Review of 'Dancing in the Streets: AHistory of Collective Joy' by Barbara Ehrenreich

As someone who has relatively recently discovered the joy of dancing (for years I was too self-conscious to really engage) I liked this book. I think I sort of knew a lot of it, including the efforts to suppress, or occasionally co-opt, collective expressions of joy by Church and State...but it was good to have it all in one place. Nice to have something of an explanation for why we enjoy it...because it helps to enable us to form groups larger than our immediate kin, and those who did enjoy it would have had an evolutionary advantage. Surprisingly little about chemical enhancements that make dancing even more enjoyable and help bring us nearer to that feeling of connection...she rather dismisses that as an ersatz experience and perhaps also recent innovation, which I think is rather unfair. But that's a quibble, it's a nice book.