geez, everyone’s reading what I’m reading. or rereading in the case of the Watchmen. so good. also just read Ishi: In Two Worlds, about a guy who was the last of the Yana tribe to come out of hiding, basically rolled out of living in the hills of California into living in San Francisco. It was really good, even if i was bummed about how much he seemed to be comfortable with civ. to each their own i guess.
This weekend I read Catcher in the Rye. Very good for the spirit.
The first, and only other, time I read it was when I was 13 years old. As you might expect, this time around I actually read it.
It really snuck up on me. One moment I was placidly perusing it on the bus, the next moment I was bawling my eyes out in front of a bunch of rough-and-tumble bus-riding strangers. (It was during the part where he breaks into his parent’s house to visit his little sister in the middle of the night and she learns that he’d flunked out of school… and he decides that if he could be anything he wanted he’d be the “catcher in the rye.” That part killed me. ;))
I think that he would have found life much more enjoyable in a tribal setting! Just a hunch…
There are some fantastic “kids” books out from an author named Michelle Paver.
They are titled the “Chronicles of Ancient Darkness”. Basically, the stories are set 6000 years ago in northern Europe and are an animist, stone-age teen epic. Think Clan of the Cave Bear meets Harry Potter but done really, really well.
What has blown me away about these books is the level of detail. There is a ton of info. on clothes, culture, plants, animals, bird language, and tracking.
Highly, highly recommended!!!
Did someone (me perhaps?) mention:
The Dancing Wu-Li Masters?
[quote=“Pathfinder, post:44, topic:577”]There are some fantastic “kids” books out from an author named Michelle Paver.
They are titled the “Chronicles of Ancient Darkness”. Basically, the stories are set 6000 years ago in northern Europe and are an animist, stone-age teen epic. Think Clan of the Cave Bear meets Harry Potter but done really, really well.
What has blown me away about these books is the level of detail. There is a ton of info. on clothes, culture, plants, animals, bird language, and tracking.
Highly, highly recommended!!![/quote]
yeah, on your advice i picked up the first one. i really like it. the detail is amazing, and i really like how the POV can switch to that of the wolf, and how the writing to changes to accomodate that POV.
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[quote=“yarrow dreamer, post:30, topic:577”]The Gypsies by Jan Yoors
blew my lid off. Jesus freaking christ, a rewilding primer. these people live like water in the cracks, within yet outside of the “dominant culture”. beautiful–strong, healthy, hardy, outdoor-living people with intact families, tribal traditions, grief and praise, song and story, non-hierarchical and fluid community structure. . . written by someone who lived among them as one of their own.
super inspiring. 
You inspired me to check this out, I picked it up at the library and am reading it now :]
It’s already been really eye-opening, thank’s so much.[/quote]
Right now I’m reading:
The Horse the Wheel and Language (dry but interesting!)
Muses, Madmen and Prophets (very interesting)
Three books that I strongly recommend are;
Daimonic Reality: A Fieldguide to the Otherworld
The Philosopher’s Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination
A Complete Guide to the Soul
All are by the same author, Patrick Harpur, and touches mostly on philosophy but quite a lot of other things as well. Don’t be disgruntled by them at first sight, they follow a very interesting and refreshingly new path of thinking. And it has some things to say about “modern” society. Really worth their weight in gold!
[quote=“loess, post:38, topic:577”][quote author=clicketyclack link=topic=619.msg12252#msg12252 date=1220918546]I just finished Into the Forest by Jean Hegland, which cheered me up. Great story about two sisters surviving collapse and going feral. Highly recommended.
[/quote]
Yes! I stayed up very late several nights with Into The Forest unable to put it down and finished it recently. I felt the story open up so wide once the sisters realized the allies that they had in the plants and forest ecosystem around them. Wonderful book that stirred feminine energies inside me.[/quote]
lol, well, I can’t say it stirred up any of my “feminine energies,” but this was great. It fits fairly well with what I imagine we’ll be going through in just a couple of years. Most definitely needed a sequel. Maybe that guy will come back with a friend or two and they can start a new NoCal tribe. I’ll wait for book two, Mrs. Heglund, if you manage to put it out before Barnes & Noble disappears!
I read The Gypsies by Jan Yoors (1st edition copy… the librarian actually requested that I treat it nicely since it was falling apart, haha) and it was pretty good, too. I didn’t realize they got around quite a much as they did prior to WWII - I thought they stayed roughly within national borders most often. Not! haha.
Endgame by Jensen actually didn’t stir me. Anyone who can spend 60 pages or so talking about how great it is to poop in the woods kind of gets a thumbs down on that count alone. But, I do agree with a great deal of his points, even though I can’t think of a single point he makes in it that he didn’t make elsewhere. It’s his delivery, I think. I think he’s mostly angry that being ill means he can’t do what he writes. I could be wrong, I don’t know him personally, but he definitely comes off as someone who needs to be free of something that just won’t let go.
As for speculative fiction, I recommend Michael W. and Katherine Gear’s “People of the…” series (can’t remember the real name of the series, my bad). It’s a pretty badass take on early North Americans and how they lived, with most of the books in roughly chronological order. It starts out with the first people to come through the glaciers hunting mammoth and giant deer on the through the clovis peoples and the Ohio valley peoples and the builders of Cahokia, etc. Fun reads. I had to slow down after about 6 or 7 books and take a break, but I’ll pick back up again soon!
Just my $0.02.
–GC
I’ve been meaning for a long time to mention this book here:
The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe
This is a book I think any rewilder will love. I’m short on time, so will come back soon to say more about it. Suffice it to say it tells the true story of a great adventure (one among a number of fantastic adventures experienced by the author, a kind of amateur anthropologist in the 1930s or so) and of a people who actually did rewild to stay free and live as they wanted to. You learn, in reading it, that there were actually free Apache living in the wild as late as the 1930s, some 40 years after the “official” surrender when Geronimo and his band came in and were shipped to reservations. When your realize how recent this really was, the whole thing is just stunning and awe inspiring.
The author’s anthropological theories may or may not be supported by subsequent developments in that field. I don’t know. But it doesn’t detract from a really engaging read. Highly recommended! :o
Okay, just to fill in a little…
In the 1930s the author of The Apache Indians: In Search of the Missing Tribe heard from some White Mountain Apaches in Arizona about relatives who had long ago fled the reservation to the Sierra Madre in Mexico. He, being a major adventurer, put together a trip to see if he could find this “lost tribe.” He took along two or three Apache men, including an old man who, as I recall, had seen some of the old days of war as a kid… something like that.
Their trip was incredible. Mostly on horseback, they roamed through the mountains, visited villages, and talked with locals, collecting evidence. I’ll just say he presents virtually iron clad evidence that there were free Apache in the area as late as the 1930s. They stayed hidden, in the vast canyons and wilderness of the Sierra Madre, occasionally stealing some horses or otherwise drawing attention to themselves. Due to their circumstances and small numbers, though, they apparently lived mostly in the old way, as hunter-gatherers, relying much less on raiding than had the Apache of the 1800s. In other words, they rewilded.
I’ll let you read the rest. An interesting question is, if they were there in the 1930s, how late in time were they there? The 40s? 50s? I doubt it was much later than that as I got the impression there may have been only 20 or 30 of them there in the 30s. They may have gradually died off or dispersed into the surrounding Mexican culture. But who knows… ???
If you are interested in practical skills I recommend “Living Off The Land” by Chris McNab. It’s a book I don’t even backpack without. Teaches you everything from climate-specific survival skills to building a meat smoking/drying rack to making a primitive bow and arrow. Plus much more!
Has anyone else here read “Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes” by Daniel Everett?
(I only post the link to amazon so folks can read reviews there, not advocating buying from them, of course…even though I do, at times.)
It was one of the most mind-blowing books I’ve read in years. Definitely among my all-time favorites.
yes, i’ve read that…it was incredible.
one very interesting part was when the author told his christian ‘testimony’ indigenous people he was trying to evangelize. it included his mother’s death (by suicide).
their reaction was laughter…it struck them as hilarious that he was trying to tell them the ‘good news’ about his culture and god (with all the attendent superiority)… while their own lives were so rich and rewarding that to them suicide was unthinkable.
i also enjoyed their very practical question of “have you ever met this Jesus person?.” the immediacy in their culture was refreshing and challenging.
the lack of recursion and the storytelling to illustrate the points was almost over my head!
this book was instrumental in helping me leave my christian faith (i was already well on my way)…another nail in the coffin in any case.
Nice. Yeah, I found the book to be incredible as well. Especially since I also grew up christian (in high school I thought my calling was to go to the jungles of south america as a missionary). So as a post-christian animist, reading this book was deliciously ironic in many ways…
Reading The Sacred Hunt: Hunting as a Sacred Path by Randall Eaton. So far it’s interesting, if a bit sexist and racist.
Currently reading The Harmless People, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. It’s about the extended time her family spent in the 1950s in the Kalahari with the !Kung. At some point I’ll follow up with her more recent work, The Old Way, which deals with the same topic. I’ll report back! 
Hunting Sacred by Larry Littlebird might be an antidote to that. The author is a fascinating guy to meet, too.
Right now I’m reading “Sex at Dawn” and my mind is not the only thing getting blown. 
It’s sort of like Ishmael, but about the anti-agricultural civilization analysis of the evolution of sexuality. It’s pretty amazing. I’m going to end up creating a “sticky” thread about it in the relationships section when I finish reading it.