Euphoria Reviews

In the New York Times, Sunday Book Review section Emily Eakin reviews Euphoria, by Lily King in her article titled Going Native on June 6, 2014. Eakin writes, “In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-­deceit.” Read more...

Ron Charles writes in his review of ‘Euphoria,’ a novel based on Margaret Mead by Lily King on June 17, 2014 for The Washington Post:

“With her influence on the sexual revolution, Mead was a globe-spanning iconoclast, alarming some and cheering others, becoming finally something of a totem upon which various groups cast their hopes and fears. So it’s refreshing to see the world’s most famous anthropologist brought down to human scale and placed at the center of this svelte new book by Lily King.” Read more...

Jan Ciabattari for npr books writes in a review on June 5, 2014 titled “Suspense Along the Sepik With the Young Scientists of ‘Euphoria", “The arrival of an iconoclastic new book by Helen, Nell's lover and a fellow disciple of Franz Boas, leads to an excitement so intense they read it aloud to each other from beginning to end. "Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad," Bankson muses. Helen's book "made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew."” Read more...

Camilla Gibb reviews Euphoria by Lily King – the colourful love life of Margaret Mead for the Guardian on Wednesday, December 24, 2014

"King immerses us so fully in the lives of her characters that they remain excellent company beyond the pages of this book. Her research is so well digested that she is able to drop us into the complexities of their work without being didactic. We can forgive the occasional cliche – “the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go” – and recognise the radical value of early anthropology to our understanding not just of the other, but of ourselves." Read more...