Word: ardrey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE by Robert Ardrey. 390 pages. Atheneum...
...Robert Ardrey is a playwright and film writer (Khartoum) who has taken up anthropology at the top of his voice. Audibility can make for large audiences, and Ardrey has enjoyed them since publication of African Genesis (TIME, Dec. 15, 1961), his first solo expedition into man's past. In that book, on evidence that would arch any cautious anthropologist's eyebrow, Ardrey proved to his own satisfaction that man is a born killer. He toyed with some other revolutionary evolutionary notions too, but he lacked either the time or the background to push them with suitable evangelical zeal...
...Ardrey wants to adjourn the biological debate by accepting the territorial principle as a key to the understanding of man and as a solution to all his behavior problems. Why does the Russian collective farmer only listlessly till state soil? Because, says Ardrey, the dispossessed planarian worm lost his zest for life and slipped this attitude into the evolutionary stream untold millions of years...
...does man go to war? For a variety of reasons, says Ardrey, but none more compelling than his fierce atavistic desire to regain or to defend ground that he considers his own. "The principal cause of modern warfare," writes Ardrey, "arises from the failure of an intruding power correctly to estimate the defensive resources of a territorial defender." This is the same as saying that Japan would not have attacked the U.S. had it known it would lose-and that is precisely what Ardrey does say. He says many other things equally indigestible and undemonstrable: that the lower animals have...
...Robert Ardrey's script much too neatly points up the similarity between fanatic Mahdi and fanatic general, and invents two dramatic confrontations between them that never occurred. But such blatant departures from history are rare. Vividly directed by Basil Dearden, Khartoum evokes the spirit and likeness of a brave, baffling soldier...