A Language Older Than Words

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read!!!
Review: An amazing book!!! Everyone in our culture should be required to read this book. Derrick is honest about what he has been through and how he see's things. The book will leave you in awe and give you a different perspective on this culture of mass destruction.

Keep writing Derrick!!!

Rating:
Summary: Different . . .
Review: One doesn't have to always agree with Jensen's arguments to get a lot out his book. Indeed, his calls for dismantling civilization may provoke dismay and be misconstrued by some. Even so, this is an extremely well-written book, and endlessly thought-provoking. It's free-flowing style and rather loose organization actually make it easier, rather than more difficult, to read. Jensen's use of deeply personal and often tragic experiences to illustrate some of his points and/or back is arguments, far from being pathetic, gives this book far more weight than it would otherwise have. In light of recent events, there is one disarmingly simple statement he makes - and a point that essentially underlies the entire text - which I simultaneously find particularly troubling, meaningful and significant: "Things don't have to be the way they are."

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful Reading Experience...
Review: Derrick Jensen's latest, A LANGUAGE OLDER THAN WORDS, is one of the most uncomfortable books I've ever read. As such, I suspect it was also highly uncomfortable for him to write. Its poetic use of words and skilled syntax only serve to emphasize, not obscure, the brutal honesty that he puts forth here.

The thesis is a simple one: We are killing the world. It's Jensen's rugged, insightful, and raw analysis of how and why we're doing it that makes me shudder when I read it. Having studied many of these themes before (well-written in books like Daniel Quinn's ISHMAEL), I've not encountered this subject in a way that touches the nerves that Jensen has managed to tap into. Killing the world, after all, is a horrifying thing, and Jensen exposes the horror by shining a bright light on it and analyzing where it comes from.

It's a brave book and a bold statement. And one that will be hated by many, particularly those who have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. The bottom line is this: if you read this book and find yourself affected by it, there's a chance for all of us. If you read this book and wonder what all the hoo-hah is about, you're too far gone and wrapped up in our cultural ways and vision to ever find your way out. If you read this book and find it threatening to your way of life, then you're the enemy, and you need to reconsider which side of the line you stand on.

I can't think of a higher compliment to give a book than to wish that I'd had it within me to write it myself. I wish I had this kind of insight and courage, and I'm grateful that Jensen does.

Rating:
Summary: For readers with heart only!
Review: If you can't handle the truth, then don't bother. If you demand excellence and honesty from your literature, then don't hestitate to read this. For those of us who know in our hearts that there is something dreadfully wrong with 'the way it is' in our human world, this book is crucial to developing the understanding that we, like the Lorax, must "speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues!" To speak for the other species we must first listen and before we can listen we must accept that such a thing is possible. This book goes a long way in breaking the pattern of denial which has kept our hearts and minds frozen in a hideous world where the only thing we seem to attribute sentience and importance to is other humans, and what these other humans keep saying over and over are outright lies about who we are and what we are doing. Please read this book and know that beyond all these lies and the destruction they try to hide there is another world with another language where the few remaining indigenous tribes and all the other species we haven't destroyed yet are still willing to welcome us back and forgive us for taking so long to admit when we're wrong.

Rating:
Summary: Moving, deep, and may change your life.
Review: As I travel my own path in my life I find myself asking many of the same questions that Derrick asks himself and society in this book. My own frustrations found voice and there was a great sense of relief that perhaps a change in our culture may yet be on the way before we destroy all the things truly sacred in our lives. If only we could see that which is sacred apart from that which is in front of us. Highest recommendations if you are looking for the interrelationships of life. Deeply philisophical and bound to create more questions than answers. Yet without asking the right questions the answers are irrelavent. With warning as this book may change your soul, it did mine - and though the path is somewhat frightening - at the same time many burdens have been lifted from my spirit.

