Reviews for The gift

The average rating for The gift based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-26 00:00:00 Nah Son I felt I needed to write a review to counter the negative ones here. Any book that calls the zeitgeist into question is bound to draw confusion and pushback. I've bought this book three times because I give it to friends who don't always give it back. That's okay: The Gift was and is a profound touchstone for me (and for an older generation of writers who knew Hyde from his Minnesota days). I recommend it to artists who wonder how their gifts may be appeciated for their worth, if not always always their fair value in a modern economy. Some of the reviewers' gripes probably owe to the fact this is a dense, dense book. Hyde's ideas build and spiral through varied concrete examples drawn from anthropology, open-source programming, poetry, and pure versus applied sciences. Hyde also shows balance; he recognizes that fees-for-services are useful when we simply don't care about a long-term relationship with the producer--but a certain spirit is lost, too, in the case of so many dead objects we bought but which now crowd the attic. Having just reread the book again, I can say it not only has aged well, but the Great Recession and the rise of the sharing economy lend an even greater resonance (in fact, the anniversary material in the newer edition is less striking than the original). For me, the most moving chapters are those in the second half on Whitman and Pound, who illustrate how the gift can circulate to the benefit of a nation or, traded for willpower, lead to soul's rot. Truly, artists should buy the book just for the cautionary tale on Pound. Here and there, the book's prose rises to a level of poetry that astonishes me more than on the first reading, where I was just wrestling with the ideas and their implications. This book saves me from choosing will over gift.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-27 00:00:00 Barry Melnyk I tried to like this book, since it had come so highly recommended, and it was in a 25th anniversary edition. If it has been in print all those years, there must be something to it, right? Nope. First of all, it's badly structured. The first half is an extended discussion of the concept of gifts (vs paying for things) in ancient vs modern societies. Once you get the basic point, that (especially older) societies exchanged goods and services as gifts, not for money, and that Hyde thinks that's a better way to do it, then you've got the idea. He says that an artist basically has to straddle the world of gifts (because his/her art is best thought of as a gift, both received and given to the world) and the world of commerce (gotta pay the rent). The second half of the book then talks about Whitman and Pound, two worthy poets, but hardly connected in any real or useful sense to the foregoing gift discussion. Second (and my other main complaint about the book) is that Hyde beats the gift horse to death. He defines, ponders, muses, and ruminates about various aspects of what is after all a pretty simple concept for pages, weaving in fairy tales, ethnography (much of it outdated or inaccurate), and random commentary about various writers and artists. It's a maddening, frustrating book that is simultaneously more and less than it aspires to be.