Reviews for The Canadian alternative

The average rating for The Canadian alternative based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-22 00:00:00 Benjamin Jason Conine The Bridge Between Matter & Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri by Paolo Soleri: when I saw the title, I became interested in learning what he had to say. Arcology (architecture and ecology) is the name adopted to identify a structure which is (somehow) a three-dimensional landscape or topology. . . Arcologies are architecture organisms of such character and dimensions as to be ecologically relevant (p. 46). I propose that a radical departure from the hopeless tangle of our urban centers seems a physical imperative, socially urgent, culturally mandatory, and historically (evolutionarily) timely (p. 19). It is as if the spirit of which matter is soaked, saturated will come to life and activate itself only when exuded out of the structure of matter itself through the formidable pressure of complexification-miniaturization (p. 40). This is a way of saying that pure spirit has no physical dimension, or for a material-agnostic that spirit is not, as spirit has not physical dimensions (p. 57). Civitate Dei becoming Godlike . . . God himself. The infinite complexity of a being utterly centered upon itself infinitely powerful and infinitely wise (by definition as it is spirit) (p. 65). Of all the manifestations we know of, the human species embodies more intensely than all others this thrust toward 'ethereal life' (p. 190). The spirit incorporated in man stands as the asentropic* arrowhead of the spiral of life (p. 191). [*Buckminster Fuller?] There is a methodology to the 'transformation' of matter into spirit. What is evident of this methodology is the direct dependence of the phenomenon on the complexity it can instrumentalize itself it with. And there is an overwhelming documentation (evolution) of the fact that ultimately spirit is qualitative; thanks to the miniaturization humbly working at the nuts and bolts of complexity. This is the natural order of things, as life is totally dependent on information and the appropriate responses information elicits about itself and itself as part of the environment (p. 192). The individual effort of 'imploding' around the seed a co-operative organism is more that analogically repeated in a 'cosmic' scale where the total semen of life, while genetically evolving, is painfully but powerfully gathering, impulsively, the universe of mass-energy into one creature, temporarily. earthly, futurely transworldly. In between those two poles--the person and realized, and the totality of the spirit, potential and improbable--stands the city of the present, a raw prototype of what can be the Civitate Dei in it's becoming (p. 194).

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-31 00:00:00 William Hickey This is a brilliant book,unfortunately hard to find a replacement copy. I need to find one.