John J. Ratey

Richard Manning

The scientific evidence behind why maintaining a lifestyle more like that of our ancestors will restore our health and well-being. In GO WILD, Harvard Medical School Professor John Ratey, MD, and journalist Richard Manning reveal that although civilization has rapidly evolved, our bodies have not kept pace. This mismatch affects every area of our lives, from our general physical health to our emotional wellbeing. Investigating the power of living according to our genes in the areas of diet, exercise, sleep, nature, mindfulness and more, GO WILD examines how tapping into our core DNA combats modern disease and psychological afflictions, from Autism and Depression to Diabetes and Heart Disease. By focusing on the ways of the past, it is possible to secure a healthier and happier future, and GO WILD will show you how.

Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

Go Wild

In this provocative, wide-ranging book, 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.

How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

Against the Grain

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.

Building a Life on the Land

A Good House

Music is fundamental to human existence; it is embedded in our evolution and encoded in our DNA, which is to say, essential to our survival. Academics in a variety of disciplines have devised explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, incomplete, ivory-towered, and just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a wholly different angle, using his own guitar and banjo as instruments of discovery. In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of music rough and rowdy. American roots music is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, field hands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these people--poor, working people--built the foundations of jazz, gospel, blues, bluegrass, rock 'n' roll, and country music, in an unparalleled burst of invention. Use this book to follow where Manning's guitar leads. Ultimately, it sings the American body electric.

Seeking Subversion, Transcendence, and Solace in America's Music

If It Sounds Good, It Is Good

Music is fundamental to human existence, a cultural universal among all humans for all times. It is embedded in our evolution, encoded in our DNA, which is to say, essential to our survival. Academics in a variety of disciplines have considered this idea to devise explanations that Richard Manning, a lifelong journalist, finds hollow, arcane, incomplete, ivory-towered, and just plain wrong. He approaches the question from a wholly different angle, using his own guitar and banjo as instruments of discovery. In the process, he finds himself dancing in celebration of music rough and rowdy. American roots music is not a product of an elite leisure class, as some academics contend, but of explosive creativity among slaves, hillbillies, field hands, drunks, slackers, and hucksters. Yet these people—poor, working 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. This is what tells us music is essential, but by pulling this thread, Manning takes us down a long, strange path, following music to deeper understandings of racism, slavery, inequality, meditation, addiction, the science of our brains, and ultimately to an enticing glimpse of pure religion. Use this book to follow where his guitar leads. Ultimately it sings the American body, electric.

A U.S. journalist expelled from South Africa shares his impressions of the trouble there, describes his meetings with whites and Blacks there, and suggests what the future may hold for South Africa

An Eyewitness Account of South Africa Today

They Cannot Kill Us All

An impassioned account of the degradation of Montana's Blackfoot River, immortalized by the book, A River Runs Through It, traces the impact of mining, development, and tourism on the river and the way of life it once fostered.

The Curse of Gold and the Fight for the Big Blackfoot

One Round River

“Manning strips away layers of western myth to tell a story of bad intentions made good, good intentions gone bad, and a wild hope that has endured through decades of ecological trauma. Every word is grounded in a fierce respect for the grasslands of the Missouri Breaks and the opportunity they represent for a radical revisioning of the wild west.”—Candace Savage, author of Prairie: a Natural History “Rewilding the West accurately and incisively sums up the interwoven story of American agriculture policies, public lands management, and conservation. Richard Manning also points toward positive possibilities in our future. Anyone interested in these matters (most of us in the West) needs to come to terms with his sometimes highly opinionated but ultimately well-reasoned arguments.”—William Kittredge, author of Who Owns the West and The Willow Field

Restoration in a Prairie Landscape

Rewilding the West

Relates the story of deforestation and of the greed and corruption of big business and government that allows it.

Richard Manning

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