Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth/Healing the Mind
"This collection of 26 essays by leaders in the new field of ecopsychology is in three parts: (1) Theoretical Perspectives, (2) Ecopsychology in Practice, and (3) Cultural Diversity and Political Engagement. While the topics covered are numerous and eclectic, and collection of writers diverse, it seems that the whole book is geared toward reaching the final third. That is to say, the intent of the book is intensely political, in the sense of using ecopsychology to contribute to protection of the Earth.
The writers featured include such luminaries as Theodore Roszak, Lester Brown, Paul Shepard, Joanna Macy, David Abram, and our own Universal Pantheist Society board member William Cahalan. Some are environmentalists, but perhaps most of the authors are clinical psychologists. The central part of the book is not the only part to emphasize the practical; even "Theoretical Perspectives" comes from people with profound actual experience or expertise in the field."
- review by Harold W. Wood, Jr
Diane Ackerman; A Natural History of the Senses
"nothing is more memorable then a smell. one scent can be unexpected. momentary, and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the poconos, when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit and the opposite sex was as mysterious as space travel; another, hours ofr passion on a moonlit beach in florida, while the night blooming cereus drenched the air with thick curds of perfume and huge sphinx moths visited the cereus in a loud purr of wings; a third, a family dinner of pot roast, noodle pudding, and sweet potatoes, during a myrtle-mad august in a midwestern town, when both of ones parents were alive. smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years and experiences. hit a trip wire of smell, and memories explode all at once."
i love this book, she goes through all the senses and gives facts, along with experiences and stories describing each sense.
personally i mostly enjoy books that i can back and read an excerpt or few from, and books of reference; like the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, QPB Dictionary of Ideas.
a real mind bender that you should check out if you havent is; Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter,[1] described by the author as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll".
"On its surface, GEB examines logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, discussing common themes in their work and lives. At a deeper level, the book is a detailed and subtle exposition of concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence.
Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.
In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants."
- from wikipedia
ive been reading it for 15 years, ive read the whole thing, but i keep going back for more, and im able to take something new from it almost every time.
