The Manas Reader

By Editors Manas and Manas editors

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670452335
• ISBN13: 9780670452330
• Release Date: May 1971
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 483 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

MANAS he might be and could be

Imagine: from the Alpha week of 1948 to the Omega of 1988, an anonymous American apolitical, anti-authoritarian anarchist, atheist-agnostic ascetic and aesthete edits a philosophic weekly - MANAS, from the Sanskrit for "man" or "the thinker" - of a dozen pages or less, with a circulation throughout of less than three thousand. He appears to read everything from the smallest privately-printed libertarian pamphlets to the cream of current cultural journals on either side of the Atlantic, and the works of the noblest present-day humanist thinkers worldwide, with the aim of furthering man's search for meaning in the fearful age of mass technocratic materialism, the atom bomb, and estrangement from the higher strata of man and nature alike. His moral touchstones - Socrates, the Bhagavad-Gita and Upanishads, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Ortega, Arthur Morgan, Abraham Maslow - inspire him across four decades as he excavates weekly the philosophic and psychic roots of our present (dis)order: fear as a motivator; the replacement of religious dogma with the enthronement of a no-less chilling scientism; the constriction of the vessels of human nature with the straitjackets of biological and historical determinism; the Gordian knot of culturally-conditioned blood-lust, hyper-competitive hedonistic possessiveness and adolescent narcissism; the commonplace snuffing of the inner light of humane conscience via the craven libido to "fit in" to the structures of authority and not "rock the boat." Robert Maynard Hutchins describes his subscribers as "the 2,500 most interesting people in the world"; and Maslow says that he is "the only small-p philosopher America has produced this century". He dies a few weeks after his final issue, aged 80. A decade hence, friends archive and cross-reference online the entire forty-one year run of MANAS - for free: and on CD-ROM for twenty dollars postpaid. Soon, idea-hungry readers here and there discover the MANAS archives via seriatim Google searches, find the uncanniest plots of common ground with their author - whose disciplined, probing and undogmatic essays on every aspect of the good life read as fresh as morning - and ask anon with eyes rubbed raw, "Who WAS this MANAS-ked man"? His name is Henry Geiger - as subscribers with a taste for the finer print in periodical life would learn only once yearly and at statement time. He collects in 1971 much of the best from his enduring editorials and reviews in THE MANAS READER - guest contributors include Maslow, Hutchins, Morgan, Henry Miller, Marc Chagall, Carl Rogers, Louis J. Halle, E.F. Schumacher, Vinoba Bhave, Theodore Roszak, Frederick Franck and Henry Anderson. We hear that one of his friends reads daily from a printout of the full-run archive, finding nothing comparable today elsewhere. Readers new to the singularity that was MANAS are to be envied. As a reader of Albert Jay Nock - to whose resigned Olympian pessimism MANAS is an ideal(ist) counter in humanist hope - was