The Hero
By Lee Child
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
WHAT MAKES A HERO? WHO BETTER TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION THAN LEE CHILD…
‘It’s Lee Child. Why would you not read it?’ Karin Slaughter
‘I don't know another author so skilled at making me turn the page’ The Times
In his first work of nonfiction, the creator of the multimillion-selling Jack Reacher series explores the endurance of heroes from Achilles to Bond, showing us how this age-old myth is a fundamental part of what makes us human. He demonstrates how hero stories continue to shape our world – arguing that we need them now more than ever.
From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling?
Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential reading for anyone trying to write or understand fiction. Child teaches us how these stories still shape our minds and behaviour in an increasingly confusing modern world, and with his trademark concision and wit, demonstrates that however civilised we get, we’ll always need heroes.
Lee Child
Lee Child is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers. All his novels have been optioned for major motion pictures, and foreign rights in the Jack Reacher series have sold in one hundred territories. He lives in New York City.
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Reviews for The Hero
18 ratings4 reviews
What our readers think
Readers find this title thought-provoking, enlightening, and captivating. The book explores the evolution of storytelling and its connection to human evolution, revealing surprising facts. The author's writing is described as mind-blowing, with vivid descriptions that immerse readers in the story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I have no particularly witty comments, but this book makes you think. A lot. About everything.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lee Child was clearly underestimated on his capability of writing. His books are so very mind blocking that you feel like your real life is a dream and your book is only the real life. The author described every scene so perfectly and well that I was honestly amazed.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a fun, clear, enlightening essay. Linking the evolution of storytelling to human evolution leads to threalization of somewhat surprising facts.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A gentle, well-crafted story.
Book preview
The Hero - Lee Child
The Hero
Let’s start with opium. That venerable poppy grew wild and natural after the retreat of the last Ice Age, across a broad band of territory stretching from Asia Minor to the Mediterranean to North Africa. We know from the archaeological record that New Stone Age farmers were interested in it. A carefully curated stash of seeds, about seven thousand years old, was discovered near the Mediterranean Sea; seventeen other New Stone Age sites throughout what we now call Europe show evidence of opium use five or six thousand years ago; and the first deliberate cultivation of the poppy, as opposed to its casual collection, seems to have happened in Mesopotamia over five thousand years ago, organized by the local Sumerians, who called their crop hul gil, which translates as ‘the joy plant’.
I would love to know who tried it first. I would love to know who tried anything first. Who first dug up a strange root or random tuber and thought, hey, you know what – maybe I should cook this and eat it? In particular, I would love to know how many died trying. Our species seems to be restless and curious to a degree that seems almost unhinged. Recent research concerning the Neanderthal people shows them to have been pretty much the opposite of what we have long assumed – they were intelligent, bigger-brained, better animals than us, stronger, faster, healthier, more durable, better toolmakers, caring, compassionate, gentle, artistic and organized. But they seem to have been constitutionally timid. Their settlements migrated slowly, cautiously and sensibly. Often a new settlement would be within sight of a previous settlement. In particular travel over water seems never to have been attempted, unless the far shore was clearly visible. By contrast, our own ancestors, Homo sapiens, went anywhere and everywhere, many of them, we assume, to their doom. Not cautious or sensible at all. The consensus – in what I suppose we could call psychological archaeology – seems to be that Homo neanderthalensis was painfully rational, and Homo sapiens was batshit crazy.
Crazy enough, certainly, for one of them to notice the pretty red flower, to scratch its immature seed pod, to watch the sticky latex ooze out, and then to think, hey, you know what – maybe I should collect this stuff and dry it, and then suck it or chew it or smoke it. I would like to meet that person. Certainly his or her inspiration was way more complicated than, for instance, finding a carrot and deciding to try a bite. Restless and curious indeed. (Although smoking is a misnomer – the latex was not itself set on fire, but indirectly heated, and the active ingredients were inhaled as they gassed off. Vaping, five thousand years ago. Nothing new under the sun.) The effect, then as now, was of a deeply warm, hugely satisfying contentment, washing unstoppably over the user, leaving him or her laid out and passive for hours at a time, inert and endlessly contemplative. As a result, the opium poppy’s scientific name is Papaver somniferum, which is Latin for ‘the poppy that carries you to sleep’.
Of course the problem with an extract from a plant growing wild and natural – or even farmed, given good years and bad – was that dosage was fundamentally unpredictable. The sixteenth-century physician Gabriel