Customer Reviews

The Greening of America, 25th Anniversary Edition

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This is the kind of book that had I read it ten years ago, it would have changed my life. However, having a little education and some wisdom that comes with age, this book quickly reveals it's true colors. Charles Reich was (and may still be) a professor at Yale University. I originally got the idea to read this book when one of my history professors related a story about Reich gadding about campus in his bare feet during the early 1970's. My professor, with a wry grin, related how shocked he and some of his fellow students were that someone of Reich's stature would do such a crazy thing. After reading this book, this behavior fits right in with Reich's codification of what he calls a "new consciousness".

This new consciousness, which is essentially the hippie lifestyle, is a new extension of man that has grown from a technological and corporate society run amuck, and two prior forms of consciousness that failed to properly allow man to run a high-tech world. This first consciousness was what our founding fathers had: a sense of individuality and hard work. With the advent of industrialism, this consciousness gave way to the second form. This is the one most of us are familiar with today. It a way of strict conformity to hierarchy, a rigid adherence to rules and regulations, as well as heavily materialistic and goal-oriented. Reich argues that this way of being was too stilted and crushed individuality and free expression. The result was the third phase of consciousness: the hippie. Doing your own thing, freedom, and a desire to make technology work for humanity were the ultimate goals of this group. Reich examines their clothing (of which shoeless activity is perfectly acceptable for a college professor) and music. He sees in all of this an articulation of rebellion and rage against the Corporate State, a mindless automaton that runs roughshod over all of humanity. The glorious hippies will rise up and put a stern hand on this rudderless beast and all will be well. Reich makes sure he points out that the current system is beyond reform (which I agree with) and that the only way to bring about a "Greening of America" is to restore humanity to society.

This book certainly has some high points. Reich is absolutely right about the banality of the system and that democracy and law have been bent and subverted to agree with and reinforce the system, just as humans have. His solution of the hippie, especially seen through the lens of time, is laughable. We all know what happened to the hippies. Those that didn't die from drug overdoses in the early 1970's sold out and actually expanded the system that Reich rails against. Who do you think the Yuppies were? Aging hippies that absolutely wallowed in materialism and excess. Think of how advertising has expanded in the last twenty years. How many television channels do we have now? How many of them are full of unhealthy images and advertising? The freedom that the hippies so strived for through the music of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead has given way to Marilyn Manson and the hateful, pornographic throbbings of rap music. As we can see, what Reich crows about has actually morphed into a nightmare. At least Reich did foresee it, as he states that if the hippies couldn't move their ideas past youth, they would fail. They did, in spades.

This book should be read, and it is interesting and exciting at times. I love how he demolishes the New Deal, although he basically does it by saying they didn't do enough because they tried to work within the system. The flaws in the book are destructive to his overall ideas, and the outcome of history has showed us that Reich completely failed in his objectives. At best it can be said that he was amazingly astute in his observations of the time.

A brilliant and rare look at the Vietnam War era's culture at American colleges during the Sixties. It seems that all chronicles of the Sixties were written by authors that never really lived within the culture. With all these media cliches of that era, this story would never seem to surface ...and yet Reich captures this rare subculture as it REALLY existed. His analysis of previous American history is also ingenious and thought provoking. While his prediction for the future of this culture seem naive, his report still causes one to wonder: what are our full range of cultural choices?

This text is a comprehensive mapping of the mechanisms of the corporate state used to subdue citizens. Reich basically argues (quite convincingly) that modern capitalist society reduces people to functions, thus our whole life is measured by how well we can become a function for the system. He analyses key areas such as labor, education, law, philosophy etc.

In a sense I would say Reich is detailing the institutional control that Herbet Marcuse talks of in his book Eros and Civilisation.

As a second year arts/law student this book has given me a definite insight into the reality of the system which I am reluctantly partaking, an insight which makes it seem all the more repugnant.

One warning, Reich required the reader to use their own analytical skills to apply his discourse to society, so if you are a person who needs hundreds of examples for each notion raised as you can not visualise them yourself, don't buy this book. Otherwise, its a fine text.

