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terezi's review against another edition
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Beautifully written and extraordinarily relevant. Intricate tapestries of essays… i loved it
tsoutham's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.0
I would have given this book a very low rating as I have been trying to finish it for weeks now as the end seemed repetitive and labyrinthine (a word that Griffin herself uses in the book). The very last section I could not even comprehend. But then I went back and reread the sections I had marked. The reflections on masculinity, rape, spirituality, worldviews of African people all had kept me engaged in the beginning. I found myself recommitted to the book.
Still I have my doubts. As a woman does Griffin really know why men carry out the atrocities of war, the even larger atrocity of the holocaust. Can she fairly compare that to her own rage as a child? She proposes that these atrocities of men are fueled by injustices suffered in childhood. I'm not convinced and to be fair she does say the origins of atrocities are complex:
Still I have my doubts. As a woman does Griffin really know why men carry out the atrocities of war, the even larger atrocity of the holocaust. Can she fairly compare that to her own rage as a child? She proposes that these atrocities of men are fueled by injustices suffered in childhood. I'm not convinced and to be fair she does say the origins of atrocities are complex:
Griffin speaks of a psychotherapist who in her work traces the origins of the violence committed by Germans in the holocaust to childhood. She was haunted by the question what could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death? Griffin says “Of course there cannot be one answer to such a monumental Riddle, nor does any event in history have a single cause. Rather a field exists, like a field of gravity that is created by the movements of many bodies. Each life is influenced and it in turn becomes an influence. Whatever is a cause is also an effect. Childhood experience is just one element in the determining field.
As a man who made history, Heinrich Himmler shaped many childhoods, including, in the most subtle of ways, my own. And an earlier history, a history of governments, of wars, of social customs, an idea of gender, the history of a religion leading to the idea of original sin, shaped Heinrich Himmler’s childhood as certainly as any philosophy of child raising. One can take for instance any formative condition of his private life, the fact that he was a frail child, for example, favored by his mother, who could not meet masculine standards, and show that this circumstance derived its real meaning from a larger social system that gave inordinate significance to masculinity.
Yet to enter history through childhood experience shifts one's perspective not away from history but instead to an earlier time just before history has finally shaped us. Is there a child who existed before the conventional history that we tell of ourselves, one who, though invisible to us, still shapes events, even through this absence? How does our sense of history change when we consider childhood, and perhaps more important, why is it that until now we've chosen to ignore this point of origination, the birthplace and womb of ourselves, in our consideration of public events?” pp 120-121
I will read more of Griffin. I have The Eros of the Everyday on order. But I will know I'm up for a challenge and I won't take on this labyrinthine woman as too brilliant to comprehend. It takes two to communicate.
I will read more of Griffin. I have The Eros of the Everyday on order. But I will know I'm up for a challenge and I won't take on this labyrinthine woman as too brilliant to comprehend. It takes two to communicate.
nickoftheparty's review against another edition
5.0
This book is so hard to describe. I've tried to explain it to friends over the course of reading it, with limited success. But I'll try again here.
A Chorus of Stones is about how our private lives are seamlessly connected with public happenings. How a secret imposed by a nation — about how a nuclear bomb is built or a people commits genocide — ripples outward, stifling the lives of individuals far from the event. And how, in turn, the shame that we impose on an individual — for their homosexuality, their femininity — can have society-wide effects. It's about trauma and gender, grace and horror, war and the stories we tell ourselves and our children.
That's not super pithy (or honestly even that useful, I'm sure). And it fails to capture what reading A Chorus of Stones is like. Griffin writes in fragments, separate chunks weaving together seven or eight narratives at once, drawing out the interconnected themes between her family history, Nazi Germany, the introduction of planes into warfare, cell biology, and more. It has the effect of beautifully arguing Griffin's central thesis without any of the classic indicia of argument. You leave the book not with a bullet pointed list of takeaways (obviously, if my useless description above is any indication) but with a deeper sense of humanity.
This book is like nothing else.
A Chorus of Stones is about how our private lives are seamlessly connected with public happenings. How a secret imposed by a nation — about how a nuclear bomb is built or a people commits genocide — ripples outward, stifling the lives of individuals far from the event. And how, in turn, the shame that we impose on an individual — for their homosexuality, their femininity — can have society-wide effects. It's about trauma and gender, grace and horror, war and the stories we tell ourselves and our children.
That's not super pithy (or honestly even that useful, I'm sure). And it fails to capture what reading A Chorus of Stones is like. Griffin writes in fragments, separate chunks weaving together seven or eight narratives at once, drawing out the interconnected themes between her family history, Nazi Germany, the introduction of planes into warfare, cell biology, and more. It has the effect of beautifully arguing Griffin's central thesis without any of the classic indicia of argument. You leave the book not with a bullet pointed list of takeaways (obviously, if my useless description above is any indication) but with a deeper sense of humanity.
This book is like nothing else.
tumblehawk's review against another edition
4.0
Been picking at this beautiful, hard-to-define work the last few weeks. It’s a sort of quilt, woven of personal narrative exhuming the violence (both quiet and loud) in a family history, threaded through stories of war and the years between wars, tales of the development of military technology such as the nuclear bomb, artists creating through wartime…if I had to compare this book to anything I’d say it’s like an Adam Curtis documentary, though it predates those; I wonder if he drew on this book for inspiration? Anywho, it’s a powerful call to life and against war, and it felt very timely indeed to read it now.
raehink's review
4.0
This is a fragmented, yet intriguing, attempt to connect nuclear warfare, child abuse, feminism, and Nazi cruelty by examining their roots and causes. I enjoyed this book.
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