A capacious overview of an enduring human value.
The acclaimed literary scholar considers the shifting significance of the term "character."
Garber, a Harvard professor of English and visual and environmental studies, brings a wide range of sources to her erudite, illuminating study of the “complex, sometimes self-contradictory, and often elusive concept” of character, whose meaning has changed throughout history. Claiming the idea of character to be a cultural obsession involving politics, entertainment, education, psychology, neurology, art, and literature, Garber examines many questions it has generated: “How can it be perceived, measured, assessed, developed, trained, or ‘built’?” Is character “innate, learned, taught, or instilled? Are character traits fixed or changeable?” Is there such a quality as a national character? Is character synonymous with personality? Is a person’s character visible, able to be “read” by head bumps, as phrenologists believed, or analyzed by physiognomy? As the author explores such questions, she turns to sources as varied as Shakespeare (Garber is a noted Shakespeare scholar) and other playwrights, Greek philosophers, photographers and artists, education tracts, and contemporary political rhetoric. The idea that character can be trained, she asserts, was promoted by many 19th-century self-help books as well as the Scouting movement. Character building “was an invitation to personal initiative.” The popular 19th-century educational series McGuffey’s Readers, Grimm’s fairy tales, and even The Wonderful Wizard of Oz all contain moral teachings to help a child build character. Garber traces the 18th-century fad of physiognomy, which later emerged as phrenology, which asserted that qualities such as greed, wickedness, melancholy, and maliciousness could be assessed from physical traits. Rubrics of character traits have been popular for centuries: As far back as the fourth-century B.C.E., Theophrastus came up with a list of 30 character types, including The Flatterer, The Reckless Cynic, The Officious Man, The Vain Man, The Oligarch, and The Slanderer, most of which, Garber astutely notes, are recognizable today.
A capacious overview of an enduring human value. (32 pages of b/w illustrations)Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-12085-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
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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