"Lévi-Strauss is a French savant par excellence, a man of extraordinary sensitivity and human wisdom . . . a deliberate stylist with profound convictions and convincing arguments... [The Raw and the Cooked] adds yet another chapter to the tireless quest for a scientifically accurate, esthetically viable, and philosophically relevant cultural anthropology... [It is] indispensable reading."—Natural History

The distinguished anthropologist discusses the role and importance of honey and tobacco in the culture of the South American Indians

" The Origin of Table Manners is the third volume of a tetralogy devoted to American Indian mythology. Unlike the first two volumes ( The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes ), which are devoted to South American myths, the present one establishes relations with North America, which is the subject of the fourth ( The Naked Man )... In the course of the analysis, the myths link up with ideas of more general interest. Thus, we find discussions of numeration, of morals, and of the origin of the novel... The Origin of Table Manners is thus of special interest to students of American Indian mythology, although it contains ideas of interest to other fields and even to the general reader."—Daniel C. Raffalovich, American Anthropologist "An immense anthropological erudition is here wielded by one of the world's finest minds, and the myths themselves have never been taken more seriously... [Lévi-Strauss] raises issues and then resolves them with the suspenseful cunning of a mystery novelist."—John Updike, New Yorker

" The Naked Man is the fourth and final volume [of Mythologiques ], written by the most influential and probably the most controversial anthropologist of our time... Myths from North and South America are set side by side to show their transformations: in passing from person to person and place to place, a myth can change its content and yet retain its structural principles... Apart from the complicated transformations discovered and the fascinating constructions placed on these, the stories themselves provide a feast."—Betty Abel, Contemporary Review "Lévi-Strauss uses the structural method he developed to analyze and 'decode' the mythology of native North Americans, focusing on the area west of the Rockies... [The author] takes the opportunity to refute arguments against his method; his chapter 'Finale' is a defense of structural analysis as well as the closing statement of this four-volume opus which started with an 'Ouverture' in The Raw and the Cooked."— Library Journal "The culmination of one of the major intellectual feats of our time."—Paul Stuewe, Quill and Quire