Some of my favorite passages:

"I know that beneath the fear and hatred, beneath the urge to control and destroy, far beneath the scarred shells that protect and define us, people are good. Deep down our needs are simple: apart from food, shelter, and clothing ther are the needs to love and be loved, for community, to be open to the world at large and for it to be open to us, to affect and be affected, to understand and be understood, to hear and be ehard, to accept and be accepted. it is only when we fear that these needs won't be met that we grasp at them, and in the grasping lose and chance of satisfying them. Love controlled is not love; just as sex demandes is rape and acceptance expected is subservience. Bu if we fear, that demand we must, for to fear these needs will not be met is to fear for our lives as surely as if our lack of love and acceptance were instead the absence of food and water. With these deep needs unsatisfied we waste away, shrivel and dies as from hunger or thirst. We die, but we go on surviving. the search for that which should have been there all along continues, but we can no longer recieve it, nor even recognize it." - P 98

"For nearly as long as I can remember, I've had the habit of asking people if they like their jobs. Over the yearst, about 90 percent - with the exception of my bosses at the NOAA - have said no. As I sat bored those days at my computer, I began to wonder what that percentage means, both socially and personally. I wondered what it does to each of use to spend the majority of our waking hours doing things we'd rather not do, wishing we wher outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing. We never have enough time to catch up - I never knew what that mean, but it always felt as though I were running downhill, my body falling faster than my legs could carry me - enough time to try to understand what we want to do with the so very few hours each of us are given." - PP 108-109

"We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable - physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially - to our surroundings"..."I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet." - PP 126-127

Rating:
Summary: Eye-opening must read
Review: Awesome, brave, chilling, provocative, challenging...Mr. Jensen has significantly changed the way I look at our world, my community, my direct and indirect interaction with all life. This should be read by everyone interested in saving our planet -it rings with common sense and in a unique and personal voice challenges each and every one of us to stop and listen...and demands of each and every one of us to ACT before it is too late. I will be sharing this book with as many people as I can; I will tell people about this book; I hope every library in North America stocks this book. Profound...cannot wait to read more of Mr. Jensen's thoughts. Buy it, then buy a second copy to lend.

Rating:
Summary: In Language Bolder Than Words
Review: "Every morning I wake up and ask myself whether I should write a book or blow up a dam," writes Jensen in his opening pages. "Every day I tell myself I should continue to write. Yet I'm not always convinced I'm making the right decision." This is the agony of an environmentalist and a pacifist who has come to realize that he's been throwing snowballs at army tanks. While he debates and negotiates with the polluters, the developers and the industrialists, they continue their destructive activities virtually unimpeded. How long, wonders Jensen, can we afford to go on being pacifists?

"Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It's a cozy relationship for all of us except the salmon."

Jensen, whether he realizes it or not, is the philosopher-king of the deep ecology movement. In this provocative and insightful book, he shows us that deep ecology is truly deep, not the shallow feel-good wishful thinking of the New Agers who too often represent the movement. Drawing on personal experience, anecdotal evidence, historical examples, and philosophical thought from the early sophists to Descartes, Jensen helps his readers peer over the tops of our cultural eyeglasses. He invites us to gaze at the world unfiltered by our shared myths and illusions about human progress. The earth is dying. We are the cause. We can stop it, but first we will have to begin talking about some subjects we've all agreed never to talk about.

One of Jensen's most effective tools is the use of his personal experience as an abused child as both a metaphor and an object lesson on the process we all go through in order to distance ourselves from the pain we endure and the damage we do simply by living in a "civilized" industrial society. Yet Jensen manages to open our eyes without using a pry bar. With self-deprecating humor, he chats with us in the amiable tones of an old friend sharing a beer on the back porch. This is powerful stuff delivered in an affable package. Highly recommended reading. So dangerous it could change your life-and maybe even your behavior.

Rating:
Summary: Insighful analyses marred by negative overkill
Review: A friend of mine once created a kind of collage that said, "As I am transformed, the world is tranformed." I admire the ideal expressed in my friend's collage, but I have always believed that while it is important to transform ourselves, the problems in the world and with our species require far deeper resolutions than individual work, such as meditating, projecting love, peace, etc.

