My Name Is Chellis

Rating:
Summary: Thorough proof for a back to earth movement
Review: This book provides a thoroughly documented (with footnotes) thesis: We live neurotic lives generated by a perpetuated trauma called civilization.This trauma started 10,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution and has grown to an incredible state in this posmodern era. As with any trauma there is a recovery path to 100% sanity, Glendinning shows that path.
It is a moving book, very powerful in stating our addiction to this techno-society and the symptons it generates. It is written by a psychologist and it shows that the author has gone through her own recovery and has come out with message to be heard.
If this book falls into enough hands it should help to change the world.

Rating:
Summary: a thesis so obvious it's brilliant:
Review: Why are we Westerners so sick as a culture? Because we're no longer rooted in the natural world.

With convincing passion and lucidity, the author raises the middle syllable of her last name against the backwardness of therapizing, medicating, motivating, chanting, meditating, praying, and healing without taking the real problem into account. People of nature, enviously demonized as childlike or primitive, suffer like the rest of us--but why do they do without neuroses and eating disorders, mass murder and organized intolerance?

Because it's our cultural separation from the seas and stars that makes us mad, and WE are the culture. In the brief, brief splinter of history since the rise of cities--a fragment in the million or so years of hunter-gatherer existence--we have taken the most radical social step imaginable and severed our contact with the dangers and lushnesses of the world. In its place we have concepts and categories, empiricism and case histories--and so much wrong-headed bewilderment that for most of us, a thing isn't real unless a laboratory measures it or a scientist finds a way to blow it up.

Dr. Glendinning does not make the reactive, pendulum-swing suggestion that we abandon our cultural or technological developments. Instead, she challenges the postmodern reader to find a satisfying personal rootedness in what's left of the Earth's wilderness.

See for yourself....

Rating:
Summary: a thesis so obvious it's brilliant:
Review: Why are we Westerners so sick as a culture? Because we're no longer rooted in the natural world.

With convincing passion and lucidity, the author raises the middle syllable of her last name against the backwardness of therapizing, medicating, motivating, chanting, meditating, praying, and healing without taking the real problem into account. People of nature, enviously demonized as childlike or primitive, suffer like the rest of us--but why do they do without neuroses and eating disorders, mass murder and organized intolerance?

Because it's our cultural separation from the seas and stars that makes us mad, and WE are the culture. In the brief, brief splinter of history since the rise of cities--a fragment in the million or so years of hunter-gatherer existence--we have taken the most radical social step imaginable and severed our contact with the dangers and lushnesses of the world. In its place we have concepts and categories, empiricism and case histories--and so much wrong-headed bewilderment that for most of us, a thing isn't real unless a laboratory measures it or a scientist finds a way to blow it up.

Dr. Glendinning does not make the reactive, pendulum-swing suggestion that we abandon our cultural or technological developments. Instead, she challenges the postmodern reader to find a satisfying personal rootedness in what's left of the Earth's wilderness.

See for yourself....