2 stars = 3 stars for exploring interesting ideas; 1 star for writing a really bad novel

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
Daniel Quinn
Bantam, 1995

I've been trying to encapsulate all my feelings about this book, and I have concluded that it is basically a written version of the film Mindwalk.

Let me explain. (And please don't comment that the written version of Mindwalk, or more accurately the book upon which the film was based, was Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point--I know that already. I'm speaking metaphorically.) While the ideas discussed in that film were oftentimes incredibly fascinating and very urgent, the film itself, as a film, sorta sucked. Not an idea picture you want to make most folks sit through more than once, if that, in other words. So it is with this book. The ideas that it explores, sort of like deep ecology for beginners, certainly put it in the 3-star ("good") category. As a novel, though, it just isn't that good. The two characters in the book are merely mouthpieces for the pseudo-dialogues comprising the bulk of the book, and one of the two, the narrator, isn't much of a mouthpiece at that. It is not a surprise to me that many publishers passed on this novel.

The story, such as it is, begins intriguingly enough with a classified ad advertising a teacher for those who earnestly want to save the world. Our narrator, being an earnest, spiritual "seeker"-type, applies in person, only to discover that the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who can communicate telepathically--not exactly what we expect of a guru! The two enter into a series of pseudo-dialogues that go on for the majority of the book's 250+ pages and which are interspersed with a few rather pedestrian interludes whose sole purpose seems to be to make this book a work of fiction, rather than a series of nonfiction lectures.

Many reviewers have asserted that these dialogues echo a powerful and respected format used by philosophers from Plato to Hume, but I disagree; instead of being authentic dialogues, in which every position is examined from many angles and by many voices, what appear in this novel are frustrated (and frustrating) lectures on the part of an overbearing, know-it-all silverback. They reminded me of high school lectures by a bad teacher who asks overly general questions and then snaps at the students for not immediately intuiting the expected answer. In addition, because these aren't authentic dialogues, Ishmael basically outlines his thesis without any critical feedback or counter-theses from the narrator, and so the reader is left accepting or rejecting the gorilla's expositions on intuition.

So much for the book's failings. Its success is in its ability to articulate clearly both a deep ecological critique of "civilization" (i.e., the worldview that has come to dominate the globe since the Agricultural Revolution began) and a vision of an alternative cultural paradigm within which humans can live harmoniously with the rest of the world. Using the terms "Takers" and "Leavers" (derived from the phrase "take it or leave it") to describe the two general types of human culture, Ishmael explores a subject with which he, as a gorilla, is quite familiar: captivity. Takers, who now make up the majority of the human species, are captives to their culture, which Ishmael defines as the story that they enact every day. For Takers, this story "casts mankind as the enemy of the world" (p. 75) and makes absolute mastery over the planet (nay, the universe!) the overarching cultural imperative. Human uniqueness and dominion over creation is "the manifesto of the [agricultural] revolution on which your culture is based. It's the repository of all your revolutionary doctrine and the definitive expression of your revolutionary spirit. It explains why the revolution was necessary and why it must be carried forward at any cost whatever" (154). Ishmael's description of the barrenness of the Takers' inner landscape rings true to those who see the consumption and control don't bring happiness: "The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness" (146). Those who find the works of Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen, (among others) compelling will nod their heads in agreement with much of what Quinn, and Ishmael, have to say about "Taker" culture.

"Leaver" cultures, which Ishmael roughly equates with "primitive" or "indigenous" cultures, are those who engage in "limited competition" (which complements Piotr Kropotkin's idea of "mutual aid"). This means that they do not exterminate their competitors and they don't deny their competitors access to food, so that biological (and cultural) communities maintain a healthy diversity and sustainability. Ishmael's challenge to the narrator, and to the reader, is to find a way to infuse the Leaver mindset (i.e., the intuition that there is no one right way, no need to have total control, and no way that we can continue to determine who lives and who dies) into our 21st century civilization.

(This review was originally written on June 25, 2007.)

