responding to the contemporary threat of ecological collapse. A notable strength of the book is the richness of the author’s commentary on the context in which vitalist ideas emerged; he offers a strikingly detailed view of the lineage of specific articulations of a faith in “animal spirits.” The only lacuna is a thorough accounting of how Indigenous worldviews have impacted Anglo-American thinking over several centuries; a little more close attention to those worldviews, which have undergone their own substantial transformations, would have been useful.
A well-informed, engrossing consideration of the significance of vitalist ideas.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780374290221
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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