Simon is an erudite, insightful guide to a story that spans centuries but still speaks to our times.
Devilish deals always end badly, but people continue to make them, according to this wide-ranging study of the Faust legend.
Most readers are familiar with the story of Faust, the scholar who makes a pact with the devil, trading his soul for knowledge, power, and riches. Simon, an essayist and editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine, believes that many people don’t fully understand the story’s depth and complexity, and this extensive cultural history goes a long way to prove his point. While the first appearance of Faust as a character was in 1592, in a play by Christopher Marlowe, the idea goes back much further, and Simon tracks through the antecedents, including the temptation of Christ. Goethe’s version, the first part of which was published in 1808, was enormously influential, sparking many other tales that picked up the theme. Thomas Mann reinvigorated the story as a novel in 1947, using the concept of a satanic pact to try to explain why the German people followed Hitler. In Roman Polanski’s 1968 movie, Rosemary’s Baby, a struggling actor offers his wife to be the bearer of the devil’s child in return for fame. Simon argues that the Faust legend draws its modern resonance from the idea of the contract—not just as a legal agreement, but as a moral choice. In the closing section of the book, the author suggests that some of the problems of the contemporary world, from screen addiction to climate change, represent Faust-style bargains. In this section, the logic is unclear, and there is a sense that Simon might be stretching the metaphor too far. Nonetheless, the book is an undeniably fascinating read, as the author weaves literary and intellectual strands into a colorful tapestry.
Simon is an erudite, insightful guide to a story that spans centuries but still speaks to our times.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781685891046
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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