The Storytelling Animal Book Review by ChristineMM

Title: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Author: Jonathan Gottschall

Publication: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2012

Summary Statement: A Short Odd Book That Jumps Around a Lot

My Star Rating: 2 stars out of 5 = I Don’t Like It

I was curious to read this book since some of my interests are story, storytelling, reading books, writing stories, personal essays, parenting, education, the role of play in children and adult’s lives, art, psychology and the workings of the human brain including recent breakthroughs in neuroscience. I read about these things and have experience doing some of these things in my life.

This book was a disappointment. With 199 pages of text, it’s short. It is a very easy read and was a quick read for me. The book felt rushed in its writing process and perhaps some of this is the fault of the editor, because some ideas seemed to skim the surface rather than really get to the heart of the matter. The topics also jumped around and sometimes later chapters would revisit the topic.

Additionally the marketing on the back cover claims the book is “delightful and original” but I do not agree. Many times, Gottschall references nonfiction trade books and regurgitates a fraction of the ideas. There are 16 pages in his bibliography that provided his source material. I had a problem with the discussions of the role of play in children’s lives, a topic that I felt he wrote too much about observations of what he sees kids doing and not enough about the psychology behind it, chiefly never stating that children use play to work out anxiety or worry or scary topics to learn how to process and handle them.

The most original parts of the book are when the many examples from literature were given. Because the author is a college English professor he is well versed in the classics and references them often as very short examples, just quick examples. If you have not read those books yourself, you won’t have the context to understand the example. I found it confusing that he spent a lot of time explaining some things which perhaps he didn’t know much about and his good examples about literature were not explained (maybe he doesn’t realize his readers may not have read every single one of those books).

There are 11 pages of notes yet it was odd that multiple times the studies he quotes were not cited. I’d like to see the two studies he quotes on page 149 and 150: a claim that the adult human mind can’t separate fantasy from reality and the claim that watching violence on TV creates violent adults. I have heard studies to the contrary and that it’s only young children or kids with certain brain disorders i.e. Autism who can’t separate reality from fantasy.

This book is a strange combination of trying to explain the base structure of what makes a good fiction story, with some psychology and some neuroscience thrown in. The attempt was made to find a brain based scientific reason to explain why people are drawn to enjoy stories. An interesting thread was praising the old storytelling and praising the fiction book and the opinion that the claim today that story is dying due to the death of the book, the author claims is unfounded as new versions of using story are in vogue now: video games, adults playing live role playing games and reality TV.

The story of Adolph Hitler was bizarre in that he blames art for not enlightening Hitler and not making him human, if he were more sensitive and empathetic he’d not have orchestrated The Holocaust. I wanted to shout to the author, “Art didn’t save him, Hitler was mentally ill and thus general ideas about humans enjoying story do not apply!”

The discussion of conspiracy theories was entertaining and he says it is a way that humans find meaning in life. That segued to the chapter on religion which seemed like a secular perspective, referencing all religious texts as fiction stories was telling. The author then referenced Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins as being “leading lights”. Then we jumped to revisionist historians such as Zinn and telling what really happened with Christopher Columbus.

The last element that was odd to me was the illustrations. Sometimes the images were never mentioned in the book and perhaps should have been. I was disturbed by the photo of a porn movie shoot, the image of the African tribe members and a reference to tell us to go look at the pretty woman, who happens to be bare breasted. There was crudeness in an unnecessary image of a teen girl giving us the finger with an ugly sneer on her face. This had a relatively large amount of illustrations.

When I wasn’t frustrated by something I was reading, I found this entertaining and light reading. However, I had too many problems with the book’s writing style, the shallowness of some of it and the rambling almost ADD topic jumping, and writing too much about some things and not enough about others. If you want to know about these topics I suggest you go right to the source nonfiction trade books and read one or two of those instead, you’ll learn a lot more from those subject matter experts than you’ll learn from this college English professor.

Perhaps Gottschall intends to use this as required reading for his college courses? If that’s the case and if his lectures are on these topics, maybe his lectures and the entire course would be something definitely better than just reading this book.

I rate this book 2 stars = I Don’t Like It.

Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book from the Amazon.com Vine program for the purpose of writing a review on Amazon’s site. I was under no obligation to review it favorably nor did I agree to blog it. For my blog’s full disclosure statement see the link near the top of my blog’s sidebar.