Fast-moving and entertaining.
Do you believe that 13 is an unlucky number? This book may cure you.
In the late 19th century, members of the “Thirteen Club” met on Fridays, walking under ladders and breaking mirrors before sitting down to dinner, 13 at a table, to show their contempt for superstition. The belief that 13 at a table is unlucky, argues Lachenmeyer (The Outsider, 1999), was the earliest superstition involving the number. Symbolically connected to the Last Supper, it usually entailed the belief that one of the diners would die within the year. Surprisingly, the evil associations of 13 aren’t as old as many believe. The earliest known reference to 13 at a table is by the Earl of Rochester in 1680, and Lachenmeyer finds scant mention of unlucky 13 in folklore of earlier periods. The Norse tale of Baldur, murdered at a gathering of 13 gods, is often cited as a pagan source, but texts preserving the myth are from Christian times and may well have been influenced by the model of the Last Supper. Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that the earliest clear reference to Friday the 13th is the title of a novel published in 1907. Lachenmeyer refutes wiccans and neopagans who contend that 13 is a holy number of the old religion, suppressed and slandered by the Catholic Church. In fact, he notes, the church views lucky and unlucky numbers as foolish if not sinful beliefs. A survey of related superstitions provides interesting factoids: Tuesday, not Friday, is the unlucky day in many European countries; the symbolism of 13 on the US dollar bill refers to the 13 colonies; and several proposed calendar reforms offer 13 months, each containing a Friday the 13th. Some amusing lists enliven the presentation.
Fast-moving and entertaining.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2004
ISBN: 1-56858-306-0
Page Count: 238
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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