A compelling catalog of Tricksters and a convincing analysis of their power.
An activist scholar explores the value of the Trickster archetype to contemporary society.
The Warrior archetype, writes author Siegel, has a firm grip on 21st-century American politics and culture, as reflected in a collective “infatuation with toxic masculinity.” From the popularity of the NFL to the “faux heroism” of QAnon conspiracy theorists, many Americans live “for the fight,” eschewing democratic virtues, believing “there is no loyal opposition, only enemies.” What America needs, this book argues, is more “Trickster energy” that laughs at the “carnival of errors known as society.” Not only do Trickster archetypes have no time for vengeance or violence in their pursuit of fun, but they often expose the dirty underbelly of society and the true motives of the powerful. Films made by the Marx Brothers, for instance, use slapstick humor as a vehicle for biting social critiques of elites and self-styled authorities. Folk stories crafted by enslaved Africans in the Americas used the West African Trickster god called Eshù Elégba to flip the narrative script about power dynamics between enslavers and the oppressed; they also highlighted the ways female Tricksters utilized clever chicanery to stave off “oppressive husbands, kings, and lovers.” Drawing on a diverse range of literature and films, this book begins with a thoughtful examination of shared attributes of Tricksters across genres, time periods, and cultures, from the Native American coyote and Zulu weasel to “The Fool” in King Lear and Bugs Bunny in Looney Tunes. Most, for example, are loners who have an ambivalence toward black-and-white morality (“they just want to have fun”). And while they revel in scatological humor, they’re powerful figures who use deception to undermine authorities. Connecting literary tropes to contemporary life, Siegel makes an effective case for the practical value of Tricksters. Sacha Baron Cohen’s menagerie of characters (who include Ali G., Borat, and Brüno) not only have provided global audiences with laughs, but also highlight latent biases in American culture. Borat, for example, convinced a bar-full of Arizonans to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” and Brüno nearly started a homophobic riot in Arkansas by kissing a man in a cage fight.
An activist scholar immersed in the Bay Area’s bohemian counterculture, Siegel shows a playful writing style, replete with puns and inside jokes, that mimics the Trickster archetype in using humor against the dark, powerful forces that drive contemporary politics and society. With a doctorate from UC Berkeley, Siegel is a skilled researcher who supports his argument with 250-plus endnotes that reflect his interdisciplinary approach to Tricksters, which combines history, sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism. Though the book’s firm command of the scholarly literature surrounding Tricksters will appeal to academics, its approachable, often jovial, writing style will also appeal to a wide audience. This emphasis on accessibility is reflected in the book’s ample references to popular TV shows and movies as well as its inclusion of dozens of photographs, posters, film stills, and other visual aids. And while the book’s politics are decisively leftist, which may alienate conservatives who by definition seek to preserve traditional institutions of power and authority, this is inevitable in a work that celebrates Tricksters who are notoriously “antistructure.”
A compelling catalog of Tricksters and a convincing analysis of their power.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1631957307
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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