“If someone who had just heard Lévi-Strauss’s name for the first time asked me to explain . . . what he was all about, I would pick up Myth and Meaning and start reading it out loud . . . Only here does one have a lucid, candid, personal exposition of the major ideas that have driven him all his life.”
—from the Foreword by Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago
“There is no easier or quicker way than through this book into that heart of darkness Lévi-Strauss calls the ‘totalitarian ambition of the savage mind’ as it throbs beneath the surface of the ‘civilized’ mind.”
—Philip Rieff, Professor of Psychiatry, Medical College of Pennsylvania
“‘If in the end you cannot tell everyone what you have been up to, your life’s work has been in vain,’ Edwin Schrödenger told us. In this eloquently slim volume, Lévi-Strauss delivers on Schrödinger’s implied request exquisitely. If every major thinker could summarize his or her conclusions this clearly, the fragmentation that threatens to reduce understanding to incoherence would be tempered considerably.”
—Huston Smith, University, Berkeley, and author of Forgotten Truth and Beyond the Post-Modern Mind
