2019/08/30

The Hidden Pleasures of Life Audiobook | Theodore Zeldin | Audible.com.au



The Hidden Pleasures of Life Audiobook | Theodore Zeldin | Audible.com.au



Non-fiction Psychology & The Mind

Sample


The Hidden Pleasures of Life
A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future
By: Theodore Zeldin
Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 21-05-2015
Language: English
Publisher: Quercus Publishing



Non-member price: $29.96
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Publisher's Summary


Are you truly alive? Move from mindfulness to thoughtfulness as Theodore Zeldin opens up new perspectives on life in a series of intimate conversations with figures both famous and obscure, from civilisations throughout time. Each chapter reconsiders one of the big decisions that every person has to make.

What is the answer to the shortage of soul mates? How can one escape from work colleagues who are bores and organisations that thrive on stress? How could the unappreciated, rejected, or betrayed find less conventional ways of expressing their dismay? How could the quarrels within and between nations, religions, and temperaments open the way for a new attitude to disagreement? How can humour erode hypocrisy more effectively? How can the yearning for beauty help to make each life into a work of art?

This is not yet another book offering instant cures. Instead of asking you to change your ways, it takes you on a journey of exploration into ambitions, affections, memories and experiments that might lead today's increasingly demanding humans nearer to filling the voids in their existence and becoming truly alive.
©2015 Theodore Zeldin (P)2015 Quercus Publishing


Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars


MR J F COYLE
09-09-2016

Great life lessons.

Would you listen to The Hidden Pleasures of Life again? Why?

Zeldin really has profound and interesting views on life and makes these clear and thought provoking. This is a book for everyone, but not everyone will have the courage to read it.

2 of 3 people found this review helpful
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Showing 1-6 of 6 reviews

Geoffrey Henny
5.0 out of 5 starsA wise guide through the human experience
August 10, 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Loved this book and his other wonderful works. So many profound observations on every important area of the human experience. I find his writing a tremendous solace as I age. You feel in the company of a wise friend guiding you through the human experience - an everyman's Virgil. He uses such interesting sources and anecdotes. His observations on the challenges we all face have a deep authenticity I can vouch for having been around for awhile. I met Theodore several times at St. A nthony's college Oxford when I was a Trinity college graduate student in the early 1970s. He was and no doubt still is a witty, erudite and very humane person. My former wife Sue Kay Chapman Henny was a friend of his which is how I got to know him. I recommend his books to nearly everyone I meet.

Geoffrey Henny - Ann Arbor, Michigan
15 people found this helpful
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Marina
5.0 out of 5 starsit is performed in such a simple language that it feels like you just have a personal talk with Theodore Zeldin
December 9, 2017
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
such an intellectual pleasure to read this book. At the same time, it is performed in such a simple language that it feels like you just have a personal talk with Theodore Zeldin.
3 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsZeldin's books are wonderful!
February 14, 2019
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Excellent book! Highly recommend.
One person found this helpful
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MAHMOUD AMIRI
2.0 out of 5 starsCommenting & high lighting the common pleasures of life which ...
August 20, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
Commenting & high lighting the common pleasures of life which we don't appreciate & take for granted is most interesting. Advocating his philosophy rather repetitive & tiring.
2 people found this helpful
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Virditas
5.0 out of 5 starsRequired reading
November 14, 2016
Format: Paperback
This is a fantastic book. Zeldin is an engineer of optimism, change, and openness. If this book were required reading for everyone, we would live in a very different world. This is a human book about human scaled possibilities. Please read this.
6 people found this helpful
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Mr. R. Watson
5.0 out of 5 starsDistilled wisdom. Pure joy.
June 26, 2015
Format: Hardcover
This is a truly wonderful book. Even the contents gave me shivers of excitement. If your wish is to be alive then read this book.
5 people found this helpful
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2019/08/29

Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth - David Korten

Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth - David Korten

Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth

Published February 2015, by Berrett-Koehler Publishers
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The video of the book launch at All Saints Church in Pasadena on January 25, 2015 with David in conversation with Rev. Ed Bacon at the Rector’s Forum, is now available on YouTube.


Purchase book

Our current story is about Sacred Money and Markets. Money, it tells us, is the measure of all worth and the source of all happiness. The market is omniscient. Earth is simply a source of raw materials. Inequality and environmental destruction are unfortunate but unavoidable. Although many recognize this story promotes bad ethics, bad science, and bad economics, it will remain our guiding story until replaced by a more compelling story that aligns with our deepest understanding of the universe and our relationship to it.

