Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History

This absorbing work exposes an immense gap in the literature about and our understanding of the past, and offers a huge canvas for further speculation. Highly recommended!

If you are one of those people who reads in terms of things subversive or hegemonic, you will not like this book, because it so completely accepts the sort of mechanized vision of the universe so common to our age. However, if one should happen to be free of that particular affliction, then this is a fairly interesting book, for not only is it readable, rare for an academic book, but it also has something to say about human history. Mr. McNeill's thesis is that the interaction between music and dancing has had a very much greater impact on human history than has heretofore been realized, and many of his speculations are well worth pondering. For students of dance, and what is perhaps now becoming a legitimate line of academic query, a subject that may someday become known as "kinesthetics," this book is a must-read. A recent book from France about the French use of church bells appears to echo many of the themes developed here, which is to say that this book may well be looked back upon as an important first step. Of course, to a politically-minded critic, such work is utterly reactionary, and perhaps it is an escape into a fantasy of other times and places, and certainly the almost uncritical way in which McNeill accepts the current Darwinistic world view is disturbing, yet nevertheless there is much to be gained here. The long analysis of the impact of close order drill on European armies is alone work of the first water, of interest to anyone working on not just European political history, but also students of European imperialism. If this book is understood aright, much of our current thought is going to have to be revised.