Second-rate (but nicely illustrated) anthropological musings on humanity's tribal ways; by Morris, best-selling author of The Naked Ape and Bodywatching, and Marsh, editor of Eye to Eye (p. 1144). The authors' primary thesis—that "man is a tribal animal"—isn't new, and many of the examples promoting that thesis here will be familiar to most readers. Moreover, the authors disagree on the roots of tribalism—Morris contends that the hunting of small game by monkeys marked the origins of the "active cooperation" that forms the glue of tribalism; contrarily, Marsh states that primates did not eat flesh and that such cooperation began with hominids. Greater consistency, if not greater insight, graces the main body of the text, presumably written by both authors, a cross-cultural survey of tribalism as it manifests in bonding patterns (territories, religions, etc.), rites of passage (circumcision, lodge rites, etc.), emblems of allegiance (clothing, tattooing, etc.), sex and courtship (weddings, polygamy, etc.), and sport and spectacle (soccer, Trobriand cricket, etc.). Most of this material, while lightly intriguing, suffers from anthropological reductionism (e.g., the definition of myths as merely "stories which have no basis in troth or reality but which provide a rationale for religious beliefs and practices"), and also a British coloration—many examples of modern-day tribalism (financiers in "the City"; swells at Derby Day; Rowdies) are drawn from aspects of British life perhaps unfamiliar to American readers. Only in the final section, on "Aggression and War," do the authors make a truly provocative point: that much contemporary violence stems from our civilization's discouragement of tribal urges. The 100 photographs, 80 in color and many startling (full-body tattoos, scarred Africans, etc.), illustrate the text with punch; overall, though, this is just a well-packaged exercise in the obvious.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0879053364
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1988
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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SEEN & HEARD
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