rajeshkan 's review for:

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde

3.0

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The Gift is a book of two parts, the first is a deep exploration of a gift as a form of sharing, as a flow across people (mostly) and the second is an illustration of artistic ability as a gift through the life and work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. The author writes of practices from different tribes about gift-giving, elaborately and effectively describing how the practice of gift-giving varies from other forms of exchange in both conception and effects. It is a good study on one aspect of human life in communities. But the author could have been more economical in writing. The second half was unreachable for me, both due to my inability to relate to poetry and the lack of connection of a lot of the material from the concepts from the first half. The section on Walt Whitman seemed to slip from portraying his concepts of gifts and bounties that abound in life to very loosely connected stories that were only mildly interesting in this context.