This book is dead-on in both its diagnosis and prescription. It trashes both the liberals and conservatives and gets right to the heart of the matter. If you can get past the hippy fashions of the day and delve into the more substantive issues of consciousness, you'll see what a crucial period that time was. Reading this book 30 years on, that the hippy revolution failed and that we are faced with an even worse social situation in some ways are sad facts. Nonetheless, there is hope. Everybody should read this book.

I bought this in a second-hand bookshop.. the owner was pleased that I had picked it out.. like it was a lost gem. "That book sold loads when it came out!" he said... But why?

The Green of America is a relevatory exposition of the state of affairs of modern industrial capitalism while riding the crest of social resistance in the 1960's (feminism, black liberation, educational upheaval). Compared to this Alvin Toffler's the Third Wave is doctored, ignorant drivel. Reich's narrative sticks solidly to material analysis and recognition of what really powers social change - social conditions (AKA class struggle or dynamics)....Even though he doesn't reference Marx much at all. Reich has taken gloomy Marcuse's assessment of consumer society and shows what modern life will really engender. Full marks for old Reich.. desperately needs reprinting!

I am looking for a copy--I'm so sad that I can't find one. Reich describes so well, the youth culture of that era. Now in my 50's I'd like to revisit the thinking of that time. It is a unique piece of social history.

This book was assigned reading for the honors English composition class that I took as a college Freshman in the Spring of 1971. Of the dozen people in our small select class, I was the only country boy--and the only person who found this book to be ridiculous. Reich imagined a world devoid of Realpolitik where the public at large frolics in the grass. Never did he imagine the world we have today--full of right-wing kooks in place of the left-wing kooks of the late 60's and early 70's! I was delighted to discover that our public library system does not even carry this book. Good riddance! Hopefully forty years hence the world will also have forgotten about Palin and the rest of latest crop of right-wing kooks that currently dominate the news!

Back in the 1970s you couldn't cross a college campus without seeing hundreds of copies of this book everywhere you looked. Hip young professors taught it. Proto-revolutionaries held it aloft. Idealistic youngsters thought it portended a new age.

All nonsense, of course. Reich's manifesto is ill-argued, historically ignorant, and with the advantage of 36 years of hindsight, absolutely wrong in everything it predicted. It begins:

"There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past.It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act..."

...and goes on and on about new conciousness arising, transcending the material world and so forth. It's sort of as if Marx's Communist Manifesto was written by a Deadhead who'd had one two many tokes over the line. And Reich knew his audience, and how to flatter them:

"This is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought, and liberated life- style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent and refusal, nor are theyin any sense irrational. The whole emerging pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bell bottoms to the Woodstock Festival, makes sense and is part of a consistent philosophy. It is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America."

Yes, beads and bellbottoms are "part of a consistent philosophy." I was never quite sure if that was evidence of a deluded middle-aged man (Reich was 40 or 41 when the book was published) trying desperately to identify with the youth culture that had passed him by, or merely a cynical attempt to cash in on the passion and ignirance of the young. Not that it matters; the end result is the same.

The number of reviews thus far suggests that the current generation of Luddites has yet to embrace this book and carry it aloft in the manner of Mao's shock troops, as they tend to do with the writings Chomsky; for that we can be thankful. But doubtless they will eventually glom on to it, ignore the history that proved it nonsense, and once again march in the streets demanding higher conciousness for all.

I started reading someone else's copy of this book about 5 yrs ago and was impressed with the way he presented his ideas. His facts must have been good, otherwise the publisher would not be "out of stock." This book was on the New York Times Bestseller List!!

Churches Duped by Green Extremists [article]
by Henry Lamb
Henry Lamb is the executive VP of the Environmental Conservation Organization
and chairman of Sovereignty International.
[...]

Few, if any, of the churches realize that the National Religious Partnership for the Environment is the outgrowth of extreme ecologists who believe the Bible is obsolete, that the earth - gaia - is the giver of life, that human beings are but individual cells in the gaia organism, and that the United Nations is the evolving "brain" of gaia.