Word: guinness
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...father A.L. Kroeber was a renowned anthropologist, and her mother Theodora wrote nonfiction, principally on the American Indian. Those who do not know these facts about Ursula K. Le Guin could probably deduce them from her 23rd book. Always Coming Home can be read as a novel, but it is really something else: a scientific-looking compendium of information about a people who might exist in the distant future. They are called the Kesh, a gentle tribe living in the nine towns of the valley of the river Na, somewhere in Northern California. Le Guin's fieldwork into their rites...
...multimedia book sounds like a terrible idea. If a cassette has to do the work that properly belongs to words on the page, then everyone involved should forget the whole thing. Fortunately, Le Guin's language is thoroughly up to the task she sets herself, which is an encyclopedic history of an imagined world. The sounds are only special effects...
...most important element in Always Coming Home is the autobiographical narrative of a woman called Stone Telling. Although her story takes up roughly one-fifth of the book, it provides an accessible focus for the bigger picture that Le Guin wishes to convey. Stone Telling looks back on her childhood, when she was called North Owl (Kesh people change their names whenever it seems appropriate to do so). She lives with her mother and grandmother in a matrilineal society whose rituals harmonize with nature and the passing seasons. She studies the habits of animals and learns the Kesh song...
Prophetic literature is intrinsically political, since it is either a reaction against or an extension of known conditions of life. And Le Guin, who has moved gradually from straight science fiction toward visionary narrative, makes no secret of her polemical intentions. The Condor people manifest all the darker impulses of contemporary superpower states. The Kesh are what humans could become if they would stop trying to impose their wills and designs on the earth. The enormous swatches of pseudoanthropological material in Always Coming Home amount to a blueprint for an allegedly better world...
...fault Le Guin for a lack of ambition. But her book erects several serious hurdles. Readers are likely to respond to its argument along partisan lines. Those who believe that man began stumbling toward destruction when he stopped being a noble savage will find their fondest dreams fulfilled. Watch for a Kesh cult to spring up on college campuses. Others, who think primitive societies formed a nasty, brutish and short phase in the evolution toward civility, will be unmoved by the serene monotony of Kesh life...