Customer Reviews

Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations With Remarkable People

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This is an excellent book that acquaints you with the intellectual odyssey and personality of Mr. Capra. Filled with brilliant insights and fascinating discussions with people like E.F. Schumacher, R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Chew, Krishnamurti, Warner Heisenberg, and many other giants of the 20th century who shaped Capra's thoughts in the writing of Tao of Physics and The Turning Point. Gives you an underpinning for The Web of Life too. An insider's multidisciplinary look into the intellectual cutting edge of the 60s and 70s. Warmly written and very pleasant. I highly recommend it as a starting point for a deep understanding of Fritjof Capra.

I have found all of FC's books very helpful. He has been able to take many exceptionally complex ideas in science and make them accessible to the lay reader - such as myself. In particular, he has made the link between the New Physics and Living Systems and the ancient wisdom.

Uncommon Wisdom takes a different approach to his other books. His traditional books are based naturally on explaining the ideas. This book is grounded in experience and in relationship. Here FC takes a personal and musing approach. He shares his own life journey, doubts, fears and hopes, as he meets, talks and develops relationships with some of the great thinkers of our time. He shows us through his story how his thinking develops. We as readers share the unfolding process in his own being as he too struggles with the import of what he is learning.

The ideas in this book are embedded in story and in people. As such they are more "sticky" than ideas simply defined and outlined. It is one thing to have Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle explained. It is so much better to listen, via FC's ears and eyes, to Heisenberg talk.

Another lasting impression I received from the book is what a time the 1970's 1980's was. Was it our Golden Age? Much of the book is located in the 1970's and 1980's when the idea of the breakdown of the Cartesian view and the rise of an interrelated view of reality was so new.

The book is out of print and I encourage him to persuade his publisher to get it back on the shelves. Why? In middle age, our youth has a pull. FC's current writing is already looking back at the 1970's which he now sees as a "Turning Point". Now in late middle age he and many millions of us are looking back with a new perspective. It is worth re-discovering the wonder of that time. In Uncommon Wisdom we travel back with FC and sit at his shoulder as he hears for the first time the ideas that are changing our world 30-years later. Maybe we have digested this time enough and we need to remember when we questioned more and to pick up the gifts we left aside as we turned away to raise our children and to get on in the world.

A wonderful book full of compassion and wonder

Enlightening, sometimes radical penetrations of thought revealed by one eminently qualified at the task.

Capra explores leading edge thought in a readable and enriching way.

Excellent book.

I find that Fritjof Capra's writing to be quite superb. He takes the sciences and spirituality and interweaves them for a greater understanding of life. In UNCOMMON WISDOM, Fritjof Capra shows his journey through his thinking. I enjoyed the way Frijof Capra disintegrates the so called ridged walls of science to show a greater connection to the world, to the future and to our own self.