Philosophy Books

I am very satisfied with the quality of the book and the expedience of the delivery.

The Skin That We Speak, by Lisa Delpit, is a collection of essays written by various authors about the impact of language in the classroom. The author identifies the purpose of the book as the exploration of "the links between language and identity, between language and political hierarchy, and between language and cultural conflict." The book is divided into three sections starting with an individual inward look into languages, a examination of the consequences of language attitudes in the classroom, and finishes with a look at the language of teachers and what they need to know to become effective in the classroom. The author titled the book, The Skin That We Speak, because "just as our skin provides us with a means to negotiate our interactions with the world - our language plays an equally pivotal role in determining who we are." For each of us our language becomes intimately connected to our identity.
Overall, this was a good book. Because it was composed of so many short essays, it made the book easy to divide into sections and read it quickly. The essays were all very well written and easy to understand the authors' purpose and its connection to the book. IT contained a nice mixture of personal stories, research, and even some ideas that could be directly used in the classroom. I think that it would be an excellent book for all teachers, new and old, to read. It opened my eyes to all the different aspects of the English language that I never realized existed and how those aspects can affect all students in my classroom. It has caused me to reflect on how I use language in my classroom on a daily basis. This book has allowed me to realize how all students can struggle with language issues in so many different ways, and how we need to be sensitive to it as classroom teachers.

An interesting look at differences in language -- accent, vocabulary, and dialect. This book explores the judgements that people, even young children, make when they hear a voice. Well-rounded and very pragmatic about solutions. Doesn't just say 'Oh, people shouldn't judge each other.' Because, like it or not, we do.

In ethics you find two sorts of reasoning:
1) One that wants to 'delimit' ethics;
allow them to do what they want.
2) One that wants to add further limits to your moral
plane.
Ethics has been argued from a social point of view:
that anthropologically speaking some restrictions
like those on incest and child abuse are universal.
The mid-ground seems to be in marriage laws
and sexual conduct: with the south sea islands on
one side and Boston Ladies of society on the other?
Historically it appears that break down in the values
of family and moral conduct go hand in hand with
decline in the culture. The fall of the Soviet Union
and Communism seems to be tied not with the ideals
of that cultural set, but the adherence to a moral conduct
where the ends justify the means.
Innocents with political and religious ideals died in Siberian camps.
There is no "Ambiguity" in clear wrongs to innocents
to promote a political set of ideas or a leader
like Stalin. Philosophically one can't say
that feminism should be tied to an existentialist doctrine
or that the natural world's lack of ethics means that
we are left to chose our own logical solution
to the decision problems. Harming others in your own selfish self interest isn't in the area of "ambiguity".
Social responsibility is a force that alters history
and is self-organizing: giving up ethical constraints
for your own ends will be the fall.
These are my own sharp words to answer Simone de Beauvior's words.

Existence.. it's meaning is never fixed, it must constantly be won. This book examines Existence and it's meaning in a humans life. French Philosopher Simone De Beauvoir talks of Nihilism, Surrealism, Existentialism, Objectivity, and a persons ethics and values in life. Beauvoir also tries to resolve some problems Sartre had with trying to work out Existentialist Ethics. Also discusses recognizing your own freedom and taking charge of your life.

Despite being shorter than most Philosophy books this is by no means a cakewalk to read. Its a challenging book but it will force you to think. It is brilliant. This is Philosophy at its finest.

This is an excellent and original work of philosophy, closely related to the contemporary ideas of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but quite unique and not reducible to their work. I find it to be one of the best books (indeed one of the few books) to use to teach existentialism in introductory classes. I recommend skipping the first chapter, because it is self-consciously "literary," (in an obscure way), and contributes nothing essential to the book. Chapter 2 is the core of the book, and it is an incredible and compelling piece of writing that brilliantly discusses the distinctive nature of childhood experience, and then develops a dialectic of "bad faith" that offers a sort of system for understanding personality types--ways, that is, of embracing (imperfectly) our freedom. The third chapter studies politics in a very thoughtful way, (though I find it is often lost on my intro students because they just don't have enough experience of political realities to appreciate the significance of what she is saying). This text is often wrongly belittled by commentators (and, indeed, de Beauvoir herself wrongly said disparaging things about it), but I think it is one of the classic texts of existential phenomenology and deserves to be widely read.

