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sba_reads's review against another edition
dark
slow-paced
2.0
Read it if you’re curious but it’s a massively aged book that hasn’t aged well at all. Wow.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, Xenophobia, Colonisation, and Classism
jcampbell's review
informative
slow-paced
3.0
Lengthy and weighty, and I read an abridged version. I can see why this was so controversial when it was published in the Victorian era, an interesting comparative study of world believes and religion.
kheleesi's review against another edition
Reading slowly for research. Didn’t want to track.
strangeglyph's review against another edition
More of a reference work than something that can be read front to back
zmb's review against another edition
4.0
The theorizing is fascinating, and, while the abridgment does a good job at cutting down the interminable examples of the full third edition, there are still a huge amount of them. Nevertheless, it's worth it for Frazier's unifying explanations. If they occasionally (or often) go to far in the direction of unification, they are the more interesting for it.
shiradest's review against another edition
I recall reading this book quite a few years ago, when I was a new Wiccan. I recall thinking that it had rehashed just enough mythology to be annoying, but not especially revealing, so I did not take notes on it. I suppose I shall have to read it again.
jcovey's review against another edition
3.0
For most books I consider abridgment a crime, but with this one I really wish I'd gone for a 'Selection from.' The ideas and theories Frazer expounds are compelling and rather convincing, but these theories are probably about 15% of the text. The rest is the seemingly endless evidence he gathered for these theories. His list of sources is a full third of the books length. It's an admirable amount of research, but the casual reader will not get much out of the detailed descriptions of harvest festivals from nearly every peasant population in Europe, especially because they are all so nearly alike that they almost instantly begin to blend together in the readers mind.