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
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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