"There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force him to perform acts which make no sense to him, as when one empties and fills the same ditch indefinitely, when one makes soldiers who are being punished march up and down, when one forces a schoolboy to copy lines."

What will the modern man do when slapped in the face with the absurdity of his own existence? Become an adventurer, passionate, serious, intellectual? Where will his values come from when there are no values -- how will he create them out of nothing? Is it easier to adopt a game full of illusions created by someone else? de Beauvoir forces the reader to come face to face with the absolute absurdity of the human condition, and then, proceeds to develop a dialectic of ambiguity that will enable the reader not to master the chaos, but to create with it. This book will probably alter many well-rooted philosophical perceptions -- so, reader beware! I could have done without the dramatic image of how the Nazi's conditioned themselves to become insensitive to human suffering (de Beauvoir used as an extreme example), but oh well... This book is a keeper, and very quotable! Highly recommended, especially for those diving into the Realm of Existentialism! --Katharena Eiermann, 2006

This is an excellent and original work of philosophy, closely related to the contemporary ideas of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but quite unique and not reducible to their work. I find it to be one of the best books (indeed one of the few books) to use to teach existentialism in introductory classes. I recommend skipping the first chapter, because it is self-consciously "literary," (in an obscure way), and contributes nothing essential to the book. Chapter 2 is the core of the book, and it is an incredible and compelling piece of writing that brilliantly discusses the distinctive nature of childhood experience, and then develops a dialectic of "bad faith" that offers a sort of system for understanding personality types--ways, that is, of embracing (imperfectly) our freedom. The third chapter studies politics in a very thoughtful way, (though I find it is often lost on my intro students because they just don't have enough experience of political realities to appreciate the significance of what she is saying). This text is often wrongly belittled by commentators (and, indeed, de Beauvoir herself wrongly said disparaging things about it), but I think it is one of the classic texts of existential phenomenology and deserves to be widely read.

Don't buy this book if you are trying to learn TM.

This book is about how David Lynch came up with the ideas for his movies and TV shows. In the book, he also explains how he got into the movie business in the first place. This part was very interesting to me as he explains that his first career choice was that of an artist/painter.

Regarding TM, he says that he became interested in TM because his sister was doing it. So to learn TM, he went to a school and took lessons. From the time of his lessons forward, Lynch says he has practiced TM every day. He credits TM for increasing his level of creativity and allowing him to maintain a positive outlook about life.

This book is a strange mix of super-short essays on life, art, film and transcendental meditation. It doesn't deliver tons of depth on any of those topics, and if you're a big Lynch fan, you've probably read many of the anecdotes before, but Lynch's quirkiness and folksy charm is always welcome. He pushes the transcendental meditation pretty hard, but it's obviously a big part of his life and very important to his creative proces. I'm a big David Lynch fan, so I enjoyed this book, though I'm not sure I got much out of it. If you're not a Lynch fan, this book may leave you just scratching your head.

David has been a longtime inspiration for me, so the creative thoughts and advice in this delicious snack of a book were welcome words. The fact that myself and many other artists are writing about the same subject is proof positive that the deep well of the Unified Field is experiencing some coalescence. My novels about "art changing reality" will soon have to move to the nonfiction section if David's consciousness-based education is well-received around the globe. How wonderful it will be when these students can reach The Creator State and truly change our world into a more positive place to exist.

Thank you David!
Sandra Walter
author, The Creator State

Very interesting I got the CD so book on tape worked he has a funny little soothing voice but good solid advice on meditation,and life in general...

