Rating: 
Summary: Who's Shaping Our Future?
Review:
Robert Bly's best yet. What happens while both parents work making money? Robert Bly, using 'Jack and the Beanstock', and other fables, addresses the children who watch too much TV, lose the ability to imagine, and remain adolescents their whole life. What can we expect as these people take control of our governmental and educational institutions?
A 'must read' for parents, but read it carefully! It may be too true!
Rating:
Summary: Who's Shaping Our Future?
Review:
Robert Bly's best yet. What happens while both parents work making money? Robert Bly, using 'Jack and the Beanstock', and other fables, addresses the children who watch too much TV, lose the ability to imagine, and remain adolescents their whole life. What can we expect as these people take control of our governmental and educational institutions?
A 'must read' for parents, but read it carefully! It may be too true!
Rating: 
Summary: a mess! Arrogant and self-serving slop!
Review: Although a fine poet and good translator, Robert Bly
is way out of his league in this seemingly erudite
cultural critique of modern society. He offers nothing
new in the way of critical analysis (most of his interesting
ideas are merely a watered-down spoon-feeding of Ortega's
Revolt of the Masses) and his partisian diatribes against
the Republican Congress are annoying, unhelpful, and miss
the mark. Although his musings about the generative birth
of the human brain, the dangerous role of television in child creativity and development, and the serious lack of
elders and the violence of youth are interesting, his
argument lacks structure, coherency, and is quite frankly, repetitive. This book is basically rhetorical masturbation!!!
Rating: 
Summary: An important critique of modern society
Review: Bly sees a break down in traditional values, with the consumer society and television being major culprits.He also blames the baby boomers because of their disrespect of authority.(However, baby boomers were the first generation to be consumerized;since, the trend has much intensified.)He shows that the young can't grow up because they don't have real adults to guide them, and the commercial interests are keeping them at an adolescent stage.As he did in "Iron John", Bly laments the absence of fathers in the family, and the impossible burdens placed on mothers.The strength of the book is his exposition of a disturbing trend in modern society: the "arrested development" of the young, which is denying them a fully human life.Bly's social theory lacks rigor, but overall this is a very important tract for the times.
Rating:
Summary: Now more than ever
Review: Bly's prophesies of ten years ago, in this book, have come true.
America is a mob of frightened children being systematically taken advantage of by precisely the sort of uncaring Elder Brothers named in this book.
Like an uncaring Elder Brother, the Bush administration will do anything it can to get elected, including lie so systematically (as does the sibling in the absence of an adult narrative) that the ecology of truth itself breaks up.
Maureed Dowd recently passed on a mere rumor, created by the clinically insane over-focus on Bush's National Guard service (which we know was exploited for his selfish ends, and his selfish ends alone). The rumor is that the stories of failure to serve are true, but the documents passed to CBS in September were fakes created by Karl Rove deliberately as a double-cross, created strictly to discredit CBS and the opposition.
When this rumor emerged, it was as if a very large segment, as large as the Ross ice Shelf, broke off never to rejoin our structures of trust and belief.
The stunt is precisely the sort of games siblings play. Precisely the sort of nonsense that occured between my own children which I wearily tried to forestall after 14 hour shifts and long-distance: for a Sibling Society hates parents and punishes parents, from welfare mothers to divorced dads, for the crime of having sex.
In a Sibling Society, siblings recognize that they have been cast into Bly's Euclidian hell in which in a post-human fashion, their ability to use language has been destroyed (as a Kant would have predicted) by systematic use of language and (in the hate-filled sneering of talk radio) "reason" to lie and to cover up.
The previous poster calls the book an "over-generalization", a favorite phrase of my generation. Seemingly so neutral, responsible, and academic, the phrase in actual use is a post-human phrase because out ability to create "generalizations" is what makes us human.
The horror is complete. Bush will be re-elected to the outrage and despair of the rest of the world, and, shortly after the election, a massive terrorist event will occur. The Bush administration (like any Elder Brother left in charge by alcoholic parents) will do nothing to stop the horror, which it will take a Steven King to recount, assuming there's anything left.
But Steven King doesn't really narrate the deepest structures which have led America to her tragic predicament, whereas Robert Bly does.
He knows why the "sixties" so quickly curdled, in a few short years, from genuine hope to Altamont and vicious cults. Western society has lost its soul.
Rating:
Summary: I was looking for a book like this
Review: I started reading this book and it was love at first sight... Everything I feel and see all around me, and more, is clearly explained here with a rare open-mindness. From my point of view, I read it like I was reading something about what will be here in the next ten years (this is how it works - what goes on in the US, goes on in Italy, only a 10,12 years later).
The author doesn't give any solution to the sense of delusion we feel: he just tries to guess what directions our growth as a people is going to take. But he knows you don't grow reading a manual, it just happends at the right time, when the right forces are in play.
