Secret chocoholic | Grandmother | Gardener/floral design maven | Author | Social systems scientist
Riane Eisler
Like most avid readers, books have been important to me all of my life. I was a curious child and I guess I’m a curious person to this day—reading both satisfied and roused my curiosity and still does. I soon realized it was a wonderful opportunity to discover the ideas of people from all over the world and from so many periods of time. This discovery opened so much for me and ultimately led me to writing books as well.
Books—and the people who write them—have been a powerful influence on my own development. And because the process of researching and writing some of my own book topics has also molded my personal development in profound ways, I open my list with a book I have written. I’ve also included books by my wonderful husband, David Loye, whose work has been an important influence on my process as well as on modern thinking.
RIANE EISLER is internationally known for her ground-breaking contributions as a cultural historian, systems scientist, futurist, attorney, consultant, and speaker. She is a recipient of the distinguished Peace Leadership Award, given earlier to the Dalai Lama, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the author of several best-selling books including The Chalice and the Blade–Our History, Our Future, which was hailed as the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species; The Real Wealth of Nations, hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking,” and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry, which shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on Partnership rather than Domination.
Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Systems (CPS), dedicated to research and education, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, an online peer-reviewed journal at the University of Minnesota that was inspired by her work, and keynotes conferences nationally and internationally. She has addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State, and Congressional briefings, has spoken at corporations and universities worldwide on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work, and is Distinguished Professor at Meridian University, which offers PhDs and Master’s degrees based on Eisler’s Partnership-Domination social scale.
My 10 Best
Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body, New Paths to Power and Love
by Riane Eisler
This wasn’t the book I was planning to write. I promised my publisher another book but a chapter of that book kept expanding—I was becoming curiouser and curiouser about its topic and how it related to me and others, to our world. Finally it became clear it was the book that needed to be written next.
We realize that flowers and candles and wine are the stuff of romance but I began to notice through research how important they are in our most sacred rites as well. And this lead me back into the prehistory, into art and the many clues that affirmed that indeed there is this link. That interest led to me noticing patterns of relating I was seeing through this lens.
I began to see patterns of movement, a gradual shift over time, historically from a partnership style of male/female relationship to a domination style and now slowly back toward a partnership one. And I was seeing a real transformation of both spirituality and sexuality along this arc of time. As well, I saw that these shifts occurred across cultures and around the world as well. What I discovered in the research and writing of this book changed and impacted me to such a great degree I felt I had to include it in my top 10.
Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love
by David Loye
David is the author of the award-winning book, The Healing of the Nation. He’s a psychologist, a social researcher, a scientist, an evolutionary systems scientist, and a prolific author of dozens of books. He is also my beloved husband who died recently just days after the 45th anniversary of our meeting.
Few people even knew there was a lost theory of love in Darwin’s work before David brought this to our greater awareness—it’s a major theory of Darwin’s that has been ignored over a 100 years. This theory focuses on the impact of the evolution of love, sex, and moral sensitivity rather than the selfishness and survival of the fittest. In fact, Darwin apologized for using the phrase “survival of the fittest,” regretting the unintended connotation that the strong must best the weak. Based on page after page of Darwin’s own writings about a third major process of evolution—the development of caring and sensitivity—this important book changes our whole perception of Darwin’s work and offers new hope for humanity as we move forward.
Delusions of Gender: How Our Mind, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference
by Cordelia Fine
Cordelia Fine has written a wonderful book that draws on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to debunk myths about men and woman’s brains being hardwired in ways that make women limited and inferior to men. This stereotype has long existed and as this book shows, it simply is not true in any way. There are certainly differences but none that justify the male dominance that developed. In Delusions, she uses science to discount that and then moves us into a look at the role of cultural and socialization factors that create false stereotypes and differences. It’s an illuminating and fascinating book.
The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions About War and Violence by Douglass P. Fry
I love this book because it’s a collection of essays by a renowned anthropologist that explores our prehistory way back to when we were foraging societies and into modern times. How it does this and how it correlates that with the history of war and violence, is utterly fascinating. It is an important and wonderful book.
The Age of Empathy, Nature’s Lessons For a Kinder Society by Franz de Waal
In this book, Franz De Waal works from the premise that evolution would not have developed our capacity for empathy if it weren’t a very important part of sentient human empathy. He explores both its development in our species and its implications for a better, kinder society. This book shows where hope can be found and how it might be implemented.
Toward a New Psychology of Women
by Jean Baker Miller
This is an update of a feminine classic that became famous for its groundbreaking demonstration of how sexual stereotypes restrict men and women’s psychological development. This author shows how both men and women share a strong yearning for connection and how that gets compartmentalized in both men and women, though even more in men. Exploring this innate yearning in both, and the ways it has been subverted in each, and the sad consequences for both men and women, and looking at the way forward—that’s what makes this such a great, and timeless, book.
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
by Carol Gilligan
Carol writes about how women look at certain things in importantly different ways. For instance, women tend to look at morality not in abstract or philosophical terms but in terms of caring—what is needed to comfort, to heal, to care for. Looking at morality in that way rather than as an abstract philosophical principle is striking in its importance. Carol Gilligan gave us numerous very important breakthroughs in this book.
The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued by Ann Crittenden
This is a very provocative book by an award-winning journalist who asks the question, “Why is the most important job in the world still the least valued?” And she argues that while women may have been liberated, mothers have not. Her perspectives, research and questions make an irresistible trail to follow and her equally interesting suggestions for societal changes create wonderful reading.
Grandfather’s Garden:
Some Bedtime Stories for Little and Big Folk
by David Loye
This is a very sweet, very dear book that uses offbeat humor and fables to join teens, adults and elders in a common cause. This book delights everyone who reads it with its message and its means for us all to break out of Storyland into our real world to save ourselves with a playful, peaceful but powerful new revolution of joy versus gloom.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma
by Bessel van Der Kolk. MD
This was a groundbreaking work, I think. It exposes the truth of the extent humans have suffered from trauma and how broadly it effects our lives and society at very high costs. It helped me understand an important piece about what is wrong with our world and it offers such vital information on how to begin fixing us and start the healing process.