A fine reappraisal of two masterpieces that discovers psychological and moral profundities amid the blood and guts.
Two very different soldiers are improbable comrades-in-arms, according to this perceptive comparative study.
At first glance they couldn’t be more dissimilar: Achilles is the ferocious Greek hero of the Trojan War, obsessed with winning personal glory (not to mention treasure and slaves) with his spear; Yossarian is a reluctant American bomber crewman, a cog in a vast military machine who is helplessly appalled at the carnage of World War II and the absurdist bureaucracy that perpetrates it. But Florida State University classics professor Golden (Understanding the Iliad, 2005, etc.) sees them as akin—two shell-shocked men engaged in a parallel struggle to wrench a “benign and compassionate humanity” from the brutality of war. Drawing on close readings of both texts and commentaries by Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, Golden traces the inner workings of the stories, teasing out the intricate interplay of farce, satire and tragedy in Catch-22 and the role of Homer’s heroic warrior code in salvaging meaning in a world where men are playthings of cruel and fickle gods. From his shrewd analysis of literary mechanics the author advances significant reinterpretations of the protagonists. He sees Yossarian not as a pacifist or a coward, but as a hero who reclaims for himself a mission of redemptive sacrifice out of the war’s mechanized mass slaughter. Achilles, in Golden’s innovative psychoanalytic reading of The Iliad, emerges as a raging narcissist whose violence, callousness and grandiosity isolate him from the human relationships he craves, and who undertakes an arduous journey back to emotional engagement with friend and foe alike. Golden combines impressive erudition with a sharp critical eye and a lucid prose style that laymen will find accessible and engaging. The result is an original and persuasive work of literary scholarship that finds much more than mere war stories in these classics.
A fine reappraisal of two masterpieces that discovers psychological and moral profundities amid the blood and guts.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1438943589
Page Count: 176
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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