The Resurgence of the Real

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Summary: THE WOMEN'S REVIEW OF BOOKS, March 1999
Review: "THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL is a visionary book of formidable scholarship that ranges across disciplines with great ease and assurance."

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Summary: FOR RELEASE: New in Paperback from ROUTLEDGE
Review: A book that changes our understanding of living in the modern world and the new possibilities before us.

New in Paperback!

THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL

Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World

by Charlene Spretnak

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR!

"Written with great fluency, carefully researched and richly annotated, this is a superb book." -- The Los Angeles Times

The closing year of this century finds us in a state of alienation. Skeptical of modern establishments - the political system, the globalized economy, our public schools and services - and their abilities to solve the most basic problems of our time, we have witnessed dramatic changes and the breakdown of formerly enduring institutions. In the face of this rising tide of chaos, confusion, and discontent, the public debates - including the "culture wars" - seem to be a mere spinning of wheels.

In this passionately stated and beautifully written work, Charlene Spretnak makes sense of this unsettling historical moment. THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL (Routledge; April 30, 1999; New in Paperback) asserts that the grand claims of modernity no longer inspire confidence because its destructive effects seem to be multiplying. The author, an influential public intellectual, speaks poignantly to our growing sense of what has been lost and what is slipping away, what might be saved and how. RESURGENCE OF THE REAL seeks the roots of modernity in the ideas formed during the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Spretnak then cogently argues that the very orientation that created the modern crises is the world-view founded merely upon economic expansion and technological innovation.

The intensification of the modern crises, however, is not inevitable and has already been challenged by an impressive network of corrective efforts. With clarity and hope, THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL reframes "the other history" of the modern era: the ecospiritual lineage of movements that resisted the corrosive effects of the industrialized modern world. These include the Arts and Crafts movement, the cosmological schools of painting, the stream of Modernist writers and artists who did not embrace the "machine aesthetic" after World War One, and Gandhi's "Constructive Program." And new acceptance of the wisdom of the body; new scientific understandings of the complexity of nature; new community-based political opposition to globalization; and the new surge of independence efforts by nations that have been devoured by modern states are all part of an emergent value system. These and other grassroots movements, Spretnak argues, are heir to a rich tradition, forging a new politics of local and regional revitalization beyond left-and-right. Spretnak concludes her wide-ranging exploration with the engaging story of an American heartland city in the near future, that has largely decoupled from the destructive dynamics of the globalized economy to initiate a range of pragmatic alternatives in its region.

Both a sharp critique and a graceful performance of the art of the possible, THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL represents a continuing evolution of thought from one of the most important feminist ecological thinkers of our time and changes the way we think about living in the modern world.

CHARLENE SPRETNAK has written several books on social issues, ecological politics, and spiritual concerns, including Green Politics (co-author), States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age and The Politics of Women's Spirituality. She currently lives near San Francisco.

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Summary: Praise for THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL:
Review: CHOSEN BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES AS ONE OF THE 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"With clarity and passion, Spretnak offers an insightful and persuasive critique of what went wrong with the modern project. . . .Admirably concise and thorough Remarkably lucid and accurate Challenging and engaging on every page, it is a book [for] everyone concerned with the fundamental problems of our time and interested in 'the big picture' - the decline of an outdated paradigm and the emergence of the postmodern, ecological vision of reality that will be crucial for the survival of humanity in the 21st century. Written with great fluency, carefully researched and richly annotated, this is a superb book."

-- The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Offering a chilling diagnosis of contemporary life that is rife with alienation and anxiety, [The Resurgence of the Real] points to the disintegration in recent years of 'so much that previously seemed stable.' Spretnak's voice is both prophetic and richly intellectual. She challenges the mind, stirs the heart and shames the conscience [This is a] heartfelt, valiant effort to illuminate the darkness and mend the fractured spirit."

-- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"[Spretnak] has become part of an honorable lineage of ways of knowing and being in the world that have quietly paralleled the development of modernity and are in resurgence now [She] intelligently blends scholarship, lyrical intuition, and passion as she traces the history of modernism."

-- New Age Journal

"In her far-ranging, in depth study of the structure of contemporary alienation, Spretnak joins the ranks of gifted writers qua intellectual social analysts like Lewis Mumford. . . . Spretnak keeps her treatment lively, accessible, and challenging."

