CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS. THE POET IN HIS LABORATORY By Patrick Wilcken

NYT book of the Times

The definitive account of the life, work, and legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss, father of modern anthropology and one of the postwar era's most influential thinkers. When Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away last October at age 100, France celebrated the life and contributions of not only a preeminent anthropologist, but also one of the defining intellectuals of the twentieth century. Just as Freud had shaken up the antiquarian discipline of psychiatry, so had Lévi-Strauss revolutionized anthropology, transforming it from the colonial era study of "exotic" tribes to one consumed with fundamental questions about the nature of humanity and civilization itself.

Remarkably, there has never been a biography in English of the enigmatic Claude Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on a welter of original research and interviews with the anthropologist, Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss fills this void. In rich detail, Wilcken re-creates Lévi-Strauss's peripatetic life: his groundbreaking fieldwork in some of the remotest reaches of the Amazon in the 1930s; his years as a Jew in Nazi- occupied France and as an émigré in wartime New York; and his return to Paris in the late 1940s, where he clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and fundamentally influenced fellow postwar thinkers from Jacques Lacan to Michel Foucault and Roland
Barthes. It was in France that structuralism, the school of thought he founded, first took hold, creating waves far beyond the field of anthropology. In his heyday, Lévi-Strauss was both a hero to contemporary intellectuals and an international celebrity.

In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wilcken gives the reader a fascinating intellectual tour of the anthropologist's landmark works: Tristes Tropiques, a literary meditation on his travels and fieldwork; The Savage Mind, which showed that "primitive" people are driven by the same intellectual curiosities as their Western counterparts; and
finally his monumental four-volume Mythologiques, a study of the universal structures of native mythology in the Americas. In the years that Lévi-Strauss published these pioneering works, Wilcken observes, tribal societies seemed to hold the answers to the most profound questions about the human mind. Following the great anthropologist from São Paulo to the Brazilian interior, and from New York to Paris,
Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi- Strauss is both an evocative journey and an intellectual biography of one of the twentieth-century's most influential minds.

PERON: A BIOGRAPHY. Joseph A. Page

Latin America has produced no more remarkable or enduring political figure than Juan Peron. Born to modest circumstances in 1895 and trained in the military, he rose to power during a period of political uncertainty in Argentina. A shrewd opportunist who understood the needs and aspirations of the country's workers, Peron rode their votes to the presidency and then increased their share of the nation's wealth. But he also destroyed the independence of their unions and suppressed dissent. Ousted in a coup in 1955, he wandered about Latin America and finally settled in Spain, where he masterminded an astonishing political comeback that climaxed in his reelection as
president in 1973.

Joseph Page's engrossing biography is based upon interviews on 3 continents, never-before inspected Argentine and U.S. government documents and exhaustive research, Page's book spans Peron's formative years; his arrest and dramatic rescue by the 'descamisados' (workers) in 1945; his relationship with the now-mythic Evita; the violence and mysterious murders that punctuated his career; his tragic legacy,
personified by his third wife, Isabel, who assumed the presidency after his death under the influence of a Rasputin-like astrologer; and the continuing appeal of Peronism in Argentina. Page's study of Argentine-American relations is particularly penetrating, esp. in its description of the struggle between Peron and U.S. ambassador Spruille Braden.

Random House; 1st edition (July 12, 1983)
ISBN-13: 978-0394522975