And I will. I got a Border's gift card from my son for Mother's Day, and it's burning a hole in my pocket. My son knows me well. Books, baby.
This is the book, "Sex, Time & Power" by Leonard Shlain. I've read his two other books: "Art and Physics", and "The Alphabet vs. the Goddess". If you've never even skimmed one of Shlain's books, you missed a magical read.
His most recent has me ready to go to the bookstore TODAY.
From the blurb: "Women taught men about time and the men used this knowledge to become the planet’s most fearsome predator. Unfortunately, they also discovered that they were mortal. Men, then invented religions to soften the certainty of death. Subsequently, they belatedly grasped the function of sex. The possibility of achieving a kind of immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures whose purpose was to control women’s reproductive choices."
Cultural anthropology and the field's analysts have had me a captive reader for years. If you're in a reading mood on this day of mementos mori, you can't go wrong reading about how we modern day homo sapiens sapiens got to our "exalted" place on the Happy Planet. You could also read some Gregory Bateson or Humberto Maturana. I was going to post a link to the Bateson site, but it appears not to be on-line. Weird. More later.
