Customer Reviews

Insatiable Is Not Sustainable

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Doug Brown has changed the way I feel about being "productive". Brown shows the reader that humans havn't always been so obsessed with improvemement, and havn't always followed the cliche of "be all you can be". And eventually this obsession with being more leads to insatiability because you can always be more! There is no end to it!

Another thing that sticks in my mind after reading Insatiable Is Not Sustainable is a quote by Derrick Jensen: "This culture values production over life itself." This constant pressure to be productive, and emphasis on "growth" in this culture is channeled into our economy which is turning living trees into to two-by-fours, mountain tops into aluminum cans, and prairies into parking lots.

Anybody who is fed up with dominant/taker culture needs to read this book.

If humans are going to have a future on this planet, a blaze of change has to sweep the earth in the next few decades--a change in the way people think about the world and our place in it. One of the sparks that are going to kindle this blaze is Doug Brown's Insatiable Is Not Sustainable, a book that reaches deep into the mad recesses of our culture (while retaining a sense of humor and remaining delightfully readable).

Doug Brown was a professor of mine in college for comparative economics. his book "insatiable is not sustainable" is an awesome book that will definitely change one's perception about our culture of material-slavery. we had to read the book as a part of curriculum for the class and regretfully, i resold my copy back to the book store. (in order to make a quick buck). ironic and moronic because i resold it in order to perpetuate my insatiability... i highly recommend and have quoted it or referenced it many a' times since i've read it in college. i am searching for a cheap replacement and for those of you whom are interested in this book, i highly recommend it.

I have purchased this book based on the recommendation of the author Daniel Quinn (who's an imaginative and original thinker, in my eyes).

However, you will NOT find any original nor valuable insights in this book. The author doesn't add much to his book title.
The book is 200+ pages long. The author spends about 80% of the text to analyze the philosophy of various thinkers of the past (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, etc) to prove that they had nothing to do with the "be all you can be" motto. What a surprise...

The fact that the current capitalistic way of life is leading us to world destruction is well discussed elsewhere. This book doesn't provide ANY interesting insight on this, too.
The last 15 (or so) pages of the book are dedicated to "what can we do about this mega-problem". Surprise, surprise! The author doesn't have any original ideas here, too. He merely suggests some lame (mostly) economic reforms, in his own words: "..all of these reforms have been specified and suggested by others over the past half century. None of them are novel..." (page 191).

So, if there's not much originality and insight, what is this book about?
Well, it is a dull academic book, citing diligently every scholar who had anything to say about the subject (though it didn't realy exist at the time!), starting from early Greeks and onwards.

It's the ultimate "me too!" book, as in: look mummy, I also wrote a book!
If you enjoyed the writing of Daniel Quinn - stay away from this book. It'll just get you highly upset..