Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
Shall We Dance?
By William H. McNeill
Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Henry Holt, 304 pp., $26.00
Barbara Ehrenreich defines her 'mission' in writing this book as being 'to speak seriously of the largely ignored and perhaps incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and exaltation.... The focus here is on the kinds of events witnessed by Europeans in 'primitive' societies and recalled in the European carnival tradition.' Writing a history of something 'perhaps incommunicable' presents obvious difficulties since participants seldom or never wrote about their joy, much less its extreme manifestation in ecstasy.
Review, 4568 words
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