An alternative, humanistic view of ancient Europe that’s worthy of readers’ consideration.
In her debut anthropological treatise, Änggård describes a more peaceful, egalitarian past for Europe.
Traditionally, the people of Europe and many of its former colonies have viewed themselves as heirs to the civilization of the ancient Greeks. Democratic Athens and her allies, they assert, laid down the philosophical and artistic template from which all Western societies subsequently sprung. Änggård also thinks that Europeans are heirs to the Greeks, but she says that the Greeks had an abusive, authoritarian society whose truly lasting gifts are patriarchy, exploitation, conquest and war. She argues that a better model would have been the Stone Age societies of Old Europe, which saw women as the equals of men and didn’t build walls around their villages. With her background in theatrical costume and set design, Änggård looks to visual clues, such as cave paintings, tombs and stone figurines, as evidence of a less violent time in history. She then analyzes how the civilizations of later antiquity attempted to dispel and write off those earlier societies. The book goes on to explain how the Greek inheritance plagues modern society even today: Sexism and racism still run rampant at the beginning of the third millennium, the author says, and aggressive, violent subjugation is still a viable political tactic. Änggård asks readers to imagine an alternate history that celebrates the ancients’ peaceful tendencies instead of warlike ones. She tracks her ambitious theory across many different cultures and eras, and her interpretation of ancient myths and texts to support her ideas is quite compelling. Her notion is that the foibles of human nature haven’t condemned societies to inequality and violence, and it’s an attractive proposition. That said, her theory is difficult to prove or disprove because so much of her case is based upon inherently subjective criticism of ancient cultural objects. For readers, it will simply come down to whether they’re swayed by her arguments or not. The book’s major achievement may not be that it shows readers how much they know about the past—but rather how much they can’t know.
An alternative, humanistic view of ancient Europe that’s worthy of readers’ consideration.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496993328
Page Count: 310
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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