This work by DAVID LYNCH is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in his art. I have been a Lynch fan for many years and always looked up to him as a filmaker, so when this book came out promising the secrets of David's creative process, I had to have it.
The book doesn't disappoint there, David explains every angle of his creative thinking, and relays many insightful and uplifting stories from his life. The wisdom held here pertains to life not just to art.
Through it all Mr. Lynch points to one thing, one recommendation, that he claims has given him the source of his remarkable wellness: TM. For those unfamiliar TM (Transcendental Meditation) is a technique for reaching higher consciousnesses taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. ([...]) His devotion to this group is certainly cultish in nature.
I recently went to the introductory TM lecture (to see what lynch was talking about). In a nutshell the TM movement is a cult that uses a scientifically substantiated meditation with a placebo to extract money from the participants. The moment they told me I had to pay 2500 dollars to gain access to a one hour training I was out and looking for answers.
If you want to know exactly what Lynch is talking about with meditation, either get a scholarship from the Lynch foundation or visit one of these groups: [...]
This is a great read, uplifting and lots of fun. I highly recommend for any Lynch fan, or anyone interested in the effects of conscious consciousness control. Just be wary of the TM people, they have something great to offer at an insane price.

Buber's not at all pedantic about his philosophy here. The book's structure utilizes a lyrical simplicity to broach the "between" that, in the full service of irony, has no spatial coordinates at all. Buber contentedly points at (more than reaches towards) the metaphysical glue that is the fingerprint of something much greater, and he uses repetition to soften the blow of its intellectual uncertainty. I, for one, think of Buber as akin to Kierkegaard (I'm sure to evoke scowls for overlooking the difference between Buber's traditional role in his religious community and Kierkegaard's arrant iconoclasm), especially in light of this work, which gives the terrifying recesses of irrationality a new humanism.

This book is difficult to read or to understand. Perhaps something has been greatly lost in the translation or else it is a complete hoax. I found it to be full of disjointed ideas and apparent nonsense.

I was a philosophy major in college and I've read a lot of works out there. I can tell you that this is by far my favorite book. Buber's ideas are so simple yet so profound - he offers a way to be in the world that is real, useful, and ultimately fulfilling. This book has helped me in my business relations (I work in sales) as well as my personal relations. It is also beautifully written (translated from the German). If you want to be inspired, read this book!

Ich und Du ("I and Thou") is one of those philosophical texts which, like Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, consist of the elaboration of a single thought. The thought is stated up front: human beings have a double relation to the world: Ich-Du and Ich-Es. The Ich-Es relation reifies and separates things out (whether they be "internal" or "external" things), while the Ich-Du relation is nothing but relation itself. The Eswelt is a world of nebeneinander and the laws that govern nebeneinander, while the Duwelt is a seamless experience of "presence." The Ich that reaches out and the Du that reaches back (neither of which reflects on "what" they individually are) constitute an exclusive circular reality (Ausschließlickheit) untroubled by causal and spatiotemporal regress. To be sure, the Duwelt collapses into the Eswelt, which means that the Ich and the Du degenerate into so many instances of Es, but there is always the possibility of resurrecting the Ich & Du hidden within the Es.

There are different kinds of Ich-Du relation: 1) with nature (presumably before we know to call it "nature"), in which case we stand at the "threshold of speech"; 2) with human beings, in which case speech coincides with the Ich-Du relation; and 3) with "spiritual beings," in which case the relation itself is speechless, but it can generate speech. (This third relation is very much in the spirit of romantic poesis.) A special subset of the third relation is the relation to God, who is the Du beyond every particular Du. God is the only Du with whom our relation cannot degrade into an Ich-Es relation, because there is no Es beyond every individual Es for which God could be mistaken. (There are, too be sure, many things which people falsely call "God," things which are really part of nature or of ourselves, such as Schleiermacher's Abhangigkeitsgefühl or Rudolf Otto's Kreaturgefühl, as Buber specifically points out).

What is essential in every case is the duality of the relation. Buber warns against interpreting the Ich-Du as a self-relation of the Ich (i.e. Hegel) or as a kind of "symmetry breaking" (to use a term from physics), which can be restored to oneness at the proper mystical "heat."

One of the explicit objects of this text is to move beyond liberal Protestant theology, i.e. beyond a theology that grounds the religious in some quality of subjective experience. For Buber, religion occurs before there is a subject, and once we arrive at the subject, we find it impossible to even think of religion apart from the subject's relation to another. Buber exploits the pronoun Du ("you") to draw our attention to an experience of encounter (rather than reflection or feeling) inadequately addressed by rational philosophy, and he employs this experience in the service of religion.

