Additional
Reading
The book section
is broken down
according to
the following categories.
Eco-living
Peak Oil
Food
Community Building
Get-off-the-Grid
Additional Reading
The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
Thom
Thomson
While everything appears to be
collapsing around us -- ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent
diseases, the end of cheap oil, water shortages, global famine, wars --
we can still do something about it and create a world that will work
for us and for our children's children. The inspiration for Leonardo
DiCaprio's web movie Global Warning, The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
details what is happening to our planet, the reasons for our culture's
blind behavior, and how we can fix the problem. Thom Hartmann's
comprehensive book, originally published in 1998, has become one of the
fundamental handbooks of the environmental activist movement. Now, with
fresh, updated material and a focus on political activism and its
effect on corporate behavior, The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight helps
us understand--and heal--our relationship to the world, to each other,
and to our natural resources.
A
Theory of Power
Jeff
Vail
I give Theory
of Power five stars because it
made me think about the world differently, in much the same way that
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael did.
This book gives you new and very refreshing (if a
bit scary) ways to look at the world and the patterns, links and
rubrics in it.
Any professor of History, Anthropology, or Political Science who does
not challenge students with this book and its ideas has missed a great
opportunity. This book forces you to think and challenges your long
held beliefs.
You will not even notice that (as Vail says in a
note to his introduction) the book is written entirely without the verb
to be.
The book is clear and concise but you will still find yourself
re-reading every other sentence. On every page you will want to stop
and think about what you just read.
The list of references, alone, is worth the price
of admission.
Read the book. You will be a different person for it.
Amazon reviewer Toes
Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
Quinn ( Dreamer ) won the Turner
Tomorrow Award's half-million-dollar first prize for this fascinating
and odd book--not a novel by any conventional definition--which was
written 13 years ago but could not find a publisher. The unnamed
narrator is a disillusioned modern writer who answers a personal ad
("Teacher seeks pupil. . . . Apply in person.") and thereby meets a
wise, learned gorilla named Ishmael that can communicate
telepathically. The bulk of the book consists entirely of philosophical
dialogues between gorilla and man, on the model of Plato's Republic.
Through Ishmael, Quinn offers a wide-ranging if highly general
examination of the history of our civilization, illuminating the
assumptions and philosophies at the heart of many global problems.
Despite some gross oversimplifications, Quinn's ideas are fairly
convincing; it's hard not to agree that unrestrained population growth
and an obsession with conquest and control of the environment are among
the key issues of our times. Quinn also traces these problems back to
the agricultural revolution and offers a provocative rereading of the
biblical stories of Genesis. Though hardly any plot to speak of lies
behind this long dialogue, Quinn's smooth style and his intriguing
proposals should hold the attention of readers interested in the
daunting dilemmas that beset our planet.
The
Story of B
Daniel
Quinn
Quinn returns to fiction after a
five-year hiatus with a sequel of sorts to Ishmael, winner of the
Turner Tomorrow Award in 1991. Like its controversial predecessor, this
book is not really a novel, but an extended Socratic dialogue that
promulgates the same animist solutions to global problems that the
author recorded last year in his spiritual autobiography, Providence:
The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. The narrator, Jared
Osborne, is
a priest of the Laurentians, a fictional Roman Catholic order under an
ancient, covert mandate to stand watch against the coming of the
Antichrist. Although skeptical, Jared is enjoined by his superior to
investigate Charles Atterley, an expatriate American preacher known to
his followers as "B." Allowing Jared into his inner circle in Munich, B
soon dispels both the concern that he is the Antichrist and the shivery
intimations of apocalypse that make the opening chapters darkly
intriguing. Through long, often numbingly repetitive parables and
speeches, B instructs Jared in the solutions to overpopulation,
ecological despoliation, cultural intolerance and other ills that have
dogged civilization since the time of "the Great Forgetting" 10,000
years ago. B's smug pontificating and his disciples' unquestioning
devotion reduces them to interchangeable mouthpieces for Quinn's
philosophies. As a result, Jared's spiritual conversion away from Roman
Catholicism and toward Quinn-ism, intended to be the book's dramatic
high point, falls painfully flat. (Read Ishmael first)
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