For those unlikely to read the original work, it's a thorough summary. The prose is pedestrian, however, whereas Lear's language is rich, powerful and precise.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Even more Radical Hope
Charles Taylor has created quite a little stiir in the blogosphere with his piece in the New York Review of Books, A Different Kind of Courage, a response to Jonathan Lear's book, Radical Hope, mentioned elsewhere in this blog.
For those unlikely to read the original work, it's a thorough summary. The prose is pedestrian, however, whereas Lear's language is rich, powerful and precise.
Charles Taylor was recently awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize. He is Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill. His books include Hegel and The Ethics of Authenticity.
For those unlikely to read the original work, it's a thorough summary. The prose is pedestrian, however, whereas Lear's language is rich, powerful and precise.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Paradigm Wars
I flaked on attending this reading downtown at Powell's last night: snow was rumored to be imminent…
Best-selling author and cultural critic Jerry Mander has challenged dominant cultural mind-sets in books such as Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred. In Paradigm Wars, he and coeditor Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a leader of the global indigenous peoples movement and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, have gathered an impressive international roster of contributors to document the momentous collision of worldviews that pits the forces of economic globalization against the Earth's surviving indigenous peoples.
Many of the planet's dwindling resources are located on lands inhabited by native communities. Those resources are now the direct target of giant global corporations who desperately need them to fuel their own unsustainable growth. The World Trade Organization and other global structures of trade and finance have written the rules of trade to make life easier for these corporate resource-hunters — accelerating the loss of native lands, autonomy, and rights and creating millions of refugees.
Paradigm Wars is the first major work to comprehensively illuminate this shameful scenario. In firsthand reports by twenty-five indigenous and nonindigenous writers, the book details the devastating impacts of extractive industries and bioprospecting, the degrading of cultural artifacts and languages, even the damage done by some well-meaning conservation groups. The book also highlights how indigenous communities are strongly resisting this onslaught, often with amazing success. Anyone concerned with environmental or social justice will find inspiration in their resistance.
About the Authors
Jerry Mander founded the International Forum on Globalization in 1994. He is a senior fellow at the Public Media Center and has authored or coedited four books.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz is an Igorot indigenous activist in the Philippines, director of Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for Policy Research and Education), and co-president of the International Forum on Globalization.
Best-selling author and cultural critic Jerry Mander has challenged dominant cultural mind-sets in books such as Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred. In Paradigm Wars, he and coeditor Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a leader of the global indigenous peoples movement and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, have gathered an impressive international roster of contributors to document the momentous collision of worldviews that pits the forces of economic globalization against the Earth's surviving indigenous peoples.
Many of the planet's dwindling resources are located on lands inhabited by native communities. Those resources are now the direct target of giant global corporations who desperately need them to fuel their own unsustainable growth. The World Trade Organization and other global structures of trade and finance have written the rules of trade to make life easier for these corporate resource-hunters — accelerating the loss of native lands, autonomy, and rights and creating millions of refugees.
Paradigm Wars is the first major work to comprehensively illuminate this shameful scenario. In firsthand reports by twenty-five indigenous and nonindigenous writers, the book details the devastating impacts of extractive industries and bioprospecting, the degrading of cultural artifacts and languages, even the damage done by some well-meaning conservation groups. The book also highlights how indigenous communities are strongly resisting this onslaught, often with amazing success. Anyone concerned with environmental or social justice will find inspiration in their resistance.
About the Authors
Jerry Mander founded the International Forum on Globalization in 1994. He is a senior fellow at the Public Media Center and has authored or coedited four books.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz is an Igorot indigenous activist in the Philippines, director of Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for Policy Research and Education), and co-president of the International Forum on Globalization.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Hack the publishing system on November 1
I just love this idea---and the book sounds good, too. ;-) Please join me:
Help Us Hack the Publishing System!
Worldchanging Team
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005175.html
On November first, at eleven minutes after eleven a.m. (Pacific time), please go to Amazon and buy the book.
Our book is not Big. It is thick; it is packed with solutions; it is, we think, smart and important.
But we don't have the blockbuster machine working for us. We have no marketing budget at all. Our publisher, Abrams, is terrific, but they are not a big company. They have a comparatively tiny promotions budget and don't have the kind of clout with booksellers to manufacture bestsellers.
Here's what we do have: you...
The Amazon list is hugely influential, indeed it's one of the main ways booksellers and media determine what books are "moving" and thus which books they should pay attention to. It's not the New York Times bestseller list, but it's the next best thing.
And Amazon, you see, ranks books based on their sales over the previous 24 hours. This means that it is possible, through coordinated action, to hack the system by getting a large number of people to buy the book at the same time.
