A Language Older Than Words

Rating:
Summary: Required reading for human beings.
Review: It's not often that I can say that a book has truly changed my life. Perhaps twice before. One was the first book I ever read which taught me that the Airplane was in the blue sky followed by a kind of realization that I was in fact, reading. One was a book I read when I was twelve which made me realize that a sixteen year old boy in New York City escaping from a Boarding School might think and feel the same way I did. And the one that I just got through reading. A Language Older than Words has changed my perception of my perceptions. It has made me realize that I can hear Spiders, Birds, Trees and I am now working on Lettuce! That the world around me is constanly communicating to me in ways that I had not allowed myself to understand before. It's as though the most gorgeous Beethoven was playing in headphones that I didn't know I had on.
I hear so much more now than I ever did before.
Thank you Derrick!

Rating:
Summary: Blast Open Your Perceptions
Review: Denial is such a tricky thing to talk about. It is designed to protect us from truths we absolutely see exist but find too frightening or upsetting to our world view, our sense of safety and stability, to acknowledge.

We know they are there.

We look away, and only talk with others who wont mention anything that makes us feel or think about the horror, the pain and the fear we live with daily in our insane, abusive culture of destruction and denial. And anyone who talks about the truth, who causes us to see, must be silenced.

Derrick Jensen will not be silenced.

A Language Older Than Words is an intelligent and unrelenting exploration of the patterns of abuse and denial in our culture that extend into every aspect of our lives, our relationships with each other, with women, children, and the natural world. Jensen shouts where others fear to whisper, and validates our natural knowledge that we are an inseparable part of the living world, and our culture of denial is silencing and killing everything.

This courageous, from the gut, truth telling rips down those layers of denial revealing how we have been taught to fool ourselves and how much of the experience of being human we have lost. Because in order to ignore the suffering (our own and that of most of the other creatures on the planet) we must also shut ourselves off from our own experience and the wonder, joy, complexities, and ecstasy of living in relationship with others and the natural world. Jensen's inspiring writing offers a way back to fully exploring and experiencing our own lives.

A Language Older Than Words is a passionate and poetic catalyst that will blast open your perceptions and give you courage to face your denial and abandon your fears. It is a gift of welcoming us back to what it truly means to be human, to be alive, to have relationship with all living things. I highly recommend this book to everyone. It is a springboard to so much further understanding, experience, and discovery. Jensen is truly one of the most important philosophers writing today.

Don't wait another day to read this book!!!

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly confused logic by author wounds noble goal
Review: Jensen seems like a good man. Sexually abused as a child, he has dedicated his life to saving the environment, for the sake of the salmon, bears, trees, and us. This is noble. However, his logic at times takes giant leaps, or his facts are distorted.

I am a man that wants everything to be proven to me. (Interestingly enough, because of this, I'm Catholic and not an atheist.) However, Jensen does not prove to me that interspecies communication is as real as he thinks it is. He cites a study saying most people believe in it. Out of curiosity, I did a small scale survey of friends and coworkers. I only found one who thinks interspecies communication is natural. They are stated something like, "Yes, I believe in interspecies communication. That's how we train dogs. BUT it only works with domesticated animals." Could this fact have been overlooked by Jensen?

Jensen then uses the story of his dog his chicken. His dog would frequently put the chicken in his mouth as a toy. Jensen claims that his dog understood that he was to no longer do this to the chicken because Jensen said so. Yet, Jensen admits it took many weeks of yelling at the dog to stop. Isn't it possible the dog was TRAINED and didn't understand the first time?

His other errors deal with what has happened when the culture of Europe met people of other races. He specifically attacks Christians for being "bad" to the natives. I would most certainly agree the Europeans were "bad" to the natives, but I surely would not say they all were or that this is Christinaity's fault (something he seems to understand little about. Jesus was not the first environmentalist.) Names like Blessed Juniperro Serra comes to mind, who taught irrigation to groups of Native Americans in the west. Or Damien Vesteur, who worked amongst the sick of Hawaii. His attack on Christianity is unfounded.

Although the book does raise good points (that we are in serious trouble), his solutions are lacking, and so are his attacks on what the real problem is. Therefore, I cannot recommend this book to others.

Rating:
Summary: Pointless, yet avant garde diatribe
Review: Jensen has a slew of problems and decides that the entire world works the way his childhood did. As an abused child who doesn't actually become a sentient person until his later 20's, he explains his view on Western Civilization where everyone is abused or an abuser, and one's membership to either group vascillates. He also seems to put forth the notion that Western Civilization sprung up as an entity not influenced by history or affected by human nature. He quotes many different sources without providing citation or credit for most, and I have discovered that it is usually quoted out of context. As is becoming increasingly avant garde these days among the environmentalists searching for peer approval through platitudes, he ends the book with the statement that there are no solutions after quipping midway about all the trees the publication of this book has destroyed. While I would be equally as suspect of a book that wrapped up the problem in one tidy little solution, the notion that there are none is absolutely ridiculous and demeans everyone who has fought and suffered thus far. I found his arguments and support for them to be lacking and horribly suppressive to any contradictory evidence. He seems to start off in the right place with many different ideas, including the argument that all of nature communicates, but then contorts them with his notion that everything is black and white. It is unfortunate that he hopelessly anthropomorphises everything in nature in order to justify why it should continue to exist. It solidifies the idea that its importance is only that which we place on it. I have met Jensen in person, asked him about several problems I had with the book, and remain unimpressed.

Rating:
Summary: Reality
Review: This book is a great inspiration to anyone. The sadness of what humanity has done to the Earth with bring to the surface your guilt. It is not too late though. Derrick Jensen is a beautiful writer. His research is outstanding. Read this book and all of his work. He is a master at what he does. You will realize that there are other people out there that think the same way as you.