I really loved this book.
Food for my mind and for my soul.
Rating:
Summary: Siblings will yawn today and yern tomorrow.
Review: In the last 20 years or so I have heard that we are going thru
a shift of paradigm in the (Western) world. Robert Bly pinpoints
the shift from a paternalistic society to what we see today.
A society that heralds the individuals right under the name
off freedom, but in reality puts good old greediness on
top. We all say me-first, and the children pays the price.
- The book is not an easy read, in spite of the shift between
the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and Mr.Blys comments.
It takes what todays siblings think they lack: TIME.
MAKE TIME.
Rating:
Summary: Siblings will yawn today and yern tomorrow.
Review: In the last 20 years or so I have heard that we are going thrua shift of paradigm in the (Western) world. Robert Bly pinpointsthe shift from a paternalistic society to what we see today. A society that heralds the individuals right under the name off freedom, but in reality puts good old greediness on top. We all say me-first, and the children pays the price. - The book is not an easy read, in spite of the shift between the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, and Mr.Blys comments. It takes what todays siblings think they lack: TIME. MAKE TIME.
Rating:
Summary: A Commentary on The Way It Is
Review: In the Sibling Society, Robert Bly has found our culture's shadows: we have failed to provide a moral compass for the young. By refusing to become fully mature themselves parents have abandoned their children to inadequate day care and hours of television and computers rather than passing on the values of the culture on a one to one basis. The effects of turning young children over to unlimited hours of television has affected their ability to focus and apply themselves to the tasks of school.
Yet school also takes some lumps from Bly. He believes that education is not what it should be because it is in collusion with the valueless sibling society that is; it does not consider what the past has to teach us.
A seeming contradiction is Bly's discomfort with authority of any sort yet he expresses a longing for the order that mature uses of authority would bring.
Promise Keepers, a men's organization that asks for responsible maturity, has missed the mark according to the author by ignoring the good gains made by women in the past thirty years. He recognizes the need for mutuality between men and women.
At the age of 70, he reflects upon the changes brought about by neglecting to teach the collective wisdom everyone took for granted a generation or two ago. He has lived through turbulent times and given a great deal of thought to what has happened in families, the leadership of this country, the media and their effects upon the young generation. Bly's view will not be popular with those who have taken popular culture for granted. For example, he believes that western movies have affected the psyches of males in our society by overturning the bases for a civilized and moral society in favor of a macho male code.
Reagan and Bush come in for hard criticism for leadership styles that disregarded the good of the whole by favoring the rich to the detriment of the environment and to the detriment of those who work hard to get ahead and cannot.
Poet and storyteller, Bly loves metaphor and for this reason, his ideas are sometimes difficult for readers to understand. He often quotes transcendent writers from our culture such as Emily Dickenson and Henry David Thoreau as well as from cultures around the world including Kabir and Rumi. He is in love with the transcendent in a non traditional way.
While the Sibling Society deals with important issues in an original and provocative way, the book is an over-generalization, lacks clarity, and often sounds downright peevish and cranky by ignoring the outstanding work of some parents, teachers and youngsters. Bly has failed to give their successes any praise. But it was probably not his wish to give a more balanced view.
Rating: 
Summary: Fairy tale interpretations, entertaining but goes nowhere
Review: One does not have to believe in a men's movement to read Robert Bly's Iron John, and having read it I thought I knew exactly where Bly would go with Sibling Society. But after reading this book, I have begun to really question what Bly is trying to accomplish with his books. He has gone from dealing with the issue of absent fathers to taking on all social problems (as though he at first thought applying what he presented in Iron John would provide the solution), causing his good-humored style to grow tense and anxious. Iron John read like listening to someone who knew what you were facing and tried to bring some awareness of its common meaning. This book appears to seem like listening to your grandfather telling you what's wrong with your generation, and he ultimately seems to imply TV and profit-driven advertising. The rebel-without-a-cause rebellion has succeeded in pop culture, and adults and maturity are unwelcome. But Bly is runing the risk of presenting a good analysis and a good remedy, but lacking a good fit between the two. Is the problem simply our being overly preoccupied with the media (or is this only what one absorbs when one attempts to both understand and remedy society based on what the media dishes out)? Is the problem fathers are at work all day or fathers who are absent completely (from divorce). Do we solve the problems of divorce by introducing an initiation ritual for those affected? Or is he now saying that the solution is no longer one created by the Industrial Revolution but from one that has arisen only in the last few decades? In attempting to analyze social ills, he is over-extending his philosophy. The book, however, is filled with absorbing pieces, but it never congeals to provide a genuine cause or solution. The writing also fails sometimes when he assumes we know everything he does about poetry and such and so is too vague.
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