Buber may not go far enough, however. He moves beyond the subject, but he does not move beyond religion-as-experience, which is the real drawback of liberal theology. In a sense, Buber is freeing God from the subject only to bind him down to "relation" (Beziehung), which hovers somewhere between subject and object, and is not obviously "religious" at all. There is nothing in Buber's argument protecting it, for example, from a biological-evolutionary explanation of the Ich-Du relation, or a psychoanalytic one. Buber overcomes one obstacle only to land himself before another one.

Sorry if that was a little technical.

Ich und Du (badly) translated as I And Thou, by Martin Buber, takes me beyond any book I've ever read before. I had to read it with another selection, because after a few pages, my soul became saturated, and I had to read something else.

I am at a loss for how to describe this book. The Third Testament hints at the idea.

We construct the world in one of two ways: either through a relationship, which engages our entire being in the encounter (an I-You relationship), or through experiencing objects as the means to an end, engaging only a part of ourselves in an I-It relationship.

From this simple seed, Buber grows three chapters and an afterward. Walter Kaufman, who translated the work, wrote a 50 page introduction, which is in itself a wonder to experience.

The experience of reading the book was amazing, although I'm not sure that I learned as much as I might have. What Buber did was to give me words to explain how I believe, what I experience, and what I long for. I must read it again. And again. And again.

Think about life as we know it.
Now think about a book that can convincingly explain it as an algorithm and... well, nothing more!
Now imagine the same book capable to thrill, amuse and inspire the reader about science, human values, ethics, consciousness, artificial intelligence and more; This is 'Darwin's dangeorus idea' : quite simply a fundamental book about the sheer beauty, simplicity, reach and mind-blowing implications of the theory of evolution by Darwin. It is firmly in my all time top ten book list.

To fully grasp Dennett's arguments in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", lots of preparatory reading is required on various authors and topics including, but not limited to: Stephen Jay Gould whom the author targets his most scathing criticisms of, Gould's colleague, Richard Lewontin, American linguist and philosopher, Noam Chomsky, mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, cognitive scientist, Jerry Fodor, adaptationism and gradualism, reductionism, saltationism, memetics etc. Dennett spends little time in introducing the reader to the works of these authors and their ideas, and instead, debunks anything and everything that attempts to weaken Darwin's natural selection theory.

In a heated and publicized exchange resulting largely from Dennett's attack on Gould with an entire chapter of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" devoted to discrediting him, Gould, who is considered the foremost authority on espousing the views on evolution called Dennett a "Darwinian Fundamentalist" who has reduced biological and cultural evolution to a largely mindless algorithmic process.

Dennett introduces two new metaphors of cranes and skyhooks which he uses repeatedly in his arguments. Cranes are the lifting mechanisms facilitating the design of organisms. They are grounded and explainable. Skyhooks are imaginary, unsupported and supposedly capable of advancing organisms in leaps and bounds in unexplainable ways. Dennett morphs some of the ideas of his detractors into skyhooks, and because skyhooks cannot exist, they have to be either falsehoods or reduced to cranes.

The subtitle of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" is "Evolution and the Meanings of Life", but throughout the 500 plus pages, Dennett dabbles in hostile territory, unapologetically attacking critics of natural selection as the primary engine of evolution. Perhaps this book should have been divided into two parts; one titled "Evolution and the Meanings of Life", and the other, "Duel of the Titans."

While Dennett comes off, at times, sounding pompous and headstrong, that may simply be because he is, in my opinion, correct about certain aspects of the human mind's ability to cope with conflicting beliefs. My personal religious beliefs aside, I do feel that, at a point, religion and evolutionary science do come into direct conflict. Some of Dennett's thoughts and ideas, in conjunction with Dawkins's ideas, can run a little wayward of what I would call science, but simply because the ideas are blended with speculation and opinion. For further reading on the evolutionary perspective of religious thought, I would recommend Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer. Again, I really enjoyed the book, my personal disagreements notwithstanding.

This is not an easy read. It's rocky, at times pedantic, somewhat oblique, and about as picky as a book on logic. Dennett has difficulty keeping the reader engaged in his point, as his examples tend to be somewhat obscure at times, and his verbosity often masks the clarity of his vision. I sometimes had to turn back to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself what he was trying to say. Luckily, he seems to understand this, and provides summary statements after each chapter -- good thing, because without these navigational aids, he can be difficult to follow.