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PDF Version

A Sacred Life and Living Earth story is grounded in a cosmology that affirms we are living beings born of a living Earth itself born of a living universe. Our health and well-being depend on an economy that works in co-productive partnership with the processes by which Earth’s community of life maintains the conditions of its own existence—and ours. Offering a hopeful vision, this book lays out the transformative impact adopting this story will have on every aspect of human life and society.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: In Search of a Deeper Truth
Chapter 1: Our Story Problem
Chapter 2: Our Quest to Know
Chapter 3: A Brief History of Story Politics
Chapter 4: Living Universe
Chapter 5: Children of a Living Earth
Chapter 6: Making a Living
Chapter 7: Enslaved by Corporate Robots Chapter 8: Economics for a Living Household
Chapter 9: A Living Economy for a Living Earth
Chapter 10: Own the Story, Own the Future




REVIEWS

An Appreciation of David KortenA review of Change the Story, Change the Future
by John B. Cobb
April 12, 2018

Many thoughtful people in the world outside academia are raising the questions to which this book provides answers – the right answers – in a way they can appreciate. As a member of the Club of Rome, Korten is visible in wide reaches of society. Let us do all we can to spread the word. This word has great saving potential. Read more…


John Cobb wrote this review for Open Horizons. He is Professor Emeritus, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate School, distinguished process theologian, and Founding Co-Director of the Center For Process Studies.

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Reflections on the book Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth
by Dana Penrice
March 14, 2017

(Originally posted by The Human Venture.)

Earlier in January, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture and a small group discussion at the University of Alberta with David Korten, the cofounder of Yes! Magazine and author of many books on the Human Venture reading list including Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth and The Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community.

The frontier of how we collectively manage threats and opportunities as a species is upon us. What Korten proposes in his most recent book Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth, is that the most significant work of our current place and time in history is to create and disseminate a collective, shared story that better prepares us to meet the realities of the situation facing humanity and our planet.

Read the full review HERE…

John Cobb on David Korten
​
An Appreciation of David Korten's
 Change the Story, Change the Future
​
4/12/2018

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An Appreciation of David Korten

by John Cobb

             From the title on, the book is rich, convincing, and on target.  Many people are doing many good things to affect change.  The title correctly tells us that much of this can be coopted into contexts that make their “good things” contribute to the ultimate evil of human self-destruction.  We need to change the thought and understanding that provide this context for policy formation and action.
            The title also correctly tells us that people actually shape their lives less according to formulated ideas and beliefs than in narratives. This latter point was once quite clear to Western intellectuals.  They were deeply influenced by the Bible.  Unlike the other major wisdom traditions, the Bible is overwhelmingly a book of narratives organized into a single overarching narrative.  Even when secularization marginalized the Bible, historians undertook to replace its often mythical narrative with one that moderns could believe.
            But now the universities are purging themselves of the remnants of even indirect biblical influence.  The historical approach to subject matter is disappearing even in history departments, and these are being marginalized.  But failing to attend to stories does not end their regime.  The implicit story with which socialization into the university leaves you is of human beings shedding superstitions and speculations and settling for facts and scientific theories.  Values and stories are part of what is shed.  Indeed, any interest in whether life is meaningful is part of the superstition and speculation from which the truly “modern” man claims freedom.
            Korten long ago liberated himself from university orthodoxy and opened himself to what is actually occurring in the world.  There, including in the university, he finds the dominant story to be one that encourages the human species to speed its way to self-destruction.  Indeed, what is now largely in control is the most powerful form of the story than must be changed.  Fortunately, In the part of this world that is free from university orthodoxy, Korten also finds much that important contributions to formulation of the new story that we need, and much interest and support.  The hope for changing the story is not mere fantasy.
            I find myself in overwhelming agreement.  Korten appreciates the importance of worldview, spiritual formation, economics, and politics.  He has keen insights in all these directions.  And he formulates ideas that I express in pedestrian and tedious ways in powerful and memorable images. He envisions “development as a pool of money, spreading across the Asian countryside, consuming life wherever it touched.” (p. 11) “Viewed through the cultural lens of mainstream economics, the Earth looks like a dead rock populated by mindless money-seeking robots.”  Of course, such images can be called “exaggerated” and “unfair,” but they communicate profound truths in life-changing ways.  I am deeply grateful – and a bit jealous.
            Korten does not make his technically philosophical ideas explicit.  However, we in the process community who consider explicit metaphysical change to be important, claim him as a co-worker, and we have found close collaboration easy and smooth.  Stories are about events.  For us, events are the deepest reality of the actual world.  Every event is itself a microcosmic process and many of them are organized into larger events that call for expression in stories.
            In reacting against the dead world of the economist, Korten stresses that we find ourselves in a living world.  Whiteheadians emphasize, with Thomas Berry, that the world is not a society of objects but a community of subjects.  What is intended by Korten and by process thinkers is virtually the same.
            Korten draws out the implications with great relevance and directness.  Life should be about life, not about money.  We are reminded of Jesus’ statement that one cannot serve both God and money.  It may take process folk a bit longer to get there, but the process community certainly agrees.  We are proud to claim Korten’s vision and his book as expressing our convictions as well as his.
            That we can do so is important for us.  We have never produced a book that had a chance of being a best seller.  It is unlikely that we ever will.  Korten’s book does have a chance.  Its style is excellent.  Many thoughtful people in the world outside academia are raising the questions to which this book provides answers – the right answers – in a way they can appreciate.  As a member of the Club of Rome, Korten is visible in wide reaches of society.  Let us do all we can to spread the word.  This word has great saving potential. 

