The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
Barnes & Noble
Nonfiction, Mythology/Psychology
****
Description
No matter how strange and diverse the world's cultures may seem, they all have, at their heart, a similar mythic core. This book outlines the characteristics of the global mythic hero, and how he/she reflects the journeys we make in our own lives.
Review
This is considered a must-read classic work on mythology, and I can certainly see that. Campbell does a remarkable job collecting and analyzing world myths from various cultures, and he comes up with many interesting facts and theories. However, as a layperson, I thought he wandered a bit too deep into academic gibberish, and there were times when I lost track of the thrust of his sentences with all the flowery (and, to my mind, unnecessary) additives. I also thought that his myth fragments, used to illustrate points, sometimes got in the way more than they helped, and there were a few illustrations whose significance to the text was never explained. On the whole, this book provided excellent food for thought, and I can see why it's so often recommended to writers.