2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful look from the future at the age of the baby boomers, April 4, 2007
This review is from: Strange Days Indeed: Memories of the Old World (Perfect Paperback)
It is 2061. Zet Quimby, a 112 year old, probably naked vegan, has written his own first person account of the strange days when he was young, before the catastrophic earth changes of 2012 forced what remained of humanity to rethink how heavily it could afford to walk upon the earth. He looks back over an event horizon which ended the world as he knew it, after he and other survivors recreated a gentler society more attuned with its environment..
They now live in close connection with nature, in a clothing-optional community, understanding that the other creatures who share the earth are sentient, intelligent beings, not to be used for dinner or the raw materials for clothing.
The strange days of which he speaks are our present days and the recent past most baby boomers remember, beginning in the 1960's, when the old social structures were challenged in earnest, and began to morph into something else or simply break down.
His take on his own experience of the times and the mindless conditioning of the mainstream culture is astute, wryly humorous, and often laugh out loud funny. It is also poignant and sometimes a bit sad. His stance as an involuntary outside observer gives him the emotional distance to analyze the unexamined cultural beliefs that demand conformity and condition group behavior. It is truly an angle that was new to me, and I enjoyed looking at things through his eyes.
Most people, for example, do not go naked in public. Consequently, says Quimby, there is an unhealthy quality of "forbidden sexual fruit" that surrounds the idea of the nude human form which he himself spent years trying to overcome. His life up until the earth changes became a long search for places to drop the imprisonment of clothes--and society's conditions about them-- among kindred spirits, and much later to embrace a consciously cruelty-free diet that excluded anything obtained by exploiting animals.
His travels up and down the west coast led him to live somewhere in the high plains desert in far northern California, near Mt. Shasta. He built his own cabin from scratch and without power tools and lived "off the grid" for years where he could live without clothes - and society's demands on the subject - to his heart's content.
Author Stuart Ward has a gift for descriptive writing, and an intuition for the right word. The book's characters are well developed and sympathetic and Zet's psychological honesty and clarity as he works through his emotional and cultural baggage are endearing.
This is definitely a niche book, and will appeal mostly to those who share the same general philosophy. It is much more than "a polemic for the naturist movement," as some reviewers have said. It is really about spiritual purity and existential transparency. Shucking his clothes is only the symbol for the deeper work. His life task seems to be to identify and drop the repressive, shame-based internal conditioning that, for him, is represented by garments.
I am giving it 4 stars because Ward has a witty, intelligent, engaging writing style, and genuine insight. Chronic misuse of some words, e.g. "loosing" for "losing," "faire" for "fair" does get annoying and seem to be something the author's book doctor or critique group really should have caught. Other words are deliberately misspelled but, because he acknowledges those himself, seem acceptable.
I am not giving it 5 stars because it is also about 100 pages too top-heavy on the nudity angle, making his thoughts on the subject unnecessarily repetitive. This might be understandable, as this book grew out of a previous work on the subject.
The passages on cruelty-free diet and lifestyle are closer to a concept whose time has come and are pulled off with persuasive eloquence and compassion for all sentient life. Anyone who has felt compelled to embark on a spiritual quest should be able to relate to the greater story. There are places of the spirit that any person thinking deeper than the superficial passing show knows must be there - and that inner terrain is easily revisited - and examined with new eyes - in Quimby's company.
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