Newsworthies

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

'Writers go on writing ... and writing ... always hoping to make a difference in the world. Books are bread cast upon the water." That's how Theodore Roszak practically shrugs off his impressive succession of significant books ... books that have made a difference in the world.

The Chicago-born writer, college professor (he teaches history at California State College at Hayward), public speaker, and humanist has just finished the latest of a list of works that includes The Making of a Counter Culture, Pontifax (a play), The Dissenting Academy (which he edited), Masculine/ Feminine (which he co-edited with Betty Roszak), Sources (an anthology he edited), and Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness.

Scheduled for 1978 release is his Person/ Planet, which he describes as "an effort to give a global, ecological interpretation to the peculiarly personalist style of contemporary culture and politics".

Roszak adds, "I believe I've found a deep, personal way to come at the environmental problems that often become 'too big' and too technical for people to take into their daily lives.

"My argument is that there is a point at which we experience with the planet ... like a baby picking up its mother's vibrations through the umbilical cord. Only-for usthose vibrations have to become culture: a conscious set of images and ideas.

"Person/Planet has much to do with family, school, and work on the human scale. There's also a long critique of the culture and economics of the modern city, which is meant to be a special challenge to all of us urban intellectuals who have a special, vested interest in the bigness of cities.

"I think it's the most important book I've written," Roszak concludes, ''and it's proba. bly the last for some time. After a while, one has to start living somewhere besides inside one's head."

That may be ... but if you had to live inside someone's head, we can't think of a more fas cinating noggin to choose than the one on Ted, Roszak's shoulders!

FRANK FORD

No one knows better than Frank Ford that these are dark days for our planet And Frank's pretty sure that things will get a lot worse before they get better. Yet—somehow—the founder of Arrowhead Mills maiming tains his faith in the eventual triumph Nature over the unnatural.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print