A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

by Susan Griffin

Book Overview

Written by one of America's most innovative and articulate feminists, this book illustrates how childhood experience, gender and sexuality, private aspirations, and public personae all assume... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038541885X
• ISBN13: 9780385418850
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

wow

all i can say about this book is that at times it was so powerful i had to put it down, i just couldn't take it

A Mind-Expanding Reinvention of War and History

So much of history is centered on warfare. And then, so much of warfare is historically rooted in a traditional perspective of leaders, politics, and other "big" events. Is there a deeper and more complex truth to all this? Now, here comes Susan Griffin, and her ideas flow freely out of the conventional boxes of interpretation. In "Chorus of Stones," she examines "small" events, and especially the internal dynamics of family relationships, and then links them to the "big" events -- like the invention of the hydrogen bomb or the decision to fire-bomb Dresden. In the process, she shows the reader how such wide-sweeping historical catastrophes like wars are inextricably connected with small, often trivialized realities whose real significance can go unnoticed, or even be repressed. If you ever thought about the old adage that "we won't understand war until we understand why couples argue with each other," then this book will fascinate you. It's a real shame that it hasn't received more attention, for it challenges so many of our notions about the separation of "personal" and "public" lives. Fascinating through and through!

follow her connections...

In this book, Griffin explores the connections between subtle violences and small denials, and horrible huge violences such as war, especially the second world war with the holocaust and the use of the atomic bomb as a weapon. One could say that this material has been covered before, but my description really does not do her work justice. The book is a highly imaginative meditation on the connections between events at different times and at different parts of the world, and between internal and external events. She traces the lives of a few historical figures including Gandhi, Himmler, and a British general, woven into the rest of the book. Also, there are some poetical descriptions of biological processes, mostly at the cellular level, and as a cell biologist, I must say that she has her facts straight, which gives me more confidence in the other parts of the book which I know less about (historical events). I feel Griffin does what an artist should do - put into words (or some form that we can understand) thoughts and feelings that are just beneath our own threshhold of consciousness.

Weaving A Personal Tapestry of War

This is an amazing book to read after reading Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August." Both books deal with the psychology of war but Susan Griffin addresses modern war on the level of the individual; telling stories of both the victims and the perpetrators of war's atrocities. Susan attempts something new in her style that is very effective on one hand but difficult for the reader on the other. She asks "Who are we?" and then answers that there are so many strands to a story and one must trace every strand. She literally takes this idea as her form and weaves the threads of several stories together on the same page. I found each "thread" fascinating but ultimately I ended up reading each separately so that I would not lose my grasp on the story. I found Chapters 1 through 5 to be fascinating. The last chapter entitled, "Notes Toward A Sketch for A Work in Progress" is just that--an abrupt departure from the main body of the book. It's what's left over in her journal that she didn't quite fit into the book but still wanted to include anyway. It's interesting but not as engaging as the first 5 chapters. The book is gloomy and yes, Susan Griffin has a depressing outlook on life, but even doomsayers can be valuable soothsayers in our society.

A consciousness-altering reading experience

I came across this book by chance - an obscure reference in a popular psychology book.Susan Griffin has captured the interconnectedness of life, war, relationships and evolution in a scope so vast, so all encompassing that it left me breathless. An amazingly successful synthesis of conveying the macrocosm by studying the microcosm. It had me scribbling down 'quotable quotes', until I soon realised that almost everything she says is profound, well thought out and corresponding to all my notions of truth. In a time when the USA is contemplating war, everyone would be well served by reading this book. Susan Griffin's work is one of startling intellectual scope written in a language that is as sparing as it is poetic. I am in awe of A Chorus of Stones and am saddened by the fact that it seems to be relatively unknown - particularly in Australia.