​-- John B. Cobb, Jr.
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Dana Penrice wrote this review for The Human Venture. She is a board member for The Human Venture Institute and Human Venture Leadership, and Alberta co-ordinator for Young Agrarians.
July 22nd, 2014|Categories: Books, Living Earth, Story Power

Change the Story, Change the Future

Dana PenriceBook Reviews

Reflections on the book Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth by David Korten

 “We humans live by our shared framing stories and have a deep need for a sense of purpose and meaning. If we do not share an authentic sacred story, the void will be filled with an inauthentic story—and that is our problem. An economy, a society, built on the foundation of a lie cannot work.”
David Korten, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth
Earlier in January, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture and a small group discussion at the University of Alberta with David Korten, the cofounder of Yes! Magazine and author of many books on the Human Venture reading list including Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth and The Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community.
The frontier of how we collectively manage threats and opportunities as a species is upon us. What Korten proposes in his most recent book Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth, is that the most significant work of our current place and time in history is to create and disseminate a collective, shared story that better prepares us to meet the realities of the situation facing humanity and our planet.
Korten says that we need to stop living by what he calls the Sacred Money and Markets Story where time is money, wealth is measured only by dollars and corporations are the main organizing unit of our way of living. Instead, he calls for a Sacred Life and Living Story where time is life, wealth is measured in real living wealth, where we recognize that life only exists in community and where “environmental sustainability, economic justice and living democracy are inseparable”.
As communities, societies and as a species, we function with shared stories. From a Human Learning Ecology perspective, understanding stories—how they came to be, how they equip us and how they constrain us—is foundational to understanding our human predicament.
As Korten opened his lecture he confided to the audience “You know, we are in trouble as a species.” With his experience working with low-income countries on development and participating in international conversations on the future of humanity through organizations like the Club of Rome, Korten became interested in tracking the impact of globalization and the consequences of a global corporate force that only values profit and growth. His life’s work has been focused on figuring out how we got into this mess and how we can get out. Getting the story right, according to Korten, will be foundational in navigating through the turbulent times that lie ahead.
Why? Life Orienting Stories (worldviews, belief systems, philosophies of life, cosmologies, etc.) shape our priorities, our plans and our actions. They influence how we define progress and our sense of what life is all about. The problem is, that like all stories, they can be incomplete or fallible. The current Life Orienting Story upon which our society has been operating is no exception.
The Sacred Money and Markets Story is a story that is rooted in the challenge of distributing resources to a population. While this is an age old problem that has been addressed in various ways with varying success in different local or regional contexts throughout human history, in a globalized world, the challenge is incredibly complex. Mixed with our undeveloped capacities to manage equality and equitability at this scale, we have designed an economy that is incredibly vulnerable to power grabs by corporations and the top 1%. Folding in the tale of the “American Dream” that if we just work hard enough we can rise to the top, culturally we have all been captured by this story.
It has told us that life is about accumulating money, our responsibility is to support economic growth and all we have to do is work our jobs and keep consuming to enjoy ‘the good life’. What it doesn’t tell us, is that the levels of consumption and growth that we are reaching have driven ecological destruction and climate change to the point of undermining the very life systems upon which we and future generations depend. We have set up a conflict between what it takes to survive and make a living within the economic system we have created and what it takes for our species to survive within the laws nature.
