What Book Have You Read Recently?

[path_of_one]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Is that the book Oprah has been on about for the last month or so? Strikes me as if she is trying to start a cult or something around this book...

Yeah. But it'd be pretty hard to start a cult around the book, in my opinion. Anyone who actually took the book to heart wouldn't be interested in joining much of anything is my guess.

[Pathless]

Derrick Jensen's Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization

Finally, a man with the balls to call a spade a spade. In this book, Jensen lays out repeatedly and in very definitive terms why and how civilization is killing the planet, making a strong case for civilization as a most violent and denying abuser of Earth: mineral, vegetable, and animal (including humans). He has no patience for saving the world through petitions and peaceful means while the violent ruling parties bulldoze and bomb their way towards completely eradicating life and the ability to sustain life. He spends some time analyzing the fallacy of Gandhian non-violence, with his basic argument being that those who dogmatically refuse to use violence under every circumstance play into the destruction wreaked by those in power who have absolutely no issue with using violence to have their way.

Jensen writes a lot about landbases, bringing us back to the basic fact that we need clean water and air to survive. He recounts the violent and expansive history of entitlement, encroachment, and insatiable consumption that is civilization, constrasting that to the lives of indigenous people the world over, who are among the diverse forms of life which continue to be systematically destroyed by civilization, in the name of "progress."

Volume II, which I haven't read, is called Resistance, and is supposed to explore the tactics that people can use to "bring down civilization." Jensen explores the basis of these tactics at the end of Volume I, explaining the concepts of "fulcrums" with which to leverage force against the many "bottlenecks," or weak points, of civilization.

Review: Facing reality in Derrick Jensen's "End Game"

I've now started James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, describing the peak oil problem as well as some problems inherent in the progressive model of civilization, and how we all are in for a big shock when oil starts running out (indications are that this is happening now). Sounds grim, but compared to Jensen's analysis, this book seems to be a skip through a fairgrounds wearing rose-colored glasses and a tie-dye tee-shirt.

I'm sure many of you will want to go out and read these books immediately.

[mee]

Where Is This World Headed?
Today’s moral breakdown is so severe that it is fulfilling Bible prophecy!



JUST FINISHED READING THIS ONLINE

[dauer]

I don't think Oprah wants to become a cult leader but I do think she's already hit New Age guru status.



I finished reading Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matter Most and it was the most awesome book. It presents the nature of difficult conversations in a very clear structure and shows how just by phrasing things in a certain way you can get a much different response. It's been extremely helpful for me, not just in really difficult conversations, but even in normal ones. I've been able to see the difference.

[Pathless]

Originally Posted by mee

Where Is This World Headed?
Today’s moral breakdown is so severe that it is fulfilling Bible prophecy!



JUST FINISHED READING THIS ONLINE

I skipped to the end.

Originally Posted by Where Is This World Headed

After this world ends, earth will become a paradise

Great. So we can look forward to the wars and the toxification of our environment, because they are actually miraculous lightning bolts of purification ejaculated by Gawd. After the ongoing holocaust, paradise.

Pass me more bible tracts, please.

[mee]

Originally Posted by Pathless

Great. So we can look forward to the wars and the toxification of our environment,

WE ALREADY HAVE THOSE

He is making wars to cease to the extremity of the earth.
The bow he breaks apart and does cut the spear in pieces;
The wagons he burns in the fire. PSALM 46;9

Who would like to live in a world with no more war MEE

how about those who are ruining the earth , read revelation 11;18

and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.

[mee]

What Book Have You Read Recently?
The bible it is most beneficial for MEE

[Ahanu]

I am almost finished reading Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. Well, I viewed the movie last week and loved the motto of the story, which, if it could speak, would say, "There is a way to be good again." It is a story of redemption for Amir.

Hassan, the hazara, strikes me as the most pure hearted person on earth. Also, I learned more about the culture and history of Afganistan. The Hazaras, for instance, have mongolian anscestors who invaded Islamic countries during the 13th centuries which erased centuries of painstakingly aquired knowledge, and killed many families. So it is no wonder the so-called true Afgans hold such a hatred for these people to such an extent that Hassan is treated as an outcast of society.

Kites were also banned by the Taliban. But before these terrible events, the kite runner's feet dashed towards the kites they had clip'd under the light blue sky. It landed somewhere over a building, or home, where the enthusiastic winner would claim the kite as a prize of their own. Anyway, just some previews of what I am reading tonight. Good-night.

[Ahanu]

OK. This is kind of funny.

". . .We fell silent for a while. Just when I thought he had fallen asleep, Farid chuckled. 'Agha, did you hear what Mullah Nasruddin did when his daughter came home and complained that her husband had beaten her?' I could feel him smiling in the dark and a smile of my own formed on my face. There wasn't an Afghan in the world who didn't know at least a few jokes about the bumbling mullah.

'What?'

'He beat her too, then sent her back to tell the husband that Mullah was no fool: If the ******* was going to beat his daughter, then Mullah would beat his wife in return.'

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afganistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes" (Hosseini 266)

I did a quick search on Mullah Nasruddin, because I had never heard of him. More jokes in the link.

Sufism/Nasrudin - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

[dauer]

I recently picked up a book I've had for a while, a discourse by Nathan of Breslov on the inner dimension of tefillin. It's based around one of Rebbe Nachman's stories. I expected it to be a bit dry but it's actually very good.

[seattlegal]

I just re-read Ayn Rand's Anthem at Project Gutenberg. (I think all of the fine print and disclaimers from Project Gutenberg are longer than this short novella.)

[Pathless]

Originally Posted by seattlegal

I just re-read Ayn Rand's Anthem at Project Gutenberg. (I think all of the fine print and disclaimers from Project Gutenberg are longer than this short novella.)

Heh. I may have to look at that, although I have an aversion to Ayn Rand, which can't really be fair since I've never ever even read anything by her. From what I know about her, though, she sickens me. Oh, and I guess it's not entirely true that I haven't read anything by her. I read a very racist and elitist snippet of a speech she gave somewhere; it was quoted in the Derrick Jensen book I finished recently (more info on that above).

[Pathless]

Currently I am working my way slowly through Ward Chuchill's collection, From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism 1985-1995. It's important stuff, I think, but the essays are on the whole more academic than I find comfortable, which is why I'm reading it slowly.

More to my taste, I recently started In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander. His style fuses the personal with the critical and theoretical, which is an apporach I really like and find readable. That kind of writing seems really accessible and solid to me.

[juantoo3]

Finally finished the Chronicles of Narnia, just in time I see for the release of Prince Caspian in the theaters. I'm not sure what I think about them, having spent so much time engrossed in Tolkien, Lewis' works just seem a little short, a little...childish?...to me. I will say, the last book, I think it was titled "the Final Battle" or some such, began as most the others, but the ending was not at all what I had come to expect. The Christian theme was very pronounced, but in that vein it was also very hopeful. I found at that point I finally couldn't put the book down. It's just unfortunate it took several short stories to get to that point.

Maybe had I not been weaned first on Middle Earth I might not be as harsh. Narnia was fun, but exceptionally light weight in my opinion.

I so seldom do "story books," so what is my next? A borrowed Stephen King book... ..."Bag of Bones." I'm barely into it, but so far not impressed. But then, long ago I only read "Christine," "Pet Semetary" and "It," all of which were movies as well.

[mee]

Will Cruelty Ever End?
Humans have the potential for being compassionate and kind. Then what makes people act cruelly?


just finished reading this online