Since, most of the time, purchases of books on Amazon are not coordinated (except in the case of right-wing political books, and that's another story), it is possible for a relatively small number of people to time their purchases right and, for a short period of time, drive the book they wish to support up the charts.
Since we're already doing extraordinarily well on Amazon just through word of mouth, we are actually in a position to quite conceivably make Worldchanging the number one book in the nation on the largest online bookseller, if just for one day.
In that one day, however, every other bookseller, reviewer, producer and store manager will hear about Worldchanging, and our odds of getting the traction we need to bring worldchanging ideas into the public debate will dramatically increase.
Here's what we're asking:
On November first, at eleven minutes after eleven a.m. (Pacific time), please go to Amazon and buy the book.
Better still, go to Amazon and buy the book on the first, and in the meantime blog, email, talk up the book and do whatever you can to encourage everyone who you think cares about sustainability, innovation and social change, everyone who wants more solutions in the public debate, to join you on buying the book on 11/1 at 11:11 a.m. Please help spread the word.
Friday, October 20, 2006
Radical Hope
I've mentioned previously the book Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear. I'm currently in the middle of it, finding it very thought-provoking and hoping some of you might be tempted to read and discuss it via blog(s).
It is a small, dense volume, written with the rigor and narrative conventions of philosophical works. Lear takes as his text the historical record regarding the destruction of the Crow nation, particularly the life, acts, and commentary of Plenty Coups, a notable Crow chief of that period. Lear employs these historical circumstances to inquire into what it means for human beings to experience cultural vulnerability and to face cultural devastation, with hope and imagination.
There are no copies in the Clackamas County library system, unfortunately, and only one in the Multnomah County system. People outside the Portland metro area may be more fortunate. (If you decide to buy the book, however, it would be lovely if you bought it from Powell's, our independent bookstore, via this link: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear)
It is a small, dense volume, written with the rigor and narrative conventions of philosophical works. Lear takes as his text the historical record regarding the destruction of the Crow nation, particularly the life, acts, and commentary of Plenty Coups, a notable Crow chief of that period. Lear employs these historical circumstances to inquire into what it means for human beings to experience cultural vulnerability and to face cultural devastation, with hope and imagination.
There are no copies in the Clackamas County library system, unfortunately, and only one in the Multnomah County system. People outside the Portland metro area may be more fortunate. (If you decide to buy the book, however, it would be lovely if you bought it from Powell's, our independent bookstore, via this link: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear)
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
BIG history
These sound like potentially fascinating books. Have you read any of them? No? Yes? If so, what did you think?
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
by David Christian
Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past
by Patrick Manning
The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia--A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy
by Robert D. Kaplan
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
by William Cronon
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
by Jonathan Lear
The first book, Maps of Time, turns out to be the seminal work in a whole school of historical study of which I was completely and inexplicably unaware, called “big history” or “world history.” Not your high school social studies teacher’s world history, either. My sister’s partner is a student of the afore-mentioned David Christian, movement founder. (So that’s—let’s see—three degrees of separation?) Turns out Jared Diamond is arguably the best-known popularizer of the approach, although not, of course, an historian. And it seems to me that The Clock of the Long Now project also fits right in to this very big picture.
I can’t help but feel there is amazing, breathtaking, groundbreaking, though-provoking work going on around the globe. Everywhere.
That’s on my good days—but then, most of them are good.
p.s. Yes, yes, OK, I've ordered the first volume of Endgame by Derrick Jensen. It remains to be seen if I possess the, er, necessary fortitude to actually read it, and not employ it with other very large depressing books (such as anything by Laurie Garrett) as an impromptu flower press/end table/door stop.
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History
by David Christian
Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past
by Patrick Manning
The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia--A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy
by Robert D. Kaplan
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
by William Cronon
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
by Jonathan Lear
The first book, Maps of Time, turns out to be the seminal work in a whole school of historical study of which I was completely and inexplicably unaware, called “big history” or “world history.” Not your high school social studies teacher’s world history, either. My sister’s partner is a student of the afore-mentioned David Christian, movement founder. (So that’s—let’s see—three degrees of separation?) Turns out Jared Diamond is arguably the best-known popularizer of the approach, although not, of course, an historian. And it seems to me that The Clock of the Long Now project also fits right in to this very big picture.
I can’t help but feel there is amazing, breathtaking, groundbreaking, though-provoking work going on around the globe. Everywhere.
That’s on my good days—but then, most of them are good.
p.s. Yes, yes, OK, I've ordered the first volume of Endgame by Derrick Jensen. It remains to be seen if I possess the, er, necessary fortitude to actually read it, and not employ it with other very large depressing books (such as anything by Laurie Garrett) as an impromptu flower press/end table/door stop.
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