However, what Dennett has achieved here will stand the test of time because it is USEFUL. He is able to look at all the objections to the theory of evolution by natural selection and take them apart logically, scientifically, and heuristically. These objections are not limited to the religious variety, but also include scientific backlashes to Darwin like those of Gould, Chomsky, and Kaufmann. In other words, if you want to understand the breadth and depth of Darwin's theory, this is a masterwork.

What it lacks is, unfortunately, what the back cover promises: a look at Darwinism in the light of ethics, morality, and culture. Sure, Dennett devotes a (delicious) chapter to the topic, invoking Nietzsche and Hobbes, and there are scattered sections in the book that are like mind candy for the intellectually thirsty reader. It's a good thing those brilliant sections are scattered randomly throughout the book, because they may be the only thing that keeps the general reader interested.

Unless you're a biologist or anthropologist, you may want to read something shorter and more to the point. This book is for scholars who want exactitude. And to those scholars, I say read this book as quickly as possible, because it's VERY hard to come back to after putting down for a week or so.

This book is a philosophical work rather than straight science, the author does an excellent job of looking at all the various species of darwinian theories and their mutations, from scientific,to pop culture to philosophical,and subjecting them to a harsh environment of critical thought and logic, so selecting out the fittest for survival at the end of the book.I may be a bit biased as I have come to the same conclusions as the author,that there is only one true version of natural selection that works with no god or intelligent design, nor any adaption via senses, or experience of any organism, it is pure random mutation followed by the environment killing off what is not the best,strongest or most efficient. It is certainly not the sort of touchy-feely stuff some people seem to seek to explain things, its cold and harsh,cruel and unforgiving, although the author keeps it less harsh that my own view of it, and rightly states in a way,that just because it is harsh,doesnt change the reality of how we feel it and percieve it, love is still love no matter its mechanical, survival,or other basis. If you feel that describing something like life or love in a cold hard scientific way will change your view of it ,ruin it for you, if you are that open to suggestion, dont read this book. If you want a great philosophical arguement to open your mind and cut through the B.S. and sugar coating,if you think in a scientific way, and yes it can be quite a harsh and cold look at things, then this book is an excellent read. The author has done an enormous amount of research and distilled it into one volume, and some of the arguements or view points will be unknown to most people,and quite useless in a way, but seeing so many view points is always good for anyone who likes to think deeply and be challenged. I didnt learn alot from this book that I hadnt already figured out for myself using common sense,yet really enjoyed it for its excellent arguements and insights, its enjoyable for the philosophical side even if you have no interest in the subject matter. Also highly recommended is the authors book on consciousness, although its fairly hard going as the concepts are alot harder to grasp than evolutions mechanisms.

In Praise of Shadows is a very readable and succinct essay regarding Japanese aesthetics and their gradual Westernization around the turn of the twentieth century. While it provides a good glimpse of what Tanizaki felt about his country, and gives good perspective to better understanding his other works, ultimately its not very informative about Japan. Many of the conclusions about westernization tend to be largley exaggerated. In addition, the picture he paints of Japanese aesthetics is overly romanticisized as well. While it is very readable, and at times interesting, if you read it, use it as a character study of Tanizaki, but if your looking for a good introduction to Japanese aesthetics take this one with several metric tons of salt.

I took a class on Japanese culture last semester, and this was one of our texts. While Tanizaki's views provide an interesting perspective, this whole essay is really just an old man talking about how traditional Japanese aesthetics are good and Western-influenced aesthetics are not. He repeatedly insults and dismisses Western ideas of beauty simply because they are Western. He may well be right, at the very least in certain aspects, by saying that the Japanese ideals of beauty are best, but his refusal to give a second thought to Western ideals makes his point moot. It's the basic fallacy of origin.

