Fabulous erudition marks this intricate study of the classic tales of wonder. Novelist and scholar Warner (Indigo, 1992; Monuments and Maidens, 1985; etc.) avows her sympathy for the fairy tales and tale-tellers on whom she focuses her keen feminist lens. Warner begins by arguing for the centrality to European fairy-tale culture, since ancient times, of old women, both as the oral historians who have passed it on and as key characters in its iconography. Reviled by some, the crones whom Warner spotlights nevertheless appear in formidable guises. Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, turns out to be the patron saint of gossips; her attributes survive in fairy tale figures (e.g., fairy godmothers). In a tour de force of scholarly speculation, Warner links the Queen of Sheba, whose riddles were the stuff of legend and who was known for her singular deformity of a webbed foot, to Mother Goose herself. Thus reweaving our understanding of the cultural unconscious, Warner draws on psychoanalysis, on philology, and on a trenchant feminism. While some connections seem stretched, for the most part these threads blend smoothly. The second part of Warner's book analyzes the tales themselves. ``Bluebeard,'' ``Beauty and the Beast,'' and ``Donkeyskin,'' a little-discussed tale of a girl's escape from incest, are the central exhibits. Occasionally Warner lapses into self-indulgence, as in a reverie on the blue of Bluebeard's beard (``the marvellous . . . rare steak . . . melancholy . . . orgone energy''). But her genuine originality shows in her ability to wring fresh psychoanalytic insight out of texts that have been in intensive analysis for decades. The discussion of feet developed in passages on the Queen of Sheba, for example, casts new light on Cinderella's glass slipper; the golden hair and archetypal beasts named in the title are illuminated in similarly provocative ways. One factor contributing to this originality is Warner's astute readings of artworks throughout this sumptuously illustrated book. Marvelously energetic cultural criticism.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-15901-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
A valuable portrait of a society moving toward fulfilling “the promises of freedom and democracy” of the Arab Spring—but...
Former New York Times Cairo bureau chief Kirkpatrick delivers a sharply detailed firsthand look at Tahrir Square and its aftershocks.
As an opening parable in this morally charged chronicle of practical politics and the consequences of unaccountable centralized power, the author offers the example of the great Aswan Dam, built in the 1950s by President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt for electricity, with many millions of American dollars behind it. The dam displaced 120,000 people, killed fish, silted the Nile, and led to “an explosion in waterborne diseases.” Yet Nasser’s government and the Western powers alike declared the dam a victory. So it was in 2011, when Egypt shook off one near dictatorship and replaced it with another only to have a military coup replace that strongman and further crack down on dissent. Such victory as there is to declare is hard to discern. Egypt is poor, overpopulated, and riddled with a corrupt bureaucracy, but apart from that, Kirkpatrick writes, it defies the usual characterizations. Israel and Egypt have cooperated, against all expectation, in fighting the Islamic State group; Egyptian women are perhaps more politically engaged than American women; Islamists willing to commit terror are in it for more than the promise of a harem in the afterlife; and so on. Pushing away layers of myth, the author depicts a complex, straining-to-be-modern society that is hampered by autocracy and has long been so. It has also been betrayed and seduced by it, as when Mohamed Morsi talked a game good enough that, by defying the generals, for liberals and leftists, he briefly “appeared to be, as he had promised, their president, too.” He was not, but it seems he was better than the military alternative—a lesson lost on the American government, Kirkpatrick writes, which pushed for democracy on one hand but for order on the other and in the end got neither.
A valuable portrait of a society moving toward fulfilling “the promises of freedom and democracy” of the Arab Spring—but with a way to go still.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2062-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
An unabashedly honest ethnography that faces head-on the challenge of representing the ``other'' in the social sciences' ``post-postmodernist'' climate of uncertainty. As the founder of ``symbolic'' anthropology, which he refers to as the ``anthropology of meaning,'' Geertz (Social Sciences/Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) has already made an impressive contribution to the field. This book—a series of reflections on his fieldwork over a period of some 40 years in two locations: Pare, Indonesia, and Sefrou, Morocco—vibrantly demonstrates that ethnography which recognizes the internal complexities and conflicts of anthropology can still be a viable and worthwhile enterprise. Geertz admits from the beginning that the reason for weaving his narrative between these two cultures is that this was the manner in which he came to ``find his feet'' in them; it is his own life, rather than any natural contrast between the two cultures, that gives form to the narrative. The task Geertz sets himself is nearly impossible: Not only have the two towns changed in virtually infinite ways, but Geertz himself and the discipline of anthropology have also undergone enormous transformations; in addition, local history and politics are nested within regional and international ones. Geertz accepts the challenge of describing this metamorphosis in all of its complexity without resorting to graphs, statistics, and models of patriarchal lineages. The ethnography that emerges is part history, part anecdote, part personal narrative, and part theory. The author likens the process to ``Richard Wilbur's Tom Swift, putting dirigibles together, in the quiet weather, out in the backyard.'' Whether he is describing Morocco, Indonesia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, or Princeton, Geertz respects the difficulty of relating a past that remains elusive despite exhaustive field notes. Ironically, this lends his voice a kind of ``ethnographic authority'' that he would probably wish to avoid. At times unwieldy, cumbersome, self-absorbed, detached, and graceless—in short, quite brilliant.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-674-00871-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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