Although the modern sensibility—Eliot and Joyce, Freud and Jung—owes a great deal to various mythologies, it is no secret that "mythic consciousness" has been superseded by "scientific consciousness," an overpowering historical fact as prevalent in the East as in the West. One would imagine that this turn of events would be the starting point in any new discussion of the "mythological dimension." Joseph Campbell seems to be aware of it only as it relates to Occidental transformations or disruptions: specifically the Judaic-Christian tradition which with its "exclusive, authoritative, collective, and fanatic" articles of faith he finds rightfully headed towards the dustbin of history. But surely this is the fate of Oriental religions as well. Can Vedantic or Taoist texts, based on the Immutable Self and an illusory world, a mystical constellation which Campbell at one point renders in truly staggering terms—"beyond names, forms and all scriptural personification, to that immanent transcendent mystery of being which defies thought, feeling, and figuration"—be expected to survive except as a poetic phenomenon or a Jamesian "will to believe?" Campbell is an erudite man, and what he has to say even in this collection of sketchy and randomly related essays is not without consequence, especially re the set pieces on the Brothers Grimm and a legend of the American Indians. Nevertheless, his theoretical excursions concerning the biological or theological aspects of myth or "Primitive Man as Metaphysician" are really more provocative than illuminating, and the recurring Buddhist/Biblical dichotomies do seem a bit cursory coming from the author of The Masks of God.
Pub Date: July 21, 1969
ISBN: 1577312104
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1969
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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