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A review by jwsg
The Hero: The Enduring Myth That Makes Us Human by Lee Child
2.0
In The Hero, Lee Child explores how this concept of "the hero" came about in.
In terms of pluses, The Hero is a short read. You learn interesting facts on the origins of words. Like how German chemist Felix Hoffman was trying to synthesise codeine but instead created a drug that was twice as strong as morphine and contrary to what Hoffman claimed, exceedingly addictive. He named this drug heroine. Or how 'barbarian' is a Greek word meaning a savage, in the sense that they could not speak Greek. "To the Greeks, all such people could manage was baa-baa-baa, like sheep. Hence barbarian". Or how 'lapis' means stone in Latin. Hence a dilapidated building is one from which stones have been removed or taken out. By definition, a wooden house or a brick house cannot be dilapidated as "they were never lapidated to begin with".
In terms of minuses, notwithstanding this being a short book, it feels like Child does an awful lot of padding. A quarter of the way through the book, Child has told us about the discovery of heroine (after telling us about morphine, opium and poppies), barbarians, dilapidated buildings, his daughter Ruth being a brilliant linguist and the discovery of the remains of Lucy, an ancient species that predated homo sapiens. But there's no sense how any of this relates to The Hero, really.
Basically, Child just wants to tell us: a long, long time ago, humans gained the ability to communicate via language. All that stuff about Lucy is a very long set up for his conceit of using generations of women to convey how far back something had happened. So instead of saying x hundred years ago or x thousand years ago, Child says "about 10,000 women ago". So 10,000 women ago, people started using language. The previous 390,000 women before that could not.
Anyway, so people started using language. At some point - people started telling stories. Initially, stories may have served just to meet the needs of the storyteller and the listener. But the shift towards agrarian communities (vs nomadic hunter-gatherers) led to stories being used by the elite as tools for manipulation and persuasion. So we start to see a schism between how the term "hero" is used by the establishment for political purposes (e.g. equating soldiers with heroes to pre-empt and cut off any debate on the military) vs popular use, where it refers to the main character in a popular book.
The padding is made even more painful by how speculatively Child writes. "Perhaps she…", "I suppose they", "no doubt", "probably….probably….probably", "there may have been", "must have". I suppose Child was attempting to write a work of non-fiction and makes statements of fact where these can be borne out by archeological evidence. But for everything else, when people used language, how they used language, when people started telling stories - Child can only speculate. Fair enough but it's awkward to read.
In terms of pluses, The Hero is a short read. You learn interesting facts on the origins of words. Like how German chemist Felix Hoffman was trying to synthesise codeine but instead created a drug that was twice as strong as morphine and contrary to what Hoffman claimed, exceedingly addictive. He named this drug heroine. Or how 'barbarian' is a Greek word meaning a savage, in the sense that they could not speak Greek. "To the Greeks, all such people could manage was baa-baa-baa, like sheep. Hence barbarian". Or how 'lapis' means stone in Latin. Hence a dilapidated building is one from which stones have been removed or taken out. By definition, a wooden house or a brick house cannot be dilapidated as "they were never lapidated to begin with".
In terms of minuses, notwithstanding this being a short book, it feels like Child does an awful lot of padding. A quarter of the way through the book, Child has told us about the discovery of heroine (after telling us about morphine, opium and poppies), barbarians, dilapidated buildings, his daughter Ruth being a brilliant linguist and the discovery of the remains of Lucy, an ancient species that predated homo sapiens. But there's no sense how any of this relates to The Hero, really.
Basically, Child just wants to tell us: a long, long time ago, humans gained the ability to communicate via language. All that stuff about Lucy is a very long set up for his conceit of using generations of women to convey how far back something had happened. So instead of saying x hundred years ago or x thousand years ago, Child says "about 10,000 women ago". So 10,000 women ago, people started using language. The previous 390,000 women before that could not.
Anyway, so people started using language. At some point - people started telling stories. Initially, stories may have served just to meet the needs of the storyteller and the listener. But the shift towards agrarian communities (vs nomadic hunter-gatherers) led to stories being used by the elite as tools for manipulation and persuasion. So we start to see a schism between how the term "hero" is used by the establishment for political purposes (e.g. equating soldiers with heroes to pre-empt and cut off any debate on the military) vs popular use, where it refers to the main character in a popular book.
The padding is made even more painful by how speculatively Child writes. "Perhaps she…", "I suppose they", "no doubt", "probably….probably….probably", "there may have been", "must have". I suppose Child was attempting to write a work of non-fiction and makes statements of fact where these can be borne out by archeological evidence. But for everything else, when people used language, how they used language, when people started telling stories - Child can only speculate. Fair enough but it's awkward to read.