A thoughtful, generous vision of human creativity across centuries of culture.
A wide-ranging examination of cultural convergences throughout human history.
Puchner, a Harvard literature professor and editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, takes a capacious view of cultural objects and practices, from cave drawings to TikTok, that form our shared human inheritance. His project, he writes, was inspired by a need to define for himself the meaning of his own scholarly field, the humanities, which he understands as an engagement with the cultural past “for the purpose of redefining the present.” In each of 15 chapters, Puchner pleasingly investigates ways that cultures have redefined themselves, often through cross-fertilization. When ancient Greece adopted an alphabet from Egyptians, a largely oral tradition faded in favor of writing. However, libraries proved to be a vulnerable form of cultural storage. Plato, who gave up a career as a playwright to follow Socrates, understood the power of dialogue to teach, though he rejected invented dialogue to create the simulated reality of theater—a critique revived in dystopian tales such as the 1999 film The Matrix. The Romans proved adept at grafting Greek culture onto their own. Many centuries after Mount Vesuvius erupted, the discovery of the sculpture of a South Asian goddess was proof of cultural influences from India as well. Puchner underscores the enriching potential of cultural importation. For example, when a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim traveled to India, he returned with religious texts that he went on to translate, leading to the flourishing of Buddhism in China just as it was diminishing in India. The invention of museums as well as exploration, colonization, and global trade all have inspired artists’ imaginations. German artist Albrecht Dürer was astonished by the gold objects he saw displayed in Brussels, gifts from Moctezuma to Spanish explorers, meant to warn them of the Aztec’s power and resources. Instead, they incited greed and destruction. Looking at recent phenomena such as K-pop, Puchner is sanguine. “The arc of cultural history,” he concludes optimistically, “bends toward circulation and mixture.”
A thoughtful, generous vision of human creativity across centuries of culture.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780393867992
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite guide to the biblical world.
Revelations from the Old Testament.
“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission, of not saying what everyone would like to know,” observes Calasso (1941-2021), the acclaimed Italian publisher, translator, and explorer of myth, gods, and sacred ritual. In this probing inquiry into biblical mysteries, the author meditates on the complexities and contradictions of key events and figures. He examines the “enigmatic nature” of original sin in Genesis, an anomaly occurring in no other creation myth; God’s mandate of circumcision for all Jewish men; and theomorphism in the form of Adam: a man created in the image of the god who made him. Among the individuals Calasso attends to in an abundantly populated volume are Saul, the first king of Israel; the handsome shepherd David, his successor; David’s son Solomon, whose relatively peaceful reign allowed him “to look at the world and study it”; Moses, steeped in “law and vengeance,” who incited the slaughter of firstborn sons; and powerful women, including the Queen of Sheba (“very beautiful and probably a witch”), Jezebel, and the “prophetess” Miriam, Moses’ sister. Raging throughout is Yahweh, a vengeful God who demands unquestioned obedience to his commandments. “Yahweh was a god who wanted to defeat other gods,” Calasso writes. “I am a jealous God,” Yahweh proclaims, “who punishes the children for the sins of their fathers, as far as the third and fourth generations.” Conflicts seemed endless: During the reigns of Saul and David, “war was constant, war without and war within.” Terse exchanges between David and Yahweh were, above all, “military decisions.” David’s 40-year reign was “harrowing and glorious,” marked by recurring battles with the Philistines. Calasso makes palpable schisms and rivalries, persecutions and retributions, holocausts and sacrifices as tribal groups battled one another to form “a single entity”—the people of Israel.
An erudite guide to the biblical world.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60189-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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