Customer Reviews

Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society

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This is a very good book decribing the need for a simpler lifestyle for the benifit of the individual as well as the environment. The author has a couple chapters devoted to practlical ways of living that are benifical to our spirits, our relationships, our health and our environment. Lots of quotes and references to other writings on the subject.

This book talks a great deal about the "evils" of the consumer society, "mass conformity", self-indulgence, etc., but in the end, it offers only revisionist history about the way things never were and advice based on platitudes and repeated encouragement to bake your own bread (literally - he's not trying to be figurative). It's filled with unrealistic descriptions of "simpler" times, such as the author's description of the noble savage: simple indigenous communities unspoiled by the evils of modern times -- which any historian will tell you never existed. His lauding of "one woman, uneducated, poor, a full-time housewife and mother" being somehow "perfect" smacks of sexism; that woman also often died in child birth at a young age and had no one to turn to when victimized by the men in her family. His idea of "an acceptance -- a total acceptance -- of things as they are" is, ofcourse, frightening; thank goodness people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't follow that model. There are far better books on the subject of simplifying your life that won't leave you feeling talked down to, that don't warp history to make their points, and that don't encourage you to accept things the way they are, including injustice.