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Summary: Unless...
Review: ...you're prepared to confront your deepest self along with the earth, politics, religion, science, and to risk changing your inner and outer self at last and for good, then don't read this book. Jensen spares no one and nothing in his blistering attack on our blind-deaf-dumb-unfeeling selves and culture. If on the other hand, you'd like to find the wonder of yourself and the earth and your fellow creatures (human and non-), then this is the book for you. I promise you, nobody comes out of this book the same. It's a painful, wondrous, moving experience. It confirms your worst fears but at the same time leaves you understanding you are not alone in your feelings about our destructive culture. Knowing that in itself makes the read worthwhile. Thank you, Derrick Jensen.
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Summary: A modern-day Thoreau
Review: Jensen's book is both terrifying (NASA is apparently using plutonium to power its rockets, in spite of the risk of an accident on earth) and haunting (the image of a child trying to be invisible in order to avoid a beating.) It breaks your heart. It challenges you. This modern-day Thoreau bares his soul in an attempt to get us to open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts. I hope we have the courage to listen to him.
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Summary: Connection
Review: This is one of the most profoundly moving books I've ever read. I absolutely encourage everyone to buy it and read it, over and over. Never before have I read words that so courageously challenge our assumptions about the way we live while simultaneously awakening a profoundly intimate connection with our souls. Jensen weaves a story of abuse, love, and impassioned relationship with family, friends, nature, culture, and self. The son of a wealthy attorney in western Montana, Derrick Jensen reveals heart-wrenching details of his own childhood, and uses these experiences as a springboard to talk about the culture at large. In a provocative weaving of his own experience, critical research, and folk stories, Jensen makes clear the relationship between the intimate atrocities of domestic violence and the larger atrocities of ecological destruction. Yet, he promises that when we begin to change our way of living, on both personal and cultural levels, we will find a whole world of connection waiting for us. It is a world of joy and pain and love and sorrow, but most deeply of all, connection. With masterful skill, awareness, and insight, Jensen's hard-hitting yet poetic writing style forces readers into an acute awareness-and deep experience--of the connected relationships between our personal lives and the world. This book is a guide for living and should be read by anyone interested in being alive.
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Summary: The silencing of our world.
Review: Jensen reflects about our culture. As he notes, silencing and violence are common behaviors that provide the powerful their power and the victims their invisibility. Jensen presents a view of our society that is sometimes difficult to accept, but that can't be ignored. When we silence nature, ourselves or someone else, it is often done violently. What do we lose in that silence in terms of our understanding of the world or each other? I found this book moving and enlightening. I have a better understanding of the beauty that we have lost by silencing the world and the ugliness that we have gained through our violent encounters with the world and one another.
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Summary: ...to be translated by heart and soul
Review: This book is categorized as a memoir and a philosophy of nature, but it is much more like a hike in the Rockies. There are places in the book of great, sweeping beauty, and places of clear-cut frustration. There are places where you want to cry out as if to warn unseen bears that you are near and you don't want them to threaten you. There are places where you must slow down, or stop for a rest and get some water. At the end, there is a deep satisfaction of having spent the energy to take such a hike.Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," and our author found this quote absurd and elitist. If Jensen could be quoted to say, "I think, therefore I write," those who have read this book would agree. The source of such deep thinking is deep feeling and deep pain, however this writer balances these feelings with humor and hope. This book will ask questions of you in both subtle and obvious ways. The questions are difficult, but you need to hear them. Answering them will be like a steep hike up a forested mountainside. Will you see the forest through the trees? Was I made aware of this book by listening for "a language older than words?" I think so. To potential readers, listen to your heart. It will tell you to not only read but to think along with this book.
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Summary: Balancing act
Review: This book is beautifully weird. It is for sure the most interesting thing I've read in a long time. Hard to say what it is, though--as a memoir it gets pretty deep--but that doesn't matter--you get swept up in it all. I was never abused by my parents, I consider myself an apathetic environmentalist (the author is an activist), I love animals as much as the next person... The third explains nothing about my reaction, even though I was deeply moved to find someone else felt the same way I do about wildlife--they're ability/our ability to have a meaningful relationship (I'm sure that my cat knows me better than I do sometimes). All I know is that I found something here that everyone should take the time to explore.
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Summary: It speaks to the shattered wild things forgotten..
Review: ...Derrick Jensen has no room for make believe in his book, A Language Older Than Words.Derrick screams the truth out in print for ALL to heal.A Language Older than Words is the map to regain lost social sanity. Once read, The message within will not let you forget,civilization and corruption cannot be permitted to exist in any living community again.. because our lives depend on it. Jill, the Underground Panther
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Summary: One of the most deeply-moving books I've ever read
Review: Oh how I wish I could get every member of Congress, say, or every schoolboard member across the country to read this profound book. Imagine such "leaders" having the sensitivity, insight and values that Derrick Jensen displays in this book! Our world would not be the same. The book has a lot of sadness to it - and why not, since the subject - the pain and destruction being inflicted upon our dear old mother earth and all her children - is a sad one indeed. There's a lot of honesty here, and a willingness to go places the less-courageous would never go. A sad, moving and powerful tale this is, but not a depressing one, for it goes deep into what ails us and our planet home, and that kind of depth is ultimately exhilerating and encouraging. A truly remarkable book - please buy it! In fact, buy as many as you can and give copies to friends and foes alike!
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Summary: The most disturbing, jarring, NECESSARY book I've ever read
Review: Derrick Jensen has written this book from his own, and the world's, soul. What starts as a "feel-good" book on interspecies communication becomes a searing examination of his own silencing as a child (his father viciously abused him, his mother, and his siblings), and his perspective widens to encompass the silencing of all life on earth through the murderous practices of industrial, religious, military, and political institutions through history. Jensen indisputably links individual suffering and violence with that of other life forms -- and of the Earth that we continue to ravage in our denial of pain. This book is a masterpiece; it is agonizing to read -- yet hopeful...though in a most cautious manner. To anyone daring to awaken to the signs in and around us, time is running out for us humans to change our suicidal and ecocidal behaviour. Jensen dares us to face our pain and transform it into loving action on behalf of Life. I consider him a prophet. He spares us nothing in his passion for healing. We must pass through raging agony in order to wake up and shake ourselves free of our denial and inertia -- but the pain we (and everything else that lives) will feel if we don't change our ways will be indescribably worse. I also recommend Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown's book, "Coming Back to Life," which gives us specific practices that individuals, groups, and communities can do to take loving action. WE CAN DO THIS -- and we need to do it together. Please -- read this book and act with it!
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Summary: amazing and beautiful
Review: I read in an earlier review someone thought jensen thought his abuse was unique. I would disagree venomously, Jensen uses his abuse as the basis for his critique of a culture that does this all the time. If Jensen had thought he was unique his points would be somewhat irrelevant, Jensen constantly in all his work states facts on the prevailance of violence in civilization, and many times uses stats on child and women abuse and rape. His crtique is well thought out and thurough. It seems to me that this book is mostly a collection of beautiful thoughts that concur with memories. I hope that this book gets fully understood, Jensen is not your run of the mill environmentalist, he is much more, he understand that there is a root to this oppression, civilization.
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