I've long puzzled over the alien and elusive Australian Aboriginal peoples. I've been moved by their landscapes and art, and read much about them. But this book pulled it together.
It explains with wit and clarity the meaning of ancient patterns that can be sketched in sand, and how they apply to us now. They flow from the troublemaking Emu and wise Echidna to the five human minds: kinship, story, dreaming, ancestor, and pattern. These are how we relate to each other and to nature, the deep past, the continuous act of creation in which we live, and the future.
It makes nonsense of settler Australia rejecting 65,000 years of wisdom by refusing an Aboriginal Voice in parliament. They should have queued around the block to say 'yes.' Those who read this book will see why.
Winner, Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards 2020
This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat.
Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?
Sand Talk provides a template for living. It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about…
I've worked in Amazonia enough to know that its peoples and plants are a trove of shared experience and evolution, sacred and intricate in equal measure.
This book is a beautiful and intriguing account of these plant-human ('ethnobotanical') relationships. There is magic, with plants granting insights to those who approach them with respect and correct technique. Medicines, dart-poisons, and hallucinogens tell their stories, and sometimes the plants, like ayahuasca vines, can be heard singing for shamanic attention.
But there is darkness, too. It lies in the cruel history of Europeans in the Amazon and careless modernity destroying what nature and indigenous peoples have created over millennia. The Amazon system is now tilting towards catastrophic change, but this book shows the way back if we are wise enough to take it.
The Amazon river basin contains the world's largest remaining rain forest as well as its longest river. Countless Indian tribes live there, as well as vast numbers of plant species, many of them still unknown to science. This book tells the story of three scientists who explored the region: the ethnobotanist Richard Edward Shultes, and two of his students, Tim Plowman and Wade Davis. Davis's account is one of danger, and of extraordinary discoveries as Shultes sought to understand the psychoactive plants of the rain forest. It is also a celebration of the Indian way of life, and a lament…
I live in Scotland, and this book helped me understand its extraordinary history.
Many Scots seek freedom from England, and how the bond was forged is a very current question. Partial answers lie with James VI of Scotland inheriting the crown of England in 1603. Both countries had religious factions, and James commissioned a new Bible to unite the faiths.
This book tells how his translators struck sparks off each other as they crafted every verse. Made during a great flowering of English, the new Bible raised the language to sublime heights. But hard men pushed the peace project into regicide, republic, civil war, and dictatorship. The King James Bible, nevertheless, remains a glory of inspired authorship at a unique moment when God, indeed, seemed to have blessed its words.
A fascinating, lively account of the making of the King James Bible.
James VI of Scotland - now James I of England - came into his new kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created:…
Nature is warning us, in the language of ecology accented by droughts and floods, that something major has to change.
A knowledge of water, and the life it bears in every drop, can help us more than anything else to adapt to our changing environment. This book uses the ecology of oceans, swamps, permafrosts, lakes, rivers, and aquifers to show what sustainability means in practice. As the climate and nature emergencies bite, public involvement in the environmental struggle is now worldwide. Science, spirit, and community are working together for ecological restoration and renewal of our relationships with nature.
It is time to restore peace with nature, and what could be more important to this than an understanding of water?
