Well, even without all the Holiday Madness of a few weeks ago, I am still swamped. My pretty red chair is already covered in books and papers and sweaters (because who knows weather it’s going to be freezing or 70º). And I am not a fan of the clutter. But it is upon me and I need to dig out.

To counter this heavy load of work weighing down on me, I’ve been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Henry Holt, $26). This is certainly a bit of a departure from her last two books, Nickel & Dimed (Henry Holt, $13) and Bait & Switch (Henry Holt, $13). But insightful and detailed reportage is what she does best and all three of these books fall into that category.

I remember the first time I read Barbara Ehrenreich… Back in those heady days of college in an American Studies class my professor assigned a book called Re-Making Love, which she co-authored with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs. Looking back at the Sexual Revolution through the closing aperture of the 80’s with the AIDS epidemic and a collective conservatism setting in, Ehrenreich and her co-authors wrote a compelling academic book that noted that it was women who had defined this major shift. I remember being very taken with the intelligent and measured writing; not that I didn’t like myself a little dazzling polemic back in the day. I just was so impressed by the coherent and well argued look at the appropriation of a movement by a collection of disparate cultural groups and influences. And I think I got a very rare “A” on that paper.

But enough day-dreaming now, back to the book at hand: Dancing in the Streets. As much a journalist as a cultural historian, Ehrenreich not only looks at the long history of ecstatic gathering, she also frames it in our modern, western world and our increasingly compromised attempts at spontaneously connecting with others. She’s not one to get caught up in the fervor of her subject; this book is as serious a work as anything else she’s written, an equally sober companion to Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (Henry Holt, $17). But the subject is infectious, she tells the stories of fantastic rituals, from African tribal dances, Bacchanals, Sufism, Carnival, to Medieval dance parties and shows the compulsion to counter these effusions through puritanism and organized military spectacles

This book collects a wonderful history of human gathering and celebration and observes with concern the effects of civilization and repression on that human nature. Panning wide but with intellectual vigor she makes a greater argument about human history and the conflicting elements of conformity and reverie.

I’m trying to take a chapter from this book and not get too down on myself for the mess of my office; it must be the whirlwind excitement of work. Who needs all that order?