The Culture of Make Believe

by Derrick Jensen

Overview

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today's death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931498579
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	03/30/2004
Series:	A Politics of the Living Book Series
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.75(d)

About the Author

Derrick Jensen is the prize-winning author of A Language Older than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War, Welcome to the Machine, and Walking on Water. He was one of two finalists for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which cited The Culture of Make Believe as "a passionate and provocative meditation on the nexus of racism, genocide, environmental destruction and corporate malfeasance, where civilization meets its discontents." He writes for The New York Times Magazine, Audubon, and The Sun Magazine among many others.  He is an environmental activist and lives on the coast of northern California.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Uncovering
2. Utility
3. Invisibility
4. Contempt
5. Power
6. Property
7. Philanthropy
8. Giving back the land
9. Beginning to see
10. Redemption and failure
11. Flesh
12. Seeing things
13. The other side of darkness
14. Criminals
15. Killers
16. The cost of power
17. Tranquility and felicity
18. Assimilation
19. the impossibility of forgetting
20. Production
21. False contracts
22. Competition
23. Distance
24. Corporations, cops, and hungry ghosts
25. War
26. Resistance
27. Expanding the frontier
28. The view from inside
29. The closing of the iron cage
30. Holocausts
32. Coming home

Editorial Reviews

"Read this book. Get it for everyone you care about."—Inga Muscio

"The Culture of Make Believe is a masterpiece."—Frances Moore Lappe

"Derrick Jensen's analysis of our culture's predilection for hatred and destruction will rattle your bones."—Daniel Quinn

From the Publisher

Library Journal-
This passionate book chronicles the violent hatreds that have been overwhelming our planet, tracing them back through their sources in imperialism, slavery, the rise of global capitalism, and the ideologies of possessiveness and consumerism. Jensen's previous book, A Language Older Than Words, a reflection on family violence and childhood abuse, attracted a wide audience. Here he puts together statistics, bits of history, and reflective interviews with friends and acquaintances to examine a world in which hatred and destruction come all too easily. As in his previous book, his intent is to recall victims as individuals. His focus is on the dangers of abstraction and the economics that result from our viewing people and things as sources of profit and elements in systems. What he intends is not a systematic picture but a stunning collection of horrific close-ups. Africans and Indians are most often in view, and women are never far from his mind. Our disdain for the environment also intrudes frequently. Jensen's solution is a return to the simple life, perhaps much like that of the hunter-gatherers, yet he knows that such a turn must be "the end of civilization." Readers will be moved by his argument, though more likely they will be inspired to look for solutions that let us keep art, science, and the great treasures that go with complex communal life. Surely not all abstract thought is bad, but Jensen's aim is to shock us awake and let us stew in the world's injustices, and at that he duly succeeds.—This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Leslie Armour