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jeff88subplot 's review for:
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell
This is not a long book, but it is a thick one. It ranges from being extremely fascinating and full of wonder to academic and hard to follow. The book was written in the 40s when Freud was still all the rage, but taken now, some of the psychoanalysis feels as some of the stories. Because sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar and a hero facing a dragon is just drama.
One cannot help but wonder how selective Campbell can also be when choosing his stories to make his points. There’s time when he points to similarities between a myth and a contemporary (at least for that time) person’s dream without explaining the connection. Leaving me wonder if I missed something.
Overall, however, Campbell is charming and his enthusiasm for stories and cultures just leap off the page. It’s hard not to get caught up in much of it, but it can get hard to slog through some of the more dense sections. One thing for sure, one cannot walk away from this book thinking about how the monomyth ties into all the stories we consume today and how someone might look at all of our story telling a thousand years from now.
One cannot help but wonder how selective Campbell can also be when choosing his stories to make his points. There’s time when he points to similarities between a myth and a contemporary (at least for that time) person’s dream without explaining the connection. Leaving me wonder if I missed something.
Overall, however, Campbell is charming and his enthusiasm for stories and cultures just leap off the page. It’s hard not to get caught up in much of it, but it can get hard to slog through some of the more dense sections. One thing for sure, one cannot walk away from this book thinking about how the monomyth ties into all the stories we consume today and how someone might look at all of our story telling a thousand years from now.