AnyBook4Less.com	Find the Best Price on the Web Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Home  |  Store List  |  FAQ  |  Contact Us  |
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money Keyword AuthorISBN

Title: Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West by Morris Berman ISBN: 0-553-34863-9 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95

Your Country USA Canada United Kingdom Australia Austria Belgium France Germany Italy Netherlands Switzerland Currency AutoUSD CAD GBP EUR AUD CHF Delivery Only cheapest delivery All delivery options Include Used Books Are you a club member of: Barnes and Noble Books A Million Chapters.Indigo.ca

Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (7 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Trasitional Objects/Little boxes society -his books are mine
Comment: This guy is brilliant! I'm now moving onto the third book, Wandering God, and he's the man. He makes all my Lewis Mumford reading more relevant. If you want to understand the epistemology of various paradigms that are the precursors to the very changes in perception different peoples go through during the shift of epochs then you've got to read this guy. I'm in a very academic communications department and in my first year I had my profs talking about my papers and I owe it to Berman's analyses of the varying technic's introductions through the epochs and their accompanying shifts in sociological ordering from a shift in how and what we perceive. This guy is da bomb of today's scholars. He blows Bateson, Erickson, Foucault, Eco, you name 'em away. He gets down to the base epistemological ordering of our world like no one else. I don't know what I'll do when I'm done all five of his books by the end of 2004.
If Wandering God follows on the heels of Songlines, which also blew open my epistemological understanding of humanity, then I can't wait to tackle it. My mind goes off with this stuff. If you're a clever mind with delusions that your cleverness can lead to enlightenment than your ego will love the challenge that this scholarly work puts to Cartesian grid thinking academia. But the real point is to return to 5 senses (and more) spontaneous dancing with the environment and re-evolve our perceiving to realize the dance that is the dreaming of reality. This means stop abstracting so much and start feeling the wind on your neck as the caress of a lover. This I think is the only way we will collectively steer this ship clear of hell.

Berman will go down in history. Kudos to a timely genius on par with McLuhan. (Oops, did I just definitively give this away as a Canadian communications student's review?)

Rating: 4
Summary: The body cannot be divorced from mind
Comment: Morris Berman makes accessible the fusion of phenomenology, existentialism, and somatology which has been developing over the 20th Century. My own guides to this synthesis, which refuses to let the dual embodied first/third-person viewpoint remain outside intellectual consideration, are Paul Shepard (whose books have been reissued), Berman (whose earlier titles have been reissued), and Thomas Hanna. Berman's trilogy (The Reenchantment of the World, Coming to Our Senses, and Wandering God) may be the most explicit statement of his own formulation of the fusion, but his other cultural critiques such as Twilight of American Culture, written from the same dual first/third-person perspective, also provide insights into his formulation. If you find Coming to Our Senses skull-shattering, don't give up -- extend your reach to his other books. And perhaps read a smaller bit of Berman at a time. Slowly, in small bites. Like the biscuit labeled "eat me" in Alice -- it will take you wonderful places.

Rating: 4
Summary: Required, if quite confused, reading
Comment: Read it. You will literally hear your skull bones crack form expansion. This book is, metaphorically speaking, a drop in the breaking wave of history that we are all in these days... The central idea is something that will bear infinite repetition before it finally settles in the public mind: human life is an experience, not an idea. As such, an individual's experience is infinetely more valuable to understand than the accompanying external circumstances...The described view is not new by any stretch, but the presentation is awesomely fresh, which makes the book worth any "educated" human's while.
However, for a book which talks at such lengths and with such persuasion about the virtues of experience... the aim of this lovely title as you read it should be to kick you into exploration, not guide you into meditation...For someone able to write this sort of book, such horrible lack of intellectual rigor should be punishable by community service.

Similar Books:

	Title: Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman ISBN: 0801492254 Publisher: Cornell University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1981 List Price(USD): $19.95
	Title: Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality by Morris Berman ISBN: 0791444422 Publisher: State University of New York Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $25.95
	Title: The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman ISBN: 039332169X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95
	Title: Magical Child Matures by Joseph Chilton Pearce ISBN: 0553258818 Publisher: Bantam Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1986 List Price(USD): $4.50
	Title: The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land by Norman Wirzba ISBN: 0813122856 Publisher: University Press of Kentucky Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.00