Bøger af Richard Manning

A fascinating, science-based study that goes far beyond the Paleo diet to show that our bodies have not evolved to fit our modern lifestyle, with practical advice on how to regain our well-being.

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years.The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.

A Good House is a chronicle of the year in which Manning set out to build his house and rebuild his life. Combining entertaining tales of the cast of characters who helped him build; practical information about wiring, roofing, and plumbing; and meditations on the struggle to integrate environmental and spiritual values into everyday life, this is a book about creating a solid foundation and building up from there-in a hosue, in a family, in living a good life.

More than forty percent of our country was once open prairie, grassland that extended from Missouri to Montana. Taking a critical look at this little-understood biome, award-winning journalist Richard Manning urges the reclamation of this land, showing how the grass is not only our last connection to the natural world, but also a vital link to our own prehistoric roots, our history, and our culture. Framing his book with the story of the remarkable elk, whose mysterious wanderings seem to reclaim his ancestral plains, Manning traces the expansion of America into what was then viewed as the American desert and considers our attempts over the last two hundred years to control unpredictable land through plowing, grazing, and landscaping. He introduces botanists and biologists who are restoring native grasses, literally follows the first herd of buffalo restored to the wild prairie, and even visits Ted Turner's progressive--and controversial--Montana ranch. In an exploration of the grasslands that is both sweeping and intimate, Manning shows us how we can successfully inhabit this and all landscapes.

Music is a cultural universal among all humans for all times. It is embedded in our DNA, essential to our surivival. Academics have considered this idea to devise explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, incomplete, or just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a different angle, using his own guitar and banko as instruments of discovery. In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of musci rough and rowdy. American roots muscic is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, fieldhands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these poor, working-class people, built the foundations of jazz, gospel, blues, bluegrass, rock 'n' roll, and country music, an unparalleled burst of invention. This is the counterfactual to the academics' story. Manning takes us down a long, strange path, following music to deeper understandings of racism, slavery, inequality, meditation,

Provides a survey of agricultural research projects underway in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, China, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. This book starts from the premise that the 'Green Revolution' which averted mass starvation a generation ago is not a long-term solution to global food needs and has created its own very serious problems.

The most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command. This book presents an account of the American plains. It also describes a vision for ecological restoration that would establish a prairie preserve larger than Yellowstone National Park, flush with wild bison, elk, and wolves.