Sun House is a sprawling,
challenging, intimate, and deeply engaging book that follows the lives of a
dozen or so amazing characters as they struggle to find meaning and purpose in
their lives. Although they are all extreme people in various ways, you can find
yourself in each of them.
The setting is the Pacific Northwest, especially
Oregon, Washington, and Montana from 1958-2016. The characters' lives intertwine
in remarkable ways, both with each other and with the urban, rural, and
wilderness landscapes that they inhabit.
As you read about their developmental
journeys, you will also get involved in challenging discussions about Buddhist
and Christian spirituality, wilderness philosophy, and ecological awareness.
Most importantly, you deeply care about each of the characters.
The book
sometimes seems like it's gone astray with wild spiritual speculation, but it
always returns to its home ground—the intriguing lives of its protagonists, and
the importance of place, ecology, and landscape. There is humor, heartbreak,
wisdom, surprise, and compassion on just about every page.
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy's mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to…
This is an
encyclopedic “big history” of the human occupation of our remarkable planet. Frankopan covers an extraordinary amount of conceptual ground.
The most important aspect of this book is how
the author uses the most current global environmental change research to assess
historical trends. If you want to deepen your understanding of how humans have
historically impacted climate, biodiversity, and habitats, this is the book to
read.
It’s very helpful to understand how “transforming the earth” is not just
endemic to commodity capitalism (its overwhelming impact notwithstanding) but
intrinsic to any culture in geographical space and historical time.
Frankopan
brilliantly weaves a narrative that moves between transcending patterns and the
idiosyncrasy of historical and ecological detail, always referring to the great
span of human history, with a keen eye to social justice, urban development,
and the coming and going of borders and nations.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: A revolutionary new history that reveals how climate change has dramatically shaped the development—and demise—of civilizations across time
*Detailing many years of extensive research, endnotes for this edition run to more than 200 pages. They are available online via a link contained in the book.*
Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that…
This is a “big history” book that
covers many layers of human relationships with the natural world. The primary
focus is what we typically refer to as
prehistory and the origins of culture, agriculture, settlement, and the state.
What makes this book so compelling is that the authors counter so many
traditional, post-colonial interpretations of these questions. They revitalize our respect for traditional knowledge and the wisdom of
pre-industrial cultures while reinforcing our sense of wonder at the multitude
of cultural forms and possibilities.
This is especially important as they
consider questions of participation, equity, and social justice in it's various forms.
Many traditional cultures, for example, had ingenious ways of organizing
resources, and cultivating participatory decision-making. Yet there are just as
many examples of imperial acts, exploitation, and racist misunderstanding.
Graeber and Wengrow provide a hands-on, accessible, compelling perspective,
based on their progressive orientation and their backgrounds in anthropology
and archaeology.
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction…
Why environmental learning is crucial for understanding the connected challenges of climate justice, tribalism, inequity, democracy, and human flourishing.
How can we respond to the current planetary ecological emergency? In To Know the World, Mitchell Thomashow proposes that we revitalize, revisit, and reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth. First, we must understand that the major challenges of our time—migration, race, inequity, climate justice, and democracy—connect to the biosphere. Traditional environmental education has accomplished much, but it has not been able to stem the inexorable decline of global ecosystems. Thomashow, the former president of a college dedicated to sustainability, describes instead environmental learning, a term signifying that our relationship to the biosphere must be front and center in all aspects of our daily lives. In this illuminating book, he provides rationales, narratives, and approaches for doing just that.
Mixing memoir, theory, mindfulness, pedagogy, and compelling storytelling, Thomashow discusses how to navigate the Anthropocene's rapid pace of change without further separating psyche from biosphere; why we should understand migration both ecologically and culturally; how to achieve constructive connectivity in both social and ecological networks; and why we should take a cosmopolitan bioregionalism perspective that unites local and global. Throughout, Thomashow invites readers to participate as educational explorers, encouraging them to better understand how and why environmental learning is crucial to human flourishing.