Writing almost 70 years ago, Tanizaki put great value on an unique sense of beauty in Japan and regretted that it was disappearing as poeple were trying to follow the Western way of life. Tanizaki unhesitatingly admitted that the Western culture was in many respects superior to that of Japan, and that it was in a sense inevatble that Japan should imitate the Western lifestyle for the improvement of its living standard,and that in the process Japanese traditional lifestyle should be to some extent abandoned. But, he emphasized with deep emotion how different the things would have been had Japan developed its own science and technology consistent with its unique sense of beauty, and had it not been compelled to abandone some of its own traditions in favor of the Western lifestyle.

The Japanese have an aesthetic concept called "Wabi Sabi." This term consists of two words. "Wabi" literally means "poverty," but in the aesthetic context it stands for simplicity; "Sabi" is literally "solitude, loneliness," and for aesthetic purposes it means something like natural impermanence. Wabi Sabi encourages, as one observer put it, a profound feeling of inner melancholy, and an appreciation of quietly clear and calm, well-seasoned and refined simplicity.

Andrew Juniper's "Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence" summarizes the concept by saying that "the term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. ... Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things." (pages 2 and 51)

In order to appreciate Junichiro Tanizaki's 50-page pamphlet "In Praise of Shadows" it helps to keep the concept of Wabi Sabi in mind. While many people would object to Tanizaki's anti-modernist view of art (and call it "reactionary" or "nationalist"), it is in fact a contemporary take on an ancient aesthetic concept that favors obliqueness (shadows) over brightness, weathered naturalness over functional novelty, the crude over the polished, and - ultimately - irrationality over rationality.

Tanizaki's essay contains good examples of Wabi Sabi, and a few peculiarly funny ones that reek of Zen humor: "one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature." (page 4) To a Western reader this sounds like unmitigated satire. But it is not. Tanizaki is serious about this stuff.

In sum, I find "In Praise of Shadows" a very entertaining illustration of an important Japanese aesthetic concept, written by one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. I bought the Leete's Island Books edition of the text, which I review here. Later I found that exactly the same translation is contained in Phillip Lopate's collection "The Art of the Personal Essay." It may be better value for money.

Of course, aesthetics are always a matter of taste. Speaking of which, "wasabi" - if you recall the title of this review - is Japanese horseradish.

In this classic 1933 essay, novelist Jun'ichiro Tanizaki explores the idea of shadows as a key note of Japanese aesthetics. Shadows are a natural function of traditional Japanese architecture - large rooms with broad eaves to keep rain and snow away from paper walls naturally create richly dark and quiet interiors, where shadows seem to have a presence all of their own. Tanizaki extends this idea, following the shadows from temple toilets to the darkness of lacquered tableware, into the folds of women's traditional clothing, and onto the Japanese stage. Some of his notions are purely fanciful - that gold was only valued by the ancients for the way it reflected candlelight; that the Japanese have an implicit distaste for their own skin given the way the light reveals its imperfect whiteness - while he is spot-on when it comes to articulating the beauty of No actors, and the way candlelight changes the quality of a restaurant meal. The essay's meandering structure might surprise those more accustomed to a rigorous argument, but as Thomas J. Harper notes in his insightful afterword, it invokes the Japanese artistic tradition of following the line wherever it leads. Along the way, Tanizaki makes a none too subtle critique of Western incursion into Japanese life. He mourns the displacement of candlelight by neon, the patina of a well-used bowl being reinterpreted as 'filth', and the white faces of Kabuki made monstrous by American spotlights. Tanizaki's essential contribution with this enduring piece is to remind us of something which, in the West, is so often forgotten: the quality of the materials and light from which a space is constructed - for light really is a tangible architectural element - will dictate on the subtle level the quality of human experience possible in that space. Modern life is too brilliantly lit, which might be why it so often lacks reverence and solemnity.

This book offers some excellent insights but lacks something that all big picture political/economic books must have - humor. That weakness makes it a long, heavy slog that is nearly worth the time spent.

This is one of the radical books of the '60s --read: life-changing/ world/ changing. About a million people love this book (I've told you a thousand times to stop exaggerating), and a zillion have reviewed it. I merely refer to a little-known interview in the Christian Century magazine with E.F. Schumacher regarding the chapter in this book, "Buddhist Economics." The author revealed that is was to be called "Catholic Economics," but the anti-Catholic (and anti-ethnic) press of the time was so successful and relentless in its propaganda that he changed the chapter's title.

