Wild Hunger

Rating:
Summary: Wild Hunger: the product of a wild imagination
Review:
Bruce Wilshire is a [...]. Wilshire has long been senile and this work is the crowning achievement of his senility. Rather than make a philosophical argument, Wilshire uses this study as a template for various autobiographical snippets, various tangents, and vast improvable speculations.

Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction reads more like some of L. Ron Hubbard's [...] scientology than it does a serious work of philosophy. His various 'arguments', unsound speculations with no empirical evidence or analytical validity, sound like the rambling of a burnt out hippie; the entire work offers no evidence to support his thesis and consists mainly of various snapshots into the mind of a delusional old man. Also, the book stands as a testament to Wilshire's hostility for the rules and conventions of syntax; the entire work is penned with the grammatical sensibilities of a four-year old- commas are misused, fragments abound, and paragraphs lack coherence and structure.

More than anything else, Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction is evidence that some professors will publish anything for tenure and some publishers will accept any manuscript emanating from a professor from a respected department. However, the Rutgers philosophy department is excellent and renowned despite Bruce Wilshire, not because of Bruce Wilshire.

This book lacks credibility, sound methodology, and convincing argument; more akin to quackery than philosophy, this book belongs in the [...] and not on the bookshelf of a philosopher, student, human, or book retailer. Wild Hunger is naught but the product of Bruce Wilshire's wild imagination; it offers no insight into the problem of addiction and no novel take on the world or humanity.

Rating:
Summary: Startling! Writing with passion and honesty
Review: Startling! Writing with passion and honesty, Wilshire shows that in addiction we participate in degenerative vicious circles that substitute for the regenerative cycles of nature. --Parabola

Rating:
Summary: Stirring cultural critique for the philosophically inclined.
Review: Think carefully: does a vague spiritual or emotional deficit sometimes gnaw at you? Are you hungry to get more out of life? If you are intrigued by the notion that modern life is not everything that it is cracked up to be and wonder about the philosophical derangement that underlies and reinforces our social and individual ills, then Bruce Wilshire's fascinating new study of modern addiction and its primal roots is the book for you.

Wilshire, a professor in Rutgers University's philosophy department, takes the phenomenon of addiction as his point of entry into the body-self of modern man. He intends to get us to see beyond addiction as simply a chemical dependency or physical sickness that can be objectively quantified and treated. Rather, he argues, addiction is a gross and inadequate attempt to fill the void formed when our irrepressible primal needs (such as security, ecstasy and coherence) go unfulfilled. Ideally, these needs would be satisfied by "consensual solidarity with other humans," and attunement with the regenerative cycles and rhythms of Nature that nourished our ancestors. "If primal needs have not been satisfied at an early age," he writes, "we have no clear idea of what they are and what could satisfy them." Bewildered, we flail for whatever is immediately at hand and becomes addicted.

There is enough substance in Wild Hunger to overwhelm even the most patient and earnest readers. This book is best digested slowly, with each sentence provoking a private tangential train of thought that leaves you hungry for more. And why shouldn't it? The power of Wild Hunger is that it incites and exposes the very same voracious hunger that it is designed to help us counterbalance and subdue. The first step towards achieving genuine gratification, as Wilshire writes often, is consciously recognizing that a cavity exists. Reading Wild Hunger may not satisfy your deepest hungers: after all, ecstasy is to be found in the wild world itself and not in the substitute gratifications of sex, drugs or exciting prose. But it will be a definite step in the right direction.

Review by Jeff Genauer, The Daily Targum.

Rating:
Summary: The Forgotten Source of Ecstasy
Review: This is one of those books you should read with a pen and notebook at your side. Ideas and connections burst into my mind as I read it. You, too, may find that questions hardly formed in your mind are suddenly being answered as you follow Wilshire's careful explorations. Addressing subjects as diverse as the city person's obsession with sex (as the only wild thing left in city life), and the psychological effects of rapid changes in technology, Wilshire seems almost to have taken the ideas for many books and listed them in one, leaving the reader to expand upon them in his own mind, in my case with great excitement. His quotations, too, from Van Gogh to Yeats to Cather to an African shaman are extraordinarily well chosen and thought-provoking. If I have a criticism, it is that he writes like a person telling you something complex very urgently: he goes rapidly from one idea to another without wrapping it in the repetition and graceful prose to which readers of less technical books are accustomed. Some readers, however, are likely to see that as a virtue rather than a fault. Caution: if you're like me, you'll want to carry this book around and quote it to friends and family, who may not be as receptive as you'd wish. However, if you're interested in issues such as the human-nature connection, ecstasy deprivation (love that term, but he does not claim to be its originator), or addictions of any kind, the kindling it causes in your synapses will be well worth the risk.

Rating:
Summary: The Forgotten Source of Ecstasy
Review: This is one of those books you should read with a pen and notebook at your side. Ideas and connections burst into my mind as I read it. You, too, may find that questions hardly formed in your mind are suddenly being answered as you follow Wilshire's careful explorations. Addressing subjects as diverse as the city person's obsession with sex (as the only wild thing left in city life), and the psychological effects of rapid changes in technology, Wilshire seems almost to have taken the ideas for many books and listed them in one, leaving the reader to expand upon them in his own mind, in my case with great excitement. His quotations, too, from Van Gogh to Yeats to Cather to an African shaman are extraordinarily well chosen and thought-provoking. If I have a criticism, it is that he writes like a person telling you something complex very urgently: he goes rapidly from one idea to another without wrapping it in the repetition and graceful prose to which readers of less technical books are accustomed. Some readers, however, are likely to see that as a virtue rather than a fault. Caution: if you're like me, you'll want to carry this book around and quote it to friends and family, who may not be as receptive as you'd wish. However, if you're interested in issues such as the human-nature connection, ecstasy deprivation (love that term, but he does not claim to be its originator), or addictions of any kind, the kindling it causes in your synapses will be well worth the risk.