A serious look at communal celebrations, well documented and presented with assurance and flair.
In what may be seen as a companion piece to her Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), social commentator Ehrenreich takes a long view of the human impulse to “seek ecstatic merger with the group,” an act that takes the form of dancing, feasting and artistic embellishment of the face and body.
Going back to the prehistory of our species, she speculates about the possible value of rhythmic dance and music in holding early human groups together, in boosting a group’s effectiveness against large prey. From there, she moves to what is known about ritual dancing in ancient China, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Ehrenreich compares the followers of Dionysus, whose worship involved frenzied dancing, with early Christians, who worshiped with singing, leaping and prophesying in tongues. But as early Christian communities became institutionalized, she reports, such enthusiastic behaviors were censured by ecclesiastic authorities, and by the 12th and 13th centuries, dancing was restricted to Church holidays and not permitted inside churches. Ehrenreich traces the status of traditional festivities through the 16th to 19th centuries, when they were increasingly being seen by the upper classes as wasteful of human labor. Calvin’s form of Protestantism condemned all forms of festive behavior, and among Muslims, the Wahhabi movement launched reforms condemning ecstatic forms of worship such as singing and dancing. Meanwhile, colonizing Europeans, encountering exuberant rituals among native peoples around the world, categorized them as superstitious, savage and repugnant. Analyzing the mass staged spectacles of the French Revolution and those of Nazi Germany, she sees the role of people reduced to mere audience. However, in rock-’n’-roll, she finds a rebellion against that reduced role, and in recent decades she sees a convergence of rock and major league sports, with fans becoming exhibitionists and participants, dressing up, painting their faces and dancing in the stands. The capacity for collective joy, she concludes, is encoded in our genes, and to suppress it is to risk “the solitary nightmare of depression.”
A serious look at communal celebrations, well documented and presented with assurance and flair.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-5723-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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