While many of us recognize this on some level, why haven’t we been able to change the story? One dangerous aspects of the Sacred Money and Markets Story is that it is coherent. It provides enough detail to provide us with meaning and give guidance to our lives. Because it feels complete or ‘good enough’, it stops us from questioning where it came from, for whom it is benefiting, what is missing and what the long term consequences might be.  We carry on our individual lives according to the social norms that have arisen under this story and external authorities with narrow interests continue to perpetuate the narrative.
Another feature is  that the Sacred Money and Markets Story doesn’t inform us on the full situation. We live within nested hierarchical situations, individual living within families, within communities, within regions, within countries, within planet Earth. Our current story has us focusing on the narrowest frames. It fails to inform us that the most significant challenges we face are playing out at the largest frame, that of our species and our planet. As Korten bluntly observed, our situation is looking grim. By taking in all of our situation, from the narrowest to the largest and including that in our orientation, we can start to understand what is required of us and where we should be building our capacities to meet the realities of our unfolding human situation.
In creating a Life Orienting Story that orients us to all of life and all of its complexities, we quickly recognize that it will never be fully complete however it must be comprehensive in providing enough detail to support wise action. While in recent years we have started to develop a fairly comprehensive narrative on the state of our planet, we must be open to ongoing testing and revision of our Life Orienting Story. We need to continue to build an accurate picture of where we are headed, what we should be paying attention to and what courses of action we should take. It is this inquiry process into the most significant aspects of life that allows us to course correct.
A well-developed Life Orienting Story should connect us to the largest, broadest story, that of life. It should remind us that we are part of two communities, the community of humanity and life. It should help us to realize that our own individual life stories are intimately linked to our shared collective story. How we inform ourselves, how we understand our biggest human challenges, what we take responsibility for and how we act, are integral to re-writing our shared Life Orienting Story.
Korten encourages us to recognize that we live by the stories we tell ourselves and it is in this story-telling that we can create a better future. The Sacred Life and Living Story reads in part,
“We humans are living beings born of and nurtured by a Living Earth. Real wealth is living wealth. Time is life. Money is just a number useful as a medium of exchange in well-regulated markets.
Life only exists in community. We humans are creatures of conscience who survive and proposer only as members of a Living Earth community. The prime task of any living community is to maintain the conditions essential to the life of its members. We all do best when we all do well in a world that works for all…”
Reading these words, or even better digging into his book, I would encourage you to test it and ask yourself “What is significant that this story is orienting us to?”, “How does it shape our responsibilities?” and “What would it look like to live by this story?”


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When Corporations Rule the World - David Korten

When Corporations Rule the World - David Korten

When Corporations Rule the World


Published June 2015, by Berrett-Koehler Publishers








Anyone serious about the systemic crisis we now face ought to read this updated version today. Korten captures the devastating and increasingly threatening dynamics of the corporate-dominated global system and has offered a vibrant, well-written, and important strategy for moving us beyond its destructive economic, social, and ecological logic.
—Gar Alperovitz, author of What Then Must We Do?
A searing indictment of an unjust international economic order. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The new edition is even more powerful than the original in its articulation of the issues, its stories of the struggle and its compelling call to each and everyone of us to become participants in what I believe to be a sacred trust….creating a world that works for all. —Danny Glover

<More Reviewer Comments>
Excerpts from Third, 20th Anniversary Edition

Introduction

Introduction – When Corporations Rule the World (Excerpt)




From Third, 20th Anniversary Edition

Twenty years ago, When Corporations Rule the World sounded a global alarm: The consolidation of power in a global economy ruled by corporations poses a growing threat to markets, democracy, humans, and life itself.

Unfortunately, subsequent events affirm all but extraneous details of the analysis. Corporate power is now more concentrated and operates ever further beyond human control. Its exercise is more reckless. Its political domination is more complete. Its consequences are more devastating. And system collapse is more certain and imminent.

