Customer Reviews

Dancing With Mosquitoes

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Running into Theo Grutter's book is like running into Jean Liedloff's Continuum Concept: meeting a mind that has come independently to be in synch with my own. This doesn't mean he's saying things I've said or thought. On the contrary, he continually surprises me with things I haven't said or thought. And he says them well and wittily. Of our frenetic "get ahead" lifestyle that robs our souls to fill our houses with gaudy trinkets: "Is it not the madness of the fool who day after day falls into the same pit, yet is wholly proud to know the trick of how to climb out of it day after day?" Of the congratulation we award ourselves for our humanitarian greatness in the Third World: "A versatile mind might want to scrutinize with an ecologically-minded eye the greatness of our great white jungle doctors. A truly modern mind that thinks also with a third eye placed generations away might then note that this humanitarian greatness nicely exploding our population there can ultimately cast a great shadow over the flora and fauna of the jungle and stop its people from singing and dancing." Composed of very brief essays, this is a book to spend a few minutes with every day, a book for your bedside table. Readers who cherish my work will cherish Dancing with Mosquitoes.

Dancing With Mosquitoes: To Liberate The Mind From Humanism -- A Way To Green The Mind records Theo Grutter's patient and persistent attempt to heal himself of such negative emotions as anger, hate, pity, and resentment. Grutter writes about northern waters, tropical seas, and the swamps were he fished for a living, as well as hunting in the taiga. Dancing With Mosquitoes is a compendium of writings that compel the reader to think outside the usual parameters of humanism and is highly recommended reading for students of philosophy, readers in search of a better and more personally fulfilling way to live, men in need of anger management, and anyone with an interest in alternative approaches to life and living.

Do not be fooled by the "customers who bought this book..." comparisons above. This book is only psycho-spiritual in an ancillary (though not unimportant) way. It is a staggering collection of extended aphorisms that examines and challenges our individual and collective sense of self. But this does not capture it. It is also poetry -- delightful not only for its ideas, but also for its language. Here we have a man standing on his own, actively divorcing himself from external philosophies, and looking about. The book is a process, not the record of a process. If you will wade out into it and follow the often strange train of Grutter's thinking, you will become part of the process. Highly recommended. Really excellent. It is not simply another "good" book. It is something special.

This brilliant iconoclastic work contains 224 meditations that at times read vividly like diary entries. Grutter's focus is on the conventional mind that endlessly churns in well-worn grooves and never succeeds in experiencing life in the raw. A seasoned outdoors man used to being alone in the wilderness, Gutter has learned to think and feel outside our civilizational grooves cut for us by our consumer society and the 850-word vocabulary of the media.

Many of his insights are as extraordinary as their formulations are shocking to a reader who prefers the safe ground of polite discourse. Those, however, who are willing and ready to follow Gutter into the wild outdoors are in for a special combination of surprise, awe, horror, disgust, beauty, and above all rawness.

Whether he talks about plants, animals, the environment, death, fear, our screwed-up civilization, or himself, he never fails to come up with any number of unpleasant insights that yet need to be heard. His language aims at the reader's gut and never misses to hit home. But he also is a master of memorable lyrical turns of phrase and gripping imagery.

The editor in me would have liked to trim this book down by a hundred pages, but I can also appreciate that the book is something of a sledge hammer whose weight ought not to be reduced. Besides, Gutter doesn't write dull pages. Words come bubbling out of him; after all, he waited 30 years to spit them out. If you read the book from cover to cover, you might actually emerge as a better human being.

Copyright ©2006 by Georg Feuerstein. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in any form requires prior permission from Traditional Yoga Studies at www.traditionalyogastudies.com

There are times when the world seems so decided and familiar that it tempts one to doze off as life slips by. Theo Gruder's book, Dancing With Mosquitoes, will certainly bring you fully awake in that case, as he pulls you off the well-worn highways of modern convention and shares his insights and ideas garnered over an interesting, decidedly off-road life lived in Alaska and Mexico. To read Gruder is to encounter a prose-poet with a whimsical eye, unafraid to question popular assumptions. His syntax is refreshing, at times surprising and often delightful, making his ideas tantalizing, like that unknown spice you can't quite identify in your favorite new dish. He has a way of rising above the fray of whatever the current controversy might be with a thoughtful and refreshing word. He is a man who has looked at life, thought deeply about it and made up his own mind. He invites us, as he has done, to examine the trip we're making on this earth, and to ask whether the values we hold are indeed those which we have actively chosen for ourselves, or whether we have settled for the prepackaged, one-size-fits-all variety. I encourage others to get to know him.

I would also encourage this bookseller to include the book's subtitle: To Liberate the Mind from Humanism-A Way to Green the Mind. Thank you.

There was something about this book that reminded me of a mosquito. From the first page on it began sucking. Being a lover of nature I felt that love drain away as I continued reading. The author's excessive use of metaphor was too much in itself, not to mention the fact that his descriptions were terribly cheesy. I found myself exercising my gagging reflex to no end. The other repulsive factor involved the author continually refering to himself. Since he is the author it is only obvious to conclude that indeed these thoughts are solely his; the fact that he kept reminding me of this led me to feel that what I was reading derived from pure arrogance. The ideas in this book are not as complex as the author insists, only if you take into account the way he presents them. Any form of theory can become garbled when muddled with overwhelming language. While the points he was trying to make were legitimate, the way he presented them was a major turn off. I had to put it down before I fulfilled my urge to go chop down an ancient forest, or at least light a match to my own backyard.

What a gift! Arriving here I found your book. I find it wild, refreshing, frightening, creative, honest, soul searching, harsh, gentle, but mostly truly objective. What can I say...But honour your odyssey of extraordinary courage...You closed the book magnamiously and the only words that come to me now are: thanks for writing it!