""Campbell has become one of the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture."" -- Newsweek ""Campbell excels in telling the stories themselves -- which feature brahmins and yogis, gods and monsters, as they disguise themselves as charioteers, eat themselves up and spy on mortals -- and in his glancing descriptions of traditions foreign to us: Japanese 'play language, ' an exceedingly polite mode of speech, for instance, or Jainism's insistence on quenching 'all desire for life.'...A solid primer."" -- Publishers Weekly