In my quest to read everyone’s favourite books, I asked my colleague Mark to pass me his and it was a doozy. At 609 large pages with small print, this book took me a couple of months to finish. It was written by Derrick Jensen who seems to be an activist, environmentalist, concerned citizen of the world.
The subject matter is quite dark, but I guess that’s a given when it looks at the world we live in and what is happening in it. It specifically focuses on examples of hatred within our world and how it in turn, destroys the natural world. It’s pretty heavy stuff and I must admit it was the first time I’ve read a book of this nature.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t interesting. I found his writing style to be quite entertaining. He would attempt to bring up a point of view from different story angles. If he didn’t get his point across to you in one fashion, then he would attempt it from a different anecdote until he covered enough to make us realize what he was getting at.
Specific topics ranged from how the African slave trade started, to how corporations killed 8,000 people in Bhopal. It speaks of the questionable justice system in which a man (usually a black man) can end up in jail for breaking into a car, while heads of corporations who destroy eco-systems around us which lead to birth defects, deaths and general nastiness walk away with a proverbial slap on the wrist.
I found the book to be quite interesting in the first half as he was introducing new concepts and his stories were quite entertaining. The later part of the book dragged on for me…I couldn’t figure out if it was the fact that he was just tying together concepts he had been introducing throughout the book, therefore making me read concepts that I had already linked together…or the fact that it was two months into the book and enough was enough!
I forgot to mention how the later half of the book specifically targets the rise of the Morgan family within the United States and how the essentially ran the country. It was an interesting analysis in how the politicians do not have a real say in how the country works, but more so the big players of the economy drive the direction in policy changes, etc. I’m sure for some of you reading this, you already knew this and I had some inkling of knowledge but nothing concrete.
If you are up for the task of reading some pretty dire stuff about the world in which we live in, then I highly recommend reading this book. I found it to be entertaining and when the time is right, I may even pick up another one of Derrick Jensen’s books. In fact, even if you’re not up for reading about the truths of the world we live in, perhaps you owe it to the world to do so and not live in a culture of make believe. Wow, I am clever in using his title of the book in a sentence. Hee hee. I’m making light of some heavy stuff and that’s not right.