Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 14 books including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. In Blood Rites, she explored the dark side of human collective excitement as incarnated in human sacrifice and war. This ambitious work presents a fascinating and wide-ranging historical and cross-cultural survey of festivity from earliest ecstatic dances in primal societies down to modern times where the closest people come to collective joy is at sports events such as football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

Ehrenreich begins with the encounter between Europeans and primal people, whose ecstatic dances expressed their communal togetherness. The colonial mind with its rigid definitions of civilized behavior found these spontaneous musical rituals aroused within them feelings of hostility, contempt, and fear. Danced religion was unruly, disruptive, and erotic.

Ehrenreich continues her exploration with material on the Greeks and their wild Dionysian rites, Roman culture with its repression of the old traditions of communal ecstasy, the war on dance conducted by Roman Catholic leaders during the 12th and 13th centuries, the suppression of traditional festivals by the Protestant reformers who saw games and all forms of group pleasure as hedonistic, and the hatred of unruly dancing by fundamentalists in Christianity and Islam.

At various times, collective joy was seen as a cure for depression (known as melancholy). Africans who came to the Americas as slaves used ecstatic dance as a form of liberating activity. Ehrenriech hits high stride when she discusses the modern era's fascist use of spectacles in which the military is proffered as a form of entertainment. She does a fine job covering the rock rebellion when youth created a counter-culture replete with music, dance, erotic expression, and group solidarity. Equally interesting is her assessment of the carnivalization of sports. She concludes:

"Not only has the possibility of collective joy been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young, but the very source of this joy — other people, including strangers — no longer holds much appeal. In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits."

The new enemies of collective joy are not religions but the powerful hierarchies of class and gender that are distrustful of festivity because goes against the grain of what they hold sacred: exclusion. But look around, and you will find subversive pockets of ecstatic dance and carnival pranks where you least expect them to surface. Ehrenreich says defiantly: "The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for erotic love of one human for another."