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This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange
for our minds… At the close of this century of creativity
and discovery, humanists and scientists alike wonder: How could human beings in
all their brilliance -- those "axemakers" with the genius to invent,
lead, inspire, heal, design -- have brought the world to the brink of destruction?
The answers can be found in The Axemaker's Gift, an imaginative
and brilliantly informed double-edged history of human culture. James Burke, a
leading expert on the interaction of technology and society, and Robert Ornstein,
a pioneer in charting the evolution of consciousness, show how the interaction
between innovation and the brain has continuously reshaped the world and, more
important, the way we think. Using the whole of human
history and Western culture as its canvas, this magnificent book shows how, at
each major stage of innovation, from the first stone axe to the supercomputers
of today's world, those few with the capacity for sequential analysis (the axemakers)
generated technologies that gave them the power with which to control and shape
the rest of their community. The other, older kinds of knowledge, born of intuition
and the brain's multiple nonverbal talents, were undervalued and largely ignored.
Now, the author's say, the cumulative effects of axemaker technology have brought
us to the point where it is possible -- and imperative for our survival -- to
bring back into use those ancient forms of knowledge, still resident in the non-axemaker
cultures of the modern world. Once in an era, a book
comes along that changes the way we think about ourselves, our culture, and our
future. Brilliant, radical, and extraordinary in its range, The Axemaker's
Gift poses the right questions at a critical moment, and begins to find the
right answers. It offers a sophisticated and original way to recapture hope for
the future. James Burke is an award-winning television
host and author, best known for his extremely successful PBS series Connections.
The companion books to this and several other of his series, including The
Day the Universe Changed, have been bestsellers in the United States and abroad.
He is a regular columnist for Scientific American. Robert
Ornstein is the author of more than twenty books, including New
World, New Mind, the best-selling The
Psychology of Consciousness, and a leading psychology
textbook. He heads the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge in Los Altos,
California. |
