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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
- A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
- Narrated by: Simon Mattacks
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Release date: 10-17-17
- Language: English
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Whispersync for Voice-ready
Regular price: $19.99
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Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world - and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?
Publisher's Summary
Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding - and reclaiming - the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
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- Scott
- 02-10-18
A remarkable exposé & synthesis of the Ponzi scheme that capitalism is and always has been.
This book is an astounding and well organized synthesis of history - environmental & social (political, economic & cultural) - that exposes the unifying threads of unsustainable exploitation that has today brought us to a precipice. Nothing is really cheap; unacknowledged costs are often high. Where in the past, as resources are depleted, capitalists have increased the level of coercive force applied, or moved on to rape more virgin lands, the authors note that with climate change, the usurpation of the commons now extends to the very atmosphere upon which all life depends. And in the conclusion they offer some very initial ideas of alternative structures. A lot to ponder, a dramatic call to face our current reality honestly, as well as to develop alternatives immediately. Critical reading!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Kristen Chaney
- 01-26-18
LOVE but different reader
LOVE THE CONTENT! His voice makes me sleepy though, so I had to hear it again.
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- Rebecca
- 10-20-17
Brilliant!
Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Marx, Roland Barthes and so many other philosophers, activists, and revolutionaries are reading this from beyond the grave and applauding! Just fantastic!