The negative reviews I've read so far are trashing the book because it wasn't what they expected it to be: a nostalgic, easy-reading book that tickled the toes and the spine while the reader sips hot cider. The book doesn't present itself as such and is clearly an academic and scholarly survey of the holiday, from its origins, through its break into popular North American culture, to contemporary practices. If you're not looking for that kind of treatment, don't read this book. But don't slam it because it didn't do what you wanted it to do. (If you don't get the connection between this paragraph and the title, look up "straw man argument.")
I found the book to be a slim, well-written text that still manages to cover a wide range of topics and provide tons of interesting facts and figures. Rogers' main thesis is that Halloween, a holiday that continually reinvents itself, continues to provide "a space for transgression and parody," even as it is appropriated to fit the social and political needs of the culture. Rogers explores this thesis by examining the origins of Halloween, its history in Britain and North America, its similarities to Mexico's "Day of the Dead," urban legends and popular reactions to the holiday, its representation in Hollywood, and current trends in its celebration. He ends with a few guesses and questions about the holiday's future. A thorough analysis without getting bogged down in any one aspect. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
Single-subject histories on the likes of salt, codfish and even the color red have become a fashionable lately, and this book is a fine specimen of the genre. It traces the history of the celebration of October 31 from Samhain, the year cycle rite observed by the pagan Celts in Britain, to the many ways it is marked in North America at the time of the new millennium. His central thesis, supported by myriad examples and illustrations, is that Halloween has always been a liminal time, a boundary between autumn and winter, this world and the other world, life and death. Drawing from the theory of anthropologist Victor Turner, he argues that liminal times are also periods of ritual inversion in which the obverse of cultural values, however they are construed, are temporarily allowed to emerge into public consciousness and celebrated before being relegated once again to the cultural closet. Whether these oppositional symbols are spiritual otherworlds, as they were for the ancient Celts, or consist instead of what is disavowed by the dominant cultural paradigm, Halloween provides a framework during which they can be publicly explored and performed. This central feature of Halloween, more than any individual rite or symbol, constitutes the core of the holiday that has endured for over a thousand years. From Celtic Samhain to globalized celebration of consumer culture, Halloween seems to attract to it the oppositional and the carnivalesque. No wonder, then, that is has become a popular target for the invectives of conservative Christian ministers and their congregations, who label it "Satanic" and call for its suppression. But the suppression of culturally contested symbols never successfully eliminates the ideas behind them. In fact, as Turner and French cultural historian Michel Foucault argue, these oppositional images are fertile ground for cultural renewal, and provide alternative ways of envisioning reality: they are cultural countersites where social mores and pretensions can be mocked, parodied, and lampooned with impunity, and an alternative universe can temporarily be imagined.
This excellent book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It reads fluidly and easily, is theoretically well-informed without being jargon-ridden or using theory as a bludgeon, and could easily be adopted for use in large undergraduate courses on cultural history, folkloristics and anthropology.
First let me say that this book is like a history book on the history of halloween. If you are looking for a quick halloween story or costume and party information, then this book is not for you.This book deals with the actual history of this wonderful holiday,where it came from and how it adapted to what it is now.I found this book to be a great source of information on the history of my favorite holiday.I would recommend this book to anyone who wants an in depth read of the history of Halloween.
As other reviews suggest, this is not a ghost story or for those with short attention spans. Dr. Rogers is a professor of history, and he has produced a correspondingly scholarly book of history, including names, dates, argumentation, and references to his source materials. When I found the book, I was mainly interested in the early history of Halloween, and the first part of the book delivers it. And it's an important contribution, contrasting with pop-histories that paste later Christian traditions on to early Celtic celebrations, and basically dismiss a thousand years of Christian development as something like "And then they tried to Christianize it because those darned pagans wouldn't go away". Halloween evolved as the cultures celebrating it evolved, and you can't understand its celebration today through a single slice of time in history.
I was tempted to give it four stars instead of five because I thought the author put too much space into Halloween movies, and not enough into the early American development. But he was bringing us up through its modern celebration in the US and Canada, and movies are an important source and reflection of the culture, so I suppose that serves his intent.
You shouldn't try to learn any subject from a single book. Excellent companion books are "The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween" by Markale, for its early history, and "Halloween: An American Holiday, An American Tradition" by Bannatyne for its American development, if you ignore her pre-American history of it (for reasons which are explained comprehensively in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon").'
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