One small strange trip into the past, one long strange trip from the future

Summer of Love
Lisa Mason
Spectra, 1995


Teenage Susan Stein, aka Starbright, runs away from middle-class Midwestern suburbia and uses her savings to fly to San Francisco in the first days of summer, 1967. (Interestingly, I began reading this book a few days before the media began hyping the 40th anniversary of this strange fleeting season called the Summer of Love.) Beckoned by a postcard from her old friend Nance, now calling herself Penny Lane, she has traveled to the City by the Bay to escape her parents' constant bickering and to reconnect with her old friend. In one of the most uncannily accurate portrayals of an LSD experience, she is thrown into the ecstatically, erratically archetypal lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. She also becomes pregnant. Starbright accidentally comes across Penny Lane only to find that the young girl is now cynical, bitter, and self-destructive. Her friend confesses that her life has been one of absolute hell, as she was regularly raped by her stepfather and ignored by her mother. Not being as well-off as Starbright, Penny has had to sleep her way across the US in order to get away from his advances, and resents the fact that her once-best friend has somehow escaped all this, and was even able to fly to San Francisco thanks to her rich daddy. Starbright watches Penny, who is still basically a child, descend further and further into the dark side of 1967--speed, prostitution, biker culture, and death.

Into this time of upheaval tachyports Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco, a young man from 500 years in the future. He has come back in time to the Summer of Love in order to find a mysterious young woman, known only through a few seconds of recovered video footage and a lot of probabilities. His job is to find this girl, protect her, and ensure that events unfold as they are supposed to, so that the existence of his future will be assured. The girl's name is not known to him; what is known is that she is pregnant, that her pregnancy is important to the future of humanity, and that demonic anti-matter forces from an alternate timeline are seeking to destroy her. As a time traveler capable of producing profound paradoxes, he is bound by an incredibly strict code of noninterference called the Grandfather Principle. He meets and befriends Starbright, whom he suspects is his mystery woman, and Ruby A. Maverick, the gorgeous 35-year old proprietor of an occult bookshop. Over the course of the novel, he reveals both the daunting shape of the future--sharing tales of overpopulation, ozone depletion, genetic mutations, and devolution--and Starbright's role, through her unborn daughter, in assisting humanity to survive the coming transitions. Alas, things are never as easy as they seem, especially when time travel and the (pardon the pun) embryonic women's reproductive freedom movement are involved, and so Chiron and Starbright have their work cut out for them.

This novel was a joy to read. Although I wasn't around for the Summer of Love (and so can't vouch for the book's veracity), the story conveys such a complex mixture of innocence, hope, joy, exuberance, ecstasy, revelation, chaos, despair, freefall, nihilism, and violence that I can't help but suspect its authenticity. It reveals the same multifaceted, ambiguous "60s" as the Love album Forever Changes, and that makes it seem straight from the source. As well, the use of regular references to newspaper clippings from The Berkeley Barb and The Oracle, sections from the I-Ching, and tidbits about environmental science rounded out this loving, and knowing, portrait of the Left Coast in `67. Finally, Starbright's regular references to Star Trek were a loving homage to that groundbreaking show; as I read the book, I realized how much that program, and the increased interest in SF that accompanied it, inspired the progressive and outlandish thinking of many young people at the time, including most likely the author herself.

(This review was originally written on June 24, 2007.)

Are you ready for the red pill?

The Culture of Make Believe
Derrick Jensen
Chelsea Green, 2004

The Culture of Make Believe picks up where its predecessor, the powerful Language Older than Words, left off. After examining in that latter volume the objectification and systematic denial of that objectification that permeate Western culture, Jensen turns his attention to the related "relationships between hate and fear, hate and power, power and fear... What are the relationships between any of these and the desire or need to control? And what are the relationships between all of these and a desire or need to perceive others as objects? It seems obvious to me that enslaving another requires that the other be, at least to some degree, objectified: Does objectification imply hatred? I used to think so, but I'm beginning to think the relationship is more complex." (67)

The relationship is indeed more complex, and because of the complexly interpenetrating nature of the subject matter, the book itself is also complex while somehow remaining an engaging read. In order to adequately describe and analyze these complex relationships, Jensen's sprawling tome draws on vivid storytelling, graphic and painful historical accounts, potent metaphors drawn from our cultural heritage, powerful intuitions, postmodern reflexivity and critical insight into the author's own biases, lengthy interviews with relevant thinkers, and an underlying logic that deftly interweaves the seemingly disparate strands of racism, sexism, monotheism, hatred, power, exploitation, colonialism, ecocide, war, abstraction, objectification, production, and of civilization (particularly the civilization with roots in the Mediterranean and the Levant, aka "Western" civilization) itself. In the Biblical metaphor that he develops throughout the book, Jensen is Noah's son Ham, sharing his vision of the naked patriarch of civilization, especially industrial civilization, and calling the reader to see that the patriarch has no clothes, and having seen, to make a choice.

