Trickster Makes This World: Michief, Myth and Art
by Lewis Hyde
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Trickster was published in 1998, and I finally came across it a year later. It has been reviewed in many book reviews and such literary lights as Margaret Atwood. Pretty much raves all around, so I'll try not to say what has already been said.
It is scholarly, erudite, and great storytelling besides. Hyde weaves the threads together very well: illuminating and revealing, and ultimately making the point that cultural change and indeed, cultural genesis, are brought about by the slippery ones, those capable of shifting things around and changing the world.
There wasn't a chapter in which I would be reading along, then suddenly be pulled into a paragraph that tied several trains of thought together into one of those "ah-ha" illuminations of something. Usually that happened several times.
If you have any interest in Trickster at all, get it, read it! If you have any interest in the way cultures define their world views and incorporate change into those views, get it, read it. As a matter of fact, just read it, ok?
Click on over to Amazon.com to read more reviews and if you want, buy the book.