Re: The Goddess Unmasked (review)
Jenny
jennyg@compuserve.com
Wed Mar 17 10:44:31 1999
Treva wrote,*p*: That's one more than I would have given it. I started it, *br*: hated it, never finished it. As you said it is shallow and *br*: very bigoted. *p*Believe it or not, in many ways the beginning was the best part.  It may have been hideously bigoted, but least it dealt with the topic the book was supposed to cover.  Only the first 100 pages (1/4 of the book) have *anything* to do with feminist spirituality!  'Round about page 255, when I was wading through Davis' puerile "Ye Kindergartener's Guide to the Kabbala", I started to feel very, VERY sorry that I'd agreed to review this puppy for a magazine.  'Cuz that meant I felt obliged to read it from cover to cover...*p*Did you make it to chapter three, where Davis first mentions Maria Gimbutas?  I laughed my *tush* off...*p*Davis was talking about how "the Goddess" had entered the University.  He began with a rant about how today's scholars were vastly inferior to the Illustrious Scholars of Yester-Year.  And it was all the fault of Affirmative Action.  To cope with the Baby Boom, universities had to recruit tons of new professors, many of whom (he claims) were rank idiots -- dropouts who couldn't finish their degrees.  Yet because of Affirmative Action, the universities retained these "tenured radicals", dramatically decreasing the quality of teaching at their universities.*p*He then says something like "It is interesting to note how many of the Goddess-supporters are professors, many of them Baby Boomers."  And he proceeds to list off a dozen or so academics.*p*I was stunned.  Gimbutas (one of the people listed) had scholastic credentials of the highest calibre, and spoke 26 languages.  And she'd gotten her degree back in the 40's, loooong before the Baby Boom!*p*Now, when I went back and read the paragraph carefully, I discovered that Davis wasn't exactly lying.  All he actually said was, many people who believe in the Goddess are professors -- which one would normally think was a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.  However the way this page was phrased *definitely* left the reader with the impression that Maria Gimbutas and company were a bunch of college drop-outs who didn't have PhDs.*p*I thought it was a perfect example of the low quality of this book.  It's bigotry trying to pass itself off as scholarship.*p*Jenny
Re: The Goddess Unmasked (review)
Treva
154
Tue Mar 16 20:21:55 1999