In another interview he told a story of speaking at the Buddhist Naropa Institute, where he tried to relate the book's principles to Buddhist philosophy. "No, we want you to tell us about Christianity," replied the predominantly Asian audience. All of which underscores Chesterton's dictum that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried. For those interested in tracking down the literature, there was also a significant article in the Whole Earth Review called "Who Cut Down the Sacred Tree?" showing that monks and nuns have long observed ecological practices and made use of what is now called appropriate technology. Schumacher took the title of another of his books, "A Guide for the Perplexed" from the Mediaeval Jewish author Moses Maimonides, again demonstrating that it is not the ancients but we moderns (and post-moderns), mad devotees of the myth of progress, who have forgotten that "small is beautiful."

A bit outdated but given that it was written in the 70s this book is very inspiring ans still very applicable (if not even more applicable today than in the past). In any event it is truly a classic in ecological economics. There are certainly many critics of this book but its significance is immense. I must say that we economists really need to work on our writing abilities because not all of the works are easy to read for non-economist audience. Yet Schumacher manages just that.

I received this book as a gift, and found it unreadable. For example, EFS says cost/benefit analysis "is a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless is given a price". This is meaningless rhetoric to me. It also assumes that only economics provides a guide to human behavior. Or that all economic analysis is totally rational. Schumacher questioned every assumption of "economic science" using theories from the anarchist tradition. Schumacher claimed neocolonialism is the result of politics, not economic principles. But doesn't class and sectional interests drive politics? His advocacy of a search for inward spiritual space, and a rejection of the real world of politics and economics, makes this book part of the problem and not part of the solution.

The 'Introduction' says Gandhi wanted to use "labor-intensive manufacture and handicrafts" (p.5). Milovan Djilas said it was important for newly liberated countries to use mass production ("The New Class"). The historical record over the past centuries should tell you who was right or wrong. Liberating revolutions result in more production and other benefits for the people; else they're not liberating. Unlimited economic growth overlooks the availability of basic resources and the capacity of the environment. But there's always some natural problem that causes a correction.

This is a very verbose book whose arguments rest on unquestioned assumptions. Since it was published in 1973 Thatcher's regime destroyed Britain's coal industry to make them dependent on imported oil and gas. We've seen what happened after they divided and privatized the railroads. But who benefited from these political decisions?

Part II Chapter 3 notes that western Europe "deliberately destroyed nearly half of their coal industries". But the economy in neocolonialist countries will always suffer to benefit the imperialist ruling country. American was a net petroleum exporter until 1967, and influenced Saudi Arabia and Iran (just like Great Britain did previously). You can also consider the actions of Jimmy Carter against nuclear reactors. France and Japan use nuclear power, they have no oil. Saudi Arabia uses nuclear power so they can profitably sell their oil abroad. Those who criticized this book showed good judgment and wisdom. You can read this book and judge its worth for yourself.

I've never been all that interested in macroeconomics, but intrigued by the title, I gave Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher a try. It was a long read, but a good one, and I culled interesting insights from every chapter. Schumacher's visionary simplicity with the largest elements of society were radical 30 years ago, but incredibly relevant, then and today.

A fair portion of the book is spent emphasizing the way our economy is unsustainable and how quickly we use up our natural resources. Schumacher also explains how little consideration was put towards pollution until it was too late. In the folksy way of a 60s radical, he speaks about the importance of the land in a way that is neither hollow nor flippant, but full of wisdom and grace.

"The whole point is to determine what constitutes progress." What is progress? What should aid to the third world look like? These questions are where Schumacher particularly shines, explaining a need for intermediate technologies to improve the quality of life for everyone and not just investments which only improve the quality of life for the highest classes and leave the lower ones even more destitute.

"No system or machinery or economic doctrine or theory stands on its own feet: it is invariably built on a metaphysical foundation, that is to say, upon man's basic outlook on life, its meaning and its purpose. I have talked about the religion of economics, the idol worship of material possessions, of consumption and the so-called standard of living, and the fateful propensity that rejoices in the fact that `what were luxuries to our fathers have become necessities for us.'" wrote Schumacher. What do our economic values say about us?