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Joyce, Freud and Jung—owes a great deal to various mythologies, it is no secret that "mythic consciousness" has been superseded by "scientific consciousness," an overpowering historical fact as prevalent in the East as in the West.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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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