Here, Tiger (Anthropology/Rutgers; The Manufacture of Evil, 1987, etc.) offers observations on our seeking of pleasure and its prehistoric roots. ``Pleasure matters,'' Tiger asserts. ``The subject is hot.'' Aiming to catch the drift of the 90's, he contends that ``pleasure is an evolutionary entitlement.'' Food, sex, drugs, power, and, more interestingly, bearing children ``are as much related to our history as a species and products of it as they are products of our invention,'' he convincingly argues. The taste for sugar, for instance, was critical to primitive gatherers in sorting out what and what not to eat. But today the craving for sweets has outlived its function, and the pleasure derived from refined sugar carries a price. On the other hand, Tiger explains, power gives humans and primates chemically measurable physiological ``benefits.'' The author advocates ``a balance sheet of fun as well as an agenda of function,'' and claims that generally governmental ``censors are in fact violating a law of nature.'' Yet, he's against legalizing drugs because ``the human central pleasure system is too avid, too frail.'' Tiger's attempt to speak to a broad audience means that what information he provides comes in the form of cutely titled (``That Old Gang Rape of Mine,'' ``Ear, Ear''), rambling passages. Moreover, his countless personal references offer little more than a series of dropped names (Avignon, Bordeaux, and Siena as ``midsize ambitious dining towns''). Nor does the slapdash writing style help (``The bounteous body seems more desirable to men, and not only in industrial societies, either''). Certainly, Tiger's stated ambition ``to assert and establish the moral, scientific, and political authority of pleasure'' proves far too broad and too complex. Pleasure? Look elsewhere for thoughts grounded in the ice-cold wake of a decade during which there seemed no shortage of those pursuing their ``entitlement'' of pleasure.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-84543-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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