Jensen's book is filled with detailed accounts of atrocities that have been perpetrated against racial and ethnic minorities, women, and against the natural world itself, but he doesn't stop with relating the gory details. Instead he digs deeper into the accounts to show how the perpetrators were most often not barbaric and marginal, as we tend to assume, but were instead policemen, politicians, businessmen, economists, investors, CEOs, Rotarians, and other decent, respectable folks, the people that Ward Churchill has called "little Eichmanns." (In other words, the perpetrators were and are all of us who benefit from the system.) He describes how South African cultures were systematically destroyed, not through lawlessness but through the passing of laws, in order to get black laborers to mine diamonds for DeBeers; in effect, racist apartheid grew out of good old-fashioned market economics. He relates accounts of how everyday black Americans were lynched and burned for looking at white women, or for looking like black men who looked at white women, or for just being black. (He even tells the story of a woman whose fetus was cut out of her belly by a bunch of upstanding white citizens as punishment for her crime of hating them for burning her husband.) Again and again, we see that the perpetrators of these evils weren't inbred reprobates, but were upstanding members of their communities, and that these evil occasions weren't attended in shame, but in celebration. For example, at its height the KKK, contrary to popular belief, did not comprise backwater yokels but police chiefs, sheriffs, attorneys general, and state governors.

According to Jensen's analysis, hatred--whether aimed at blacks, at women, at religious minorities, at Iraqi civilians, or at the natural world itself--is a manifestation of our cultural vision of the world. In this vision, the Other is objectified, dealt with abstractly in terms of a class (so an innocent black man is burned just because he looks like the actual criminal or a 2,000 year old tree is rendered into two-by-fours just to make a quick buck), held in contempt, and viewed as a resource to be exploited instead of as another living being with which one may enter into relationship. Moreover, as Jensen teases out, the phenomenon of red-faced, spittle-flinging hatred is an aberration that typically appears only when the normal direction of power is subverted or challenged. At other times, hatred merely manifests as the status quo, innocent only to those who benefit from its privileges.

This book, while engaging, is not an easy read, precisely because it challenges the reader on EVERY level. It reveals the "embeddedness of all of us in a culture that perceives war in monstrously utilitarian terms" and our "immersion in a river of deceit, a river where we take as accepted that one hand may hold forth an olive branch while another makes final arrangements to thrust with a sword, a river where treaties are abrogated at convenience, a culture in which lying to achieve one's goals in not only acceptable and expected, but routine" (175). Making the choice to see one's embeddedness in the culture of make believe and to conceive of alternatives is irrevocable and has real consequences: "The difficulty comes--and here is the real beauty of the story of Noah and his sons---when, like Ham (or at least my vision of Ham), you find your way through these shifts in perception and see the patriarch naked and vulnerable. What do you do then? Do you, like Ham, talk about what you have seen? As the story makes clear, there are grave strictures against doing so, with severe consequences. Or do you follow the lead of Ham's brothers, and reap the privilege that comes from averting your eyes?" (62-3) Jensen's book challenges our need for happy, simple solutions and implies that this need for "feel-good" vibes is itself a loss created by the culture of make believe: "I need not fight despair...despair is a normal and reasonable response to a desperate situation.... my response--breaking into sobs over the killing of so much beauty--is normal, and expected, and that to not feel these losses manifests another type of loss, that of one's own humanity, one's own heart." (249)

I could write and quote more, but I won't. My guess is that you are here, reading these reviews, because you already have an idea of what Derrick Jensen has to say and agree with it to a greater or lesser extent. Readers seem to either hate Jensen's writing style-- with its tangential approach, long narrative arcs that connect loose ends over a span of 200 pages, and self-referential quality--or to love it, hearing it in a voice as refreshing as the truth it reveals in page after page. Give this book a read. Your view of the world and of your role in it won't be the same when you finish it.

(This review was originally written on June 22, 2007.)

Must-read for those interested in an ecologically sound theology

Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing
Rosemary Radford Ruether
HarperOne, 1994


Professor Ruether's dense and challenging book is a must-read for progressive Christians (and other disciples of Jesus) interested in developing an ecologically sound theology. As she makes abundantly clear in the final section of the book, "there is no ready-made ecological spirituality and ethic in past traditions. The ecological crisis is new to human experience...The radical nature of this new ecological devastation means that all past human traditions are inadequate in the face of it. Whatever useful elements may exist...must be reinterpreted to make them usable in the face of both new scientific knowledge and the destructive power of the technology it has made possible" (p. 206). The clarity of her argumentation, the quality of her prose, and the urgency of our current environmental and theological situation make what could be a daunting read into a fair approximation of a page turner.