Thus I do agree in spirit with a lot of what Mr. Jensen says in his 370+page book. I think that the problems in the world can only worsen if things go on as they are, but that is just my opinion. On the other hand, so far the world has gone on, despite one prediction after another, ad infinitum, by ecologically-minded people, religious extremists, etc. Thus I can only conclude that the earth and humanity are far more resilient than the predictors of doom are willing to admit.

Mr Jensen is not just an environmental extremist, he takes extreme positions on just about every facet of what he discusses. In fact the word extreme is really tame for many of the stands taken in this book. The correct term is more like in-your-face, and that might be a tame word also.

The author does have a very good handle on the causes of many of the problems in the world and with the human species. To name but a few of his points, he cites the lack of love, fear, coercion, oppression/torture of women, minorities, native peoples world-wide, and animals, and the overvaluing of money along with the obsession/overemphasis of producing (unnecessary) material goods. He discusses these points insightfully and thoroughly, and he very deftly analyses the deleterious effects of Newtonian-Cartesian reductionism on the social sciences. Also, people do live in denial about what is going on. Few question much of anything. "Ignorance is bliss" is very relevant to our times.

Yet to me the book fails badly. On the one hand, on p. 142 Jensen correctly states that "life is untidy" and talks about embracing life's contradictions. But his real agenda is to trash everyone and everything that doesn't agree with his worse-than-extreme positions, so later (p. 198) we get a simplistic quote from Victor Frankl that either we are decent or indecent people. I will give one of countless examples I could of Mr. Jensen's extremisms based on this black or white illogic. To the author, if you are a decent, hardworking "wage slave," trying to raise a family, you support capitalism, you are trashing the planet and oppressing the have-nots, and thus you are "bad." His extremism reaches absurd heights, such that on p. 371, as he is wrapping up the book, we read, "We are, of course, already dead. There is no hope." This is nonsense.

I do not have enough space to discuss Mr. Jensen's personal pain. It is tragic, there is no doubt about that. Yet Mr. Jensen seems to feel that his pain is not only unique (it isn't), but also gives him the right not only to judge humanity as a failure, and furthermore to paint himself as some sort of Messiah carrying that burden. It doesn't work. And while I do not totally buy into the New Age dictum that we always create our own reality, in Mr. Jensen's case I have no doubt that it applies far more than he would believe.

I also do not want to discuss the title of the book, because to me it is maybe a tertiary theme to what the book really delves into. I will say that I do not doubt at all that interspecies communication exists, "without words," and that sensitive people can pick up things from the earth and non-humans.

One question that is asked repeatedly I do want to answer. On p. 237 we read, "Where do we look for ultimate responsibility...?" I recommend the book, "And The Truth Shall Set You Free," by David Icke. You will get answers, though they may not be *the* answers.

"A Language Older Than Words" comes highly recommended by the author of "Diet For A Small Planet" and other respected authors of alternative books. Personally I would recommend this often overstated diatribe only to deeply wounded souls looking for large-scale scapegoats. As for caring and aware people who are trying to live decent lives, please consider my review and the other reviews and decide for yourselves.

Rating:
Summary: A must read for anyone who cares about our collective future
Review: If I could afford it, I would GIVE copies of this book away. I believe it is that important. If polls are to be believed, the majority of Americans say they are concerned about the environment, but few of us manage to live up to our convictions. Jensen's book is so compelling that has the power to push readers from complacency to activism in a quiet, but forceful manner.

What is truly unique about this book is the manner in which Jensen discusses his own journey to personal activism. He spent years numbing himself to the sexual abuse inflicted upon him by father. He sees the same processes at work in our destructive relationship to the environment. Learning to treat each othe with greater respect and learning to appreciate the natural living environment, he argues, are irrevocably linked.

Rating:
Summary: A book everyone should read
Review: Words cannot do this book justice, but let me say that "A Language Older Than Words" is one of the best books I have ever read, and by "best" I mean: its message is important; it is memorable; it is sincere/authentic; and the prose is excellent (Jensen's story/message is conveyed artistically). This book should be required reading for human beings. National Book Award, Pulitzer, you name it: there is no award this book does not deserve. In fact, there is no award worthy of this book.