Two more entries to consider:
5. Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and WarFrom Publishers Weekly
In Young's reckoning, the primitive mind recognized that the energies leading to love and war overlap. But with the advent of the scientific worldview, he contends, we have lost touch with the wellsprings of myth: patriarchy marginalized erotic love, while the rites that monitored and refined hunting and aggression have atrophied. Professor of literature at the University of Essex in England, Young treads speculative waters in discussing the bloodlust of chimpanzees, early human love on the African savannah, the birth of language out of "a grammar of the sacred" and paleolithic peoples' psychic defenses against slipping back into cannibalism and religious frenzy. A grand synthesis in the tradition of Robert Lowell and Joseph Campbell, weighed down by demanding prose, this bold, stimulating inquiry seeks to restore to the modern world "the feminine touch . . . our chief stay against violence." Young leaps from the art of Minoan Crete to Genesis and Gilgamesh to T. S. Eliot, deconstructing "the scientific myth" in search of mythic roots.
http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Sacred-Ec ... dley+young6.The Making Of A Counter Culture: Reflections of the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition Mass Market Paperback
by Theodore RoszakWhen it was published twenty-five years ago, this book captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels—and their baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy—the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman. In a new introduction, Roszak reflects on the evolution of counter culture since he coined the term in the sixties.
Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969, "If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society—all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian."
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Counter-Cu ... tercultureOur selections so far. Voting starts later tonight or tomorrow morning. Still time for more suggestions!
1. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
2. In the Dark Places of Wisdom
3. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
4. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation
5. Origins of the Sacred: The Ecstasies of Love and War
6. The Making of a Counterculture
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer