At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives, and indeed affects all aspects of life on earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community, and how we can make things better.
This narrative moves elegantly between the microcosm of the author's dysfunctional family and the macrocosm of History. Readers are initiated into the stifling world of child and spousal abuse, and then beyond, where Jensen finds the same dynamics tricked out on the grand stage of Western civilization.

Listening to the Land is a collection of interviews with environmentalists, feminists, theologians, philosophers, and Indians centering around the question: If the destruction of the natural world isn't making us happy, why are we doing it?"

 

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 today’s death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. Readers of Jensen’s earlier work will recognize his deft and startling interweaving of the deeply personal, the political, the historical, and the philosophical, as he attempts to understand the atrocities that characterize so much of our culture, from the 8,000 dead at Bhopal to the more than twenty million people enslaved today (more than came over on the dreaded Middle Passage), to the destruction of the natural world.

Hailed as the philosopher poet of the ecological movement, best-selling author Derrick Jensen returns with a passionate forecast of how industrial civilization, and the persistent and widespread violence it requires, is unsustainable. Jensen's intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy's Black Ship to Hell.