All of this is now abundantly visible. People the world over have mobilized to resist and to build the foundations of a new life-serving economy in which money is a means, not an end.

As the devastation wrought by corporate rule accelerates, time grows every shorter. Replacing the suicide economy we have with the living economy we must bring forth is imperative, and we must accomplish it within a blink of history’s eye.

If we are to move beyond the current system’s deep dysfunction, we must understand its cultural and institutional sources and how they contrast with the design principles by which healthy living communities self-organize. In 1995, the year When Corporations Rule the World launched, the news was filled with reports of eye-popping corporate executive compensation packages, corporate downsizing, and the outsourcing of good-paying jobs to countries distinguished by their low wages and weak labor and environmental protections.

It proved to be a moment of awakening to the depth and implications of an unfolding global corporate takeover with ever more brutal consequences for families, communities, democracy, liberty, Earth, and the livelihood of billions of people.

As the gap between the promise and reality of capitalism grows ever wider, the illusion that lures us into submission grows ever more transparent to reveal the disturbing truth that in submitting to global corporate rule and mindless consumerism, we sacrifice the joys of living and risk humankind’s future. In response, millions of people are acting to reclaim their lives and rebuild their communities. They sow the seeds of an emerging global social movement dedicated to democracy, a living economy, and Living Earth.

Books


Conclusion



From When Corporations Rule the World, Third, 20th Anniversary Edition

Twenty years ago, the title When Corporations Rule the World evoked for many people a question: Do corporations rule the world? Events of the past twenty years have erased all trace of doubt. Indeed, they do. And the consequences are dire.

Our future depends on replacing a life-destroying capitalist suicide economy with a living economy devoted to life’s service. The need is urgent and imperative. The time to debate whether it is necessary or even possible has long passed. We must turn what seems politically impossible into the politically unstoppable. And we must do it in a blink of history’s eye.

In 1995, the seeds of resistance to corporate rule — which captured global attention with the 1999 Seattle WTO protest — were just beginning to germinate. Local-economy initiatives were few and scattered and had yet to coalesce into the global new-economy movement now emerging and gaining momentum by the day.

As the momentum builds, corporatists respond with assurances to the public that if government and special interest citizen advocates will just get out of their way, profit-driven corporations will create jobs for all and heal the environment. These assurances wear increasingly thin as the same corporatists spend billions of dollars on PR campaigns and political lobbying to defeat any initiative that might benefit people and the rest of nature at the expense of corporate freedom and profits.

The ruling institutions of the suicide economy cannot reform themselves from within for a simple reason: Their structure limits human decision making in their service to choices that maximize short-term profits. A system designed to maximize short-term profits free from the expression of moral sensibility drives inevitably toward ever-increasing inequality, environmental destruction, and political corruption. This inherently self-destructive economic system is like a cancer cell. It can destroy itself and the body on which it feeds; it cannot heal or replace itself with a healthy cell.

Even if modest internal reform is possible, marginal reforms can at best slow the damage. Humanity will continue on its suicidal path for so long as we accept the premise that money is wealth and that control of our means of living is best left to a global alliance of “too big to regulate” money-seeking corporate robots devoted to amassing monopoly power to extract unearned profits. . Our human future requires a different system based on authentic values and valid assumptions. We are only beginning to recognize the scope and depth of the implications.

To succeed in the daunting task of securing the future of humankind, we must be clear on the magnitude of the challenge, the forces aligned in our favor, and the critical needs and breakthrough opportunities.

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Overview

In this new edition of his classic book, David Korten illuminates the convergence of ideological, political, and technological forces that have driven an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in a handful of corporations and financial institutions and left the market system blind to all but its own short-term financial gains. As he vividly documents, the social and environmental consequences of these efforts have been devastating. Human survival depends on a global community-based, life-centered alternative beyond the outmoded ideologies of communism and capitalism. Korten lays out specific steps to achieve it.

In the new introduction and conclusion, and the updated prologue and epilogue, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing new economy movement; reviews the implications of relevant events since 1995—including the global democracy movement, 9/11, the war on terror, and the financial crash of 2008—explores why the institutions of what he calls a suicide economy resolutely resist even modest reform; and outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.


September 11th, 2010|Categories: Uncategorized






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