Customer Reviews

The Other Side of the World: Essays and Stories on Mind and Nature

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This book explores one of the greatest minds on human perception though pleasurable short stories.

The author, Bill Eddy, offers unique insight on how language and culture have shaped opinions of the natural environment. He demonstrates the need to change the inside - the way we think - before we can change the outside.

He does this by gracefully guiding the reader on how this is far more important than simply addressing familiar issues like water resources or soils types. And, as he demonstrates, this understanding affects absolutely everything.

The unique aspect is that he does this as a storyteller, not an activist with an agenda. He offers concepts to ponder from his worldwide experience of 40 years of cultural film making.

These short, philosophical essays read well together or independently. Many were created for five minute pieces on National Public Radio. The advantage I found of having the book, however, is re-reading certain sections expanded the meaning when applied to my own experience.

This is a great read for any thoughtful person, and a perfect gift or addition to a bedside table.

Fortunate is the owner of this book. The elegant covers of this collection of essays embrace small worlds of being, revealing themselves as Eddy's prose gently unfurls, opening and enlarging with it the readers mind and insights over vast distances of space, time, culture and meaning.

I find it difficult to describe the quality of pleasure that I experience while reading, and rereading, these meditations. Their essential value-and joy-has been that of reminding this reader of the vast potentialities for original thinking that lie within the mind, but which are frequently derailed by routine habits of thinking, and inattentiveness to the patterns of connection of being and seeing. Eddy's thought patterns are never routine, and frequently startling in their fertility and originality of association. Each one is a pearl-a unique aggregate of the luminous colors of an auspicious mind.

Form follows function. This book is a beautiful physical illustration of that observation. Not quite six by eight by one inches, its qualities of weight, printing, and craftsmanship are such that it can easily be held-open for reading-in one hand; wonderful for striking a casually erudite and appealingly cultivated pose. Romantics, and intellectuals, take note.

It's an exquisite addition to the Thinking Man or Thinking Woman's library.