Blood Rites: Origins & History of the Passions of War
BARBARA EHRENREICH
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36 reviews (1997) (256p)Visit this book's Amazon.com page >>
| Book Description |
| The author of Fear of Falling traces the evolution of human warfare from an elite religion of a privileged caste reenacting the experience of predation to a rite of mass worship that we know today as nationalism. 30,000 first printing. Tour. |
| Amazon.com Review |
| In this ambitious work, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a daring explanation for humans' propensity to wage war. Rather than approach the subject from a physiological perspective, pinpointing instinct or innate aggressiveness as the violent culprit, she reaches back to primitive man's fear of predators and the anxieties associated with life in the food chain. To deal with the reality of living as prey, she argues that blood rites were created to dramatize and validate the life-and-death struggle. Jumping ahead to the modern age, Ehrenreich brands nationalism a more sophisticated form of blood ritual, a phenomenon that conjures similar fears of predation, whether in the form of lost territory or the more extreme ethnic cleansing. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War may not offer a cure for human aggression, but the author does present a convincing argument for the difficulties associated with achieving peace. |
| Barbara Ehrenreich Award Stats |
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| *Major Prize = Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award |