The book itself is divided into four sections---Creation, Destruction, Domination and Deceit, and Healing---and in each section Ruether sketches the different lines of myth and metaphor that have shaped and continue to shape our relationships with one another and with the living earth as a whole.

"Creation" begins with the Babylonian, Jewish, and Platonic Greek creation stories, in which nature and the feminine are conceived of as the threatening "Other" in need of suppression by a transcendent (male) ego. This section concludes with the post-Newtonian perspectives of quantum mechanics, ecology, and other contemporary scientific cosmologies that seem to imply a re-integration of the observer ("man") with the observed ("nature"). Ruether feels that this latter "creation myth" needs to become the new basis for our theologies. "We need scientist-poets who can retell the story I have alluded to in this chapter, the story of the cosmos and the earth's history, in a way that can call us to wonder, to reverence for life, and to the vision of humanity living in community with all its sister and brother beings" (p. 58). This language is hardly that of traditional Christian theology, and yet the need for a language of wonder and reverence that is not inextricably connected with 2,000-year old myths and legends is, to me, self-evident.

"Destruction" explores and interrogates Jewish and Christian themes of the End Times, and then examines the converging contemporary catastrophes facing humanity and the entire global biosphere. Are these myths and realities related, and if so, how? In the traditional views, good and evil tend to be understood in tribal terms, and so the response to "evil" often takes the place of total, absolute enmity towards different genders, religions, ethnicities, races, etc. "The impulse to apocalyptic thus becomes genocidal, the extermination of those people who are seen as 'Satan's people.'...Massacres of the enemy through military weapons, ranging from the sword to nuclear bombs, are fantasized by apocalypticists as instruments of righteousness" (p. 83). If the entire natural world is understood as the primal Other which needs to be subdued or subjugated, then it isn't hard to see the connection between these worldviews and our contemporary ecological crises.

The third section, "Domination and Deceit," traces the connections between Judeo-Christian understandings of evil and patriarchal patterns of exploitation and abuse that have characterized much of the history of civilization. Lest the reader come this far only to think that the Judeo-Christian worldview is untenable and irredeemable from an ecological perspective, Ruether provides two lines of theological insight that might provide an ecologically sound basis for a Christian theology of "Healing"---the covenantal and the sacramental. In her final chapter, Ruether outlines how these different theological elements can come into play in our efforts to heal ourselves, one another, and the living world on which we all depend for our existence. It helps also to keep in mind that Ruether is not looking

In short, essential reading for Green Christians and other spiritually and ecologically minded types.

(This review was originally written on April 9, 2007.)

If Tom Robbins wrote a Clancy novel under the influence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Crying of Lot 49, & Silent Spring

Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller
Neal Stephenson
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988


He considers himself a "Toxic Spiderman," the media refer to him as the "Granola James Bond," and the blurb on the back of the book describes protagonist Sangamon Taylor as a "New Age Sam Spade." One thing he ain't, unfortunately, is a well-developed character with family, friends, etc. Amazingly enough, this lack of character development doesn't hurt the rollicking story one whit. In fact, from the first page, the reader is on a thrilling Zodiac ride around the toxic Boston Harbor, into which something a little nastier than tea is being dumped.

Add regular substance use (typically, but not always, following Sangamon's Principle that "the simpler the molecule, the better the drug"), a Satanic heavy metal band, a handful of bigwig corporate criminals, Taylor's penchant for the media-savvy "invironmintle" spectacle and noir-ish first person narration, and Stephenson's gift for brilliant one liners, and you get an intelligent, fun novel that somehow perfectly captures the transitional period of the late 1980s. Basically, think Tom Robbins writing a Tom Clancy novel under the influence of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Crying of Lot 49, and Silent Spring, and you'll still be way off, but close enough to enjoy the ride.

(This review was originally written on January 18, 2007.)

Seeing the end approaching

The Children of Men
P.D. James
Grand Central Publishing, 2002

The narrator Theo, an urbane professor of history in a world without a future, finds his empty, numbed life given a new sense of purpose as he is drawn into a conspiracy involving five disparate people (the Five Fishes), each with their grievances against the Warden of England (the narrator's cousin) and his totalitarian rule of a dying nation. What Theo does not realize is that one of these conspirators, a woman with whom he is falling in love, is, well, I'll let you find that out.

The novel is suspenseful and chilling, while also possessing a literary richness unlike many SF novels that deal with similar themes. I would favorably compare it with A Handmaid's Tale.