-- Publishers Weekly

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Summary: perspective-altering masterpiece...
Review: Here is easily the most fascinating, thought-provoking book I've ever read. Far too rarely do we examine those reasons we should feel jusitified in our disillusionment, instead opting to revel in it.

I can't count the number of times I had to re-read a paragraph or page to fully comprehend Spretnak's complex argument. I can't count the number of times I rushed out to read passages aloud to my brother.

I'd love to teach this book one day.

Rating:
Summary: perspective-altering masterpiece...
Review: Here is easily the most fascinating, thought-provoking book I've ever read. Far too rarely do we examine those reasons we should feel jusitified in our disillusionment, instead opting to revel in it.

I can't count the number of times I had to re-read a paragraph or page to fully comprehend Spretnak's complex argument. I can't count the number of times I rushed out to read passages aloud to my brother.

I'd love to teach this book one day.

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Summary: Beautiful and Philosophical
Review: Humanity is so ready for this groundbreaking book!

I heard Charlene Spretnak on the radio and rushed to buy this book.

Spretnak goes beyond our arbitrary ways of categorizing the world and its inhabitants, offers hope for the environment, for humankind, for our spirit. Forget right and left, modern and postmodern, communist and capitalist, all the usual labeling. Spretnak explores what's wrong with modernity, from its beginnings in the age of Renaissance humanism! She writes eloquently of the suicidal rush to embrace technology at all costs.

Excellent book for any environmentalist, anyone with a spiritual or religious inclination, any art history student, any political scientist.

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Summary: A Beautiful & Elegant Critique of the Post-Modern Mystique!
Review: In "Resurgence of the Real", Author Charlene Spretnak takes accurate aim at the pandemic, negative and deadening global aspects of the hyper-rationalized social, economic, and political environment of the postindustrial world, diagnosing its ills, and proposing a quite realistic, attainable, and more organic alternative to our misguided ways. In this elegantly written and argued neo-Luddite thesis, Spretnak passionately speaks on behalf of a more enlightened post modern ecology that actively eschews the deadening embrace of 20th century scientism and technological industrialism and recognizes the basic human connection to nature and the environment.

This is a book with a mission and a message. On the one hand, she offers an impressive critique of how our blind fascination with rationalism, science, and technological innovation has strangled out of consciousness any appreciation or awareness of the natural world around us, and has led us into a ritual denial of our fundamental connection to nature. On the other hand, showing how illusory and simplistic our intellectual categories seem to be, she argues for a recovery effort in order to actively regain our individual and collective awareness of our natural context, our relationships to other human beings, and to our basic grounding in the ecology of the real world around us.

But the leap toward such critical awareness eludes many of our contemporaries, who are locked into such a modernistic, mechanistic and rational worldview that they tend to view themselves as bio-machines requiring external interventions when malfunctioning. Every thing about our artificially created and sustained human environment holds us within this kind of faulty and dangerous world-view. Instead, she argues, we need to recognize that we are self-correcting energy systems operating within nature, which she defines as a dynamic and self-regulating cosmos. This is heady and quite intellectually stimulating stuff, and requires a close reading and a requisite ability to think, as they say, "outside the box" of conventional thought.

The author faces the issues of our time with eloquence, clarity, and a keen intellectual acumen. The book is obviously written with great care, passion, and unimpeachable intellectual clarity. Spretnak offers a stinging and accurate diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the post-modern world, and presents, with great lucidity and careful thought, a look at the emerging postmodern ecological world-view we need to overcome the ecological, social, and political problems confronting us. This is a very special, passionate, and wonderful book, and is one offering hope for the future. I hope you enjoy it.

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Summary: Slightly flawed
Review: There's some wonderful stuff here-esp. the material on William Morris and John Ruskin and the neo-Utopian view at the end. I've given the book to several friends, but always with this caveat: don't trust the material on witch burnings. She's bought into what are apparently terribly exaggerated figures on the numbers of victims, which are based on faulty research. Contemporary researchers put the number at 50,000 to 100K rather than the millions cited here. And one was too many, IMO. See WITCH: THE WILD RIDE FROM WICKED TO WICCA by Candace Savage for a more contemporary view.