A Language Older Than Words

by Derrick Jensen

Overview

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603581820
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	03/01/2004
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	418
File size:	3 MB

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

1. Silencing
2. Coyotes, kittens, and conversations
3. Taking a life
4. Cultural eyeglasses
5. Cranes
6. The safety of metaphor
7. Claims to virtue
8. Seeking a third way
9. Breaking out
10. Economics
11. The goal is the process
12. Heroes
13. Metamorphosis
14. Insatiability
15. Violence
16. The parable of the box
17. Violence revisited
18. Coercion
19. Honeybees
20. A turning over
21. A life of my own
22. Interconnection
23. The plants respond
24. Death and awakening
25. A time of sleeping
26. Out of mourning, play
27. Trauma and recovery
28. Connection and cooperation

Editorial Reviews

Singular, compelling and courageously honest, this book is more than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood. It relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet's. Comparing his physically and sexually abusive father's destruction of his family with humankind's systematic destruction of civilization, New York Times Magazine contributor Jensen (Listening to the Land) tells a story about the hope for regeneration in a landscape of human and natural desolation. Throughout, Jensen mobilizes his experiences as student, teacher, environmentalist, beekeeper, high jumper, abused child and survivor to delve deeper inside his own wounded psyche while condemning the constrictions of a culture that fosters abuse. In lyrical prose, Jensen calls for accountability and urges people "to live in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the world." Rather than na vely proposing an answer to the ills of modernity, he demonstrates the complexity of the problems by examining an array of environmental and sociopolitical atrocities, including the Holocaust, and what he sees as the reckless production of plutonium to further space exploration and the maltreatment of indigenous peoples by self-serving neighbors. His visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: "Things don't have to be the way they are." Jensen's book accomplishes the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader's heart. 15,000 first printing; 10-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Singular, compelling and courageously honest, this book is more than just a poignant memoir of a harrowingly abusive childhood. It relates the extraordinary journey of one man striving to save his own spirit and our planet's . . . His visceral, biting observations always manage to lead back to his mantra: 'Things don't have to be the way they are.'"—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher