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Dancing In The Streets
A History Of Collective Joy
by Barbara Ehrenreich
The author best known for her books about the modern workplace in all its forms tackles a much happier subject--literally--in her latest nonfiction work.
Metropolitan, 336 pages
01/09/2007
$26.00
ISBN: 0805057234
Nonfiction
History
Social Sciences
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Publishers Weekly
Ehrenreich writes with grace and clarity in a fascinating, wide-ranging and generous account. [6 Nov 2006, p.48]
Kirkus Reviews
A serious look at communal celebrations, well documented and presented with assurance and flair. [15 Oct 2006, p.1054]
Daily Telegraph Lynsey Hanley
Once reconciled to the counter-intuitive nature of spending hours alone reading a book that suggests you'd be better off dancing instead, time will fly and you'll end it convinced that you've been in happy, wine-fuelled conversation with the author herself.
The Guardian Simon Callow
Her lightness of touch is commendable, because the story she has to tell is in many ways a dismaying one.
The Independent Pat Kane
A genuine triumph of popular critical scholarship, in which the human tradition of collective celebration - from the survival tactics of hunter-gatherers, to the Burning Man festival in Nevada - is given its rightful due.
The Nation Terry Eagleton
An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of collective joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead...It's not just a history of festivity, one that packs a remarkable amount into its relatively slim compass, but a timely political meditation.
Entertainment Weekly Tina Jordan
Though less accessible than "Nickel and Dimed," this scholarly work is a terrific counterpart to Blood Rites, her cultural history of war.
Salon Stephen Amidon
Lively and compelling...The author's inability to envision future forms of collective joy makes Dancing in the Streets a lively, intelligent elegy for lost happiness, rather than a prescription for a way back into the woods.
San Francisco Chronicle Austin Considine
To have analyzed, condensed and astutely presented 10,000 years or more of history on so vague and elusive a topic as collective human joy -- and to have done it so cogently, with 20 pages of works cited -- is nothing short of intellectual heroism...But to have done so in fewer than 300 pages necessarily feels a bit weak at times -- painstakingly researched, but perhaps a bit hasty.
Los Angeles Times Mark Coleman
Though her latest book presents a solid and provocative academic overview of its subject, too much of the current-day material reads like library research. Dancing in the Streets might have achieved transcendence if the author had been a face in the crowd.
Boston Globe Dan Cryer
Dancing in the Streets is ambitious yet frustrating, fascinating yet quirky, thought-provoking yet irritating. You can have fun arguing with it on every page.
Washington Post Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Dancing in the Streets has plenty of substance, and it's unfair to criticize a book for something it doesn't include. But if dance is a primal activity, and if we get primal benefits from it, the failure to acknowledge its primal components detracts from what is otherwise an impressive work.
Chicago Tribune Beth Kephart
The language is pedantic, the concerns are scholarly, and the subject matter, which turns out to be more about the rise of anomie and melancholy than the release of joy, is often somewhat grim.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Chris Scott
The problem with such single-point explanations of human actions, explanations that are supposed to provide a skeleton key for history's many rooms, is that they are not context-specific.
The New York Times Robert Pinsky
This pop anthropology lacks fizz. There's a yearning, wistful gap between Ehrenreich's celebration of inebriated dance and her term-paper prose. In that yearning, she disregards the double, ambiguous nature of Dionysus, the deity she calls ''the first rock star.'' Possibly, her writing indicates a flinching, less than complete apprehension of that shape-shifting Lord of Misrule.
Wall Street Journal
Ehrenreich is less of a scholar than a journalist who writes well-researched essays. Her writing is clear, but for a book on joy, it lacks a sense of personal joy...It could use more people and less about groups of people, more firsthand reporting and less secondhand sociology.
 The average user rating for this book is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
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