When Margaret Mead left for Samoa in 1925, she had never been abroad, never spoken a foreign language, never spent a day alone. These letters were intended to acquaint a close circle of family and friends with the nature of her work—arranging housing, accumulating children's drawings, tending the sick, negotiating for simple translations and access to rituals. In Samoa she finds the food starchy, the expectation of regular speeches exhausting. En route to Manus, she marvels at the wonders of Pidgin; once there, she contends with "crazy circumlocutions," avid native traders, and an informant "who is five feet six of sulky uselessness most of the time." In New Guinea, Mead and Reo Fortune use salt as currency and master 24 third-person pronouns. Bali has dancing, cockfights, and seven-hour cremations. By the Fifties, her audience enlarged by professional associations and the miracle of photocopiers, the letters are somewhat more formal but equally fluent; altogether, they document the evolution of an attitude and the refinement of techniques that now support anthropology. For even as she records the particulars, she fixes on the larger scene—the delicate relationship between fieldworker and subject. And many years later, returning with videotape instead of notebook to observe willing changeovers to 20th-century lifestyles, she meets past informants, reflects on transitions, and urges this graceful recognition: "when one works in a culture in which the people become literate, one's own work becomes part of their sense of their own history." Written in the unencumbered style of Blackberry Winter, with the same regard for paradox and continuities, her letters furnish a vivid, uncensored overview of emerging sensitivities and the shaping of a discipline.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1977
ISBN: 0060958049
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1977
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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