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TLDR: This book is awful. Don’t read it unless you hate yourself.

Wow I hated this book. But I was determined to finish it so I could fairly rant and write this review.

This book is really a transcript of a series of PBS television specials from 1985, and I don’t think it worked in print format at all. Yet I can’t imagine the specials being any less awful than this book. It has pretty good ratings on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and has appeared up high on several lists of strong mythology books, but I hated it. It’s not just that it was too overhyped; this book evoked strong feelings of anger and annoyance in me, which I’ve never really experienced before while reading a book. It was a rambling, nonsensical, hippy rant about how people of the past knew what was up and were transcendent and how awful society is now.

My first problem is with the format. Each chapter is a certain broad topic relating to mythology (i.e. The Hero’s Adventure, The Gift of the Goddess). If I didn’t know the chapter names ahead of time, I would have had absolutely no idea what the chapters were even about. There was no cohesion of ideas. Additionally, because the chapters were divided this way, the flow of the book was nonexistent. It jumped around so much, occasionally explaining a myth (not often), and touching on different cultures here and there. I didn’t internalize anything because the topics and myths were so scattered.

I was angry with the outdated ideals discussed in this book. The book seemed a little sexist to me and I was frustrated with the repetition that love and marriage should exist only between a male and a female.

My biggest problem with this book is that it was SO SO SO preachy. It read like a spiritual text. Campbell talks on and on about “transcendence� and God and divinity and the need for religion. If I had known this was the prime focus of the book ahead of time, I would never have considered reading this. The actual mythology is so scare because for every one page of myth, there were 15+ pages of transcendence and how this myth relates to religion and God and how we lack spirituality in our modern times. The title of the book is “The Power of MYTH� not the “The Power of Hippy Religious Nonsense.� Overall, this book left me feeling extremely disappointed and frustrated.