Book cover of The Culture of Make Believe

Book description

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Culture of Make Believe as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I liked the book because it is not just about racism, but it grapples with how hate manifests itself in our Western world.

Jensen paints on a huge canvas detailing American racism from the genocidal slave trade through lynchings to the 2000 murder of Amadou Diallo by NYC police and covers a wide range of other cultural horrors as well: the massacres of Native Americans, the Holocaust, the 8,000 deaths from the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in India and the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraj. 

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