For students of Greek drama, a revelatory contemplation of the theater’s enduring power.
A philosopher examines ancient drama for insights into morality, power, and freedom.
In an erudite reconsideration of Greek tragedy, philosopher Critchley (Philosophy/New School for Social Research; What We Think About When We Think About Soccer, 2017, etc.) asserts that the ancient Greek past offers “a way of questioning and destabilizing the present.” Each generation, he writes, has the responsibility of reinventing classical works in order to rescue whatever “will speak to the present and arrest us momentarily from the irresistible pull of the future.” In 61 brief chapters, each an inquiry, commentary, or meditation, Critchley offers close readings that assume readers’ familiarity with many of the 31 extant tragedies by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus; iconic playwrights such as Shakespeare, Beckett, and Brecht; philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle; and critical works on tragedy by philosophers, theorists, and literary scholars from German idealists and romantics to contemporary writers such as Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, and Anne Carson. Tragedy, Critchley writes, “poses a most serious threat to that invention we call philosophy” because it presents a “conflictually constituted world defined by ambiguity, duplicity, uncertainty, and unknowability.” In tragedy, humans must respond “to demands that exceed autonomy, that flow from the past, disrupt the present, and disable the future.” Gods stand as “the placeholder for a force or forces that exceed yet determine and can indeed destroy human agency. The gods are names for powers not under our control.” Among many unresolved questions about the impact of tragedy on viewers, the author asks about “the inversion of gender roles” in plays centered on the actions of intelligent, courageous women. In rigidly patriarchal Greek society, young men played these roles, and it is not known if women were among audience members. Male viewers, then, were confronted with displays of women’s power as well as overwhelming grief. Were such plays “lifelike,” Critchley wonders, “…or is something more subversive, troubling, and insurrectionary taking place in drama?”
For students of Greek drama, a revelatory contemplation of the theater’s enduring power.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4794-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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