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 enlarge | Author: Jonathan Lear
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $9.43
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 43556
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0674027469
Dewey Decimal Number: 100
EAN: 9780674027466
ASIN: 0674027469
Publication Date: April 30, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-6 of 6 | | « PREV | | |
 almost useful February 15, 2007
14 out of 21 found this review helpful
"Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation" by Jonathan Lear is the title of a book that brings together the history of the collapse of Crow Indian culture and established philosophical thoughts from works by Aristotle, Freud, and Plato. In this book, Lear has achieved a melding of philosophy and history that should be fascinating to both historians of Native American history as well as students of classical psychological philosophy. The main character appears to be Plenty Coups, who helped steer the transition of the Crows from their traditional lives to the new reality that the U.S. Government had brought forth in the 19th and 20th centuries. Plenty Coups' featured contributions, however, are not the details of U.S.-Crow negotiations but certain acts and statements that the author has deemed worthy of extrapolation. These key dreams and symbolic gestures are expanded upon by Lear with the adaptation of thoughts from Aristotle (on courage) and Freud (on dreams). For example, dreams are categorized in the following manner: no-account dreams, where one merely observes; wish dreams, where a wish is realized within the dream; property dreams, where one acquires properties, e.g. a horse, that comes true while one is awake; and medicine dreams, which "give powerful insight". Dreams experienced under a dreaming ritual are shared to the rest of the tribe, and a collective interpretation of the dream ensues. In this manner, dreams, such as the medicine dream that Plenty Coups had, were "used . . . to struggle with the intelligibility of events [e.g. loss of land to rival tribes and the U.S.] that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand."
Lear has demonstrated how classical philosophy and psychology can help us understand the tumultuous transition of a culture, yet at the same time he falls short of a masterpiece. While his title suggests a framework for having hope with an example so that the reader can become a living example of Lear's ideas, the actual text appears to not go much further beyond extrapolations of pivotal symbols. It is as if Lear is the child at the seashore that finds seashells of different sizes, but that child is not yet able to figure out that equally sized clamshells fit together on clams in the ocean; and that the clam has practical value as lunch.
Lear does make an effort to generate some practicality, but it falls short. For example, he tried to compare radical hope and optimism, yet he does it in a manner that is convoluted into the text. How are hope and optimism similar, and how are they different? If Lear is willing to rehash decades-old thoughts of Freud and Aristotle as a well-timed review for understanding Crow history, it doesn't seem to be too much more work to have a chart or a table entitled "some ways that hope and optimism are different." Such key tables would probably enlighten the reader in ways that greatly augment the organizing structure provided by Plenty Coups' key statements.
While the selling point was "how to have hope, even if you're the leader of a culture under deterioration," the actual take-home message is a referral to Freud and Aristotle. Are written works by Freud and Aristotle better than Lear's book in helping the reader understand cultural transition? That is open to debate. I had a bookstore clerk search the entire bookstore, yet there were no recently published books I had not yet read on the art of having hope at a societal level. Therefore, Lear's contribution to contemporary thought with this book is significant. He would do great good to his readership if he would only use some key tables and lists. I look forward to more works by the author on his efforts to apply abstract ideas to factual history and arrive at a framework that has practical value.
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