Kirkpatrick Sale has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is After Eden.
After Eden
Summary
When did the human species turn against the planet that we depend on for survival? Human industry and consumption of resources have altered the climate, polluted the water and soil, destroyed ecosystems, and rendered many species extinct, vastly increasing the likelihood of an ecological catastrophe. How did humankind come to rule nature to such an extent? To regard the planet's resources and creatures as ours for the taking? To find ourselves on a seemingly relentless path toward ecocide? In After Eden, Kirkpatrick Sale answers these questions in a radically new way. Integrating research in paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, he points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of Homo sapiens' estrangement from the natural world. Sale contends that a new, recognizably modern human culture based on the hunting of large animals developed in Africa some 70,000 years ago in response to a fierce plunge in worldwide temperature triggered by an enormous volcanic explosion in Asia. Tracing the migration of populations and the development of hunting thousands of years forward in time, he shows that hunting became increasingly adversarial in relation to the environment as people fought over scarce prey during Europe's glacial period between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. By the end of that era, humans' idea that they were the superior species on the planet, free to exploit other species toward their own ends, was well established.
©2006 Duke University Press (P)2013 Redwood Audiobooks
Emancipation Hell
Summary
Emancipation - freeing the slaves - hell? The Emancipation Proclamation - one of the sacred icons of American history - a tragedy? How can this be? That was the opinion of Frederick Douglass, the most important African American leader of the 19th century, who proclaimed, "I denounce the so-called Emancipation." Douglass wrote: "I admit that the Negro...has made little progress from barbarism to civilization, and that he is in a deplorable condition since his emancipation. That he is worse off in many respects, than when he was a slave, I am compelled to admit..." Indeed, social statistics of 1900 indicate that material quality of life was lower for most black Americans than under slavery. Kirkpatrick Sale marshals much forgotten evidence to cast this glorious part of American history in a realistic and critical light. Emancipation, yes. But as a military measure during a cruel war of invasion? Slavery once existed throughout the western hemisphere, but almost everywhere except the United States, it ended peacefully. Emancipation with no thought or plan for the unprecedented situation to be managed? With no real sympathy or interest in the people freed except their usefulness in controlling and exploiting the conquered South? (Some Northern leaders denounced the Proclamation as an atrocity and an estimated 200,000 Northerners deserted or evaded service in a war for African Americans rather than for the "Union.") Perhaps never in history, Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates, has a benevolent act been so tainted with impure motives and disdain of consequences. Abraham Lincoln has a lot to answer for, says the author. His flawed proclamation doomed Americans to a century and a half of racial conflict and disparity that is still with us.
©2016 Kirkpatrick Sale (P)2016 Shotwell Publishing LLC