David Rothenberg's multilayered life thrust him into Broadway's brightest lights prison riots political campaigns civil rights sit-ins and a Central American civil war. In his memoir EFortune in My EyesE his journey includes many of the most celebrated names in the theater: Richard Burton Elizabeth Taylor Bette Davis Sir John Gielgud Peggy Lee Alvin Ailey Lauren Bacall Christine Ebersole and numerous others.THHe produced an Off-Broadway prison drama EFortune and Men's EyesE which reshaped his life. John Herbert's chilling play led directly to the creation of the Fortune Society which has evolved into one of the nation's most formidable advocacy and service organizations in criminal justice.THRothenberg was Elizabeth Taylor's opening night date at the Richard Burton Hamlet a a distant cry from his entering Attica prison during that institution's famed inmate uprising; these are just two of the experiences revealed in this memoir. As a theater publicist and producer a and as a social activist a he shares experiences with politicians and with anonymous men and women out of prison who have fought to reclaim their lives. The human drama of the formerly incarcerated that unfolds in this book is a match for many of the entertainment world's most fabled characters.

Die Vielfalt der VogelgesAnge ist erstaunlich und aus Asthetischer wie auch aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht ein groAes RAtsel. Noch immer verstehen Evolutionsbiologen nicht, warum der Vogelgesang derart einfallsreich ist und warum zahlreiche Vogelarten so viele Stunden mit Singen zubringen. Die gewAhnlich vorgebrachten ErklArungen a " Revierverteidigung und Anlockung von Geschlechtspartnern a " kAnnen die Vielfalt und Energie, die viele der uns vertrauten VAgel an den Tag legen, nicht im Ansatz erklAren. Singen VAgel mAglicherweise, weil es ihnen gefAllt? Diese scheinbar naive ErklArung kristallisiert sich immer mehr als die Wahrheit heraus. Warum VAgel singen geht dem Vogelgesang einfA1/4hlsam auf den Grund a " ganz in der Tradition der klassischen Werke etwa von Bernd Heinrich a " und vereint neueste wissenschaftliche Forschungsergebnisse mit einem profunden VerstAndnis von SchAnheit und Form in der Musik. GestA1/4tzt auf GesprAche mit Neurowissenschaftlern, A-kologen und Komponisten geht der Autor der schwer zu beantwortenden Frage nach, warum VAgel singen, in welcher Weise sie es tun und was ihre GesAnge fA1/4r Artgenossen und fA1/4r andere Arten a " insbesondere fA1/4r den Menschen a " bedeuten. David Rothenberg taucht stets vAllig in Herz und Seele des Vogelgesangs ein a " ob er nun in Pittsburgh mit seiner Klarinette den WeiAhauben-HAherling begleitet oder in den australischen Winterquartieren eine Jam-Session mit dem BraunrA1/4cken-Leierschwanz abhAlt. Er schreibt als Naturkundler, Philosoph, Musiker und Forscher und liefert mit seinen intimen Schilderungen des anrA1/4hrendsten aller Naturerlebnisse brillante Einblicke in ein PhAnomen, das uns zugleich vertraut und doch zutiefst fremd ist. "Info-Text zum englischen Original: " The astonishing variety and richness of bird song is both an aesthetic and a scientific mystery. Biologists have never been able to understand why bird song displays are often so inventive and why so many species devote so many hours to singing. The standard explanations, which generally have to do with territoriality and sexual display, dona (TM)t begin to account for the astonishing variety and energy that the commonest birds exhibit. Is it possible that birds sing because they like to? This seemingly naAve explanation is starting to look more and more like the truth. In the tradition of classic works by Bernd Heinrich, Edward Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams, Why Birds Sing is a lyric exploration of bird song that blends the latest scientific research with a deep understanding of musical beauty and form. Based on conversations with neuroscientists, ecologists, and composers, it is the first book to investigate why birds sing and how, and what effect their music has on other animals - particularly humans. Whether playing the clarinet with the white-crested laughing thrush in Pittsburgh, or jamming in the Australian winter breeding grounds of the Albert's lyrebird, Rothenberg journeys to the heart and soul of bird song. Why Birds Sing offers an intimate look at the most lovely of natural phenomena - with surprising insights about the origin of music.

This innovative book, assembled by the editors of the renowned periodical Terra Nova, is the first anthology published on the subject of music and nature. Lush and evocative, yoking together the simplicities and complexities of the world of natural sound and the music inspired by it, this collection includes essays, illustrations, and plenty of sounds and music. The Book of Music and Nature celebrates our relationship with natural soundscapes while posing stimulating questions about that very relationship. The book ranges widely, with the interplay of the texts and sounds creating a conversation that readers from all walks of life will find provocative and accessible.
The anthology includes classic texts on music and nature by 20th century masters including John Cage, Hazrat Inrayat Khan, Pierre Schaeffer, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Toru Takemitsu. Innovative essays by Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, David Toop, Hildegard Westerkamp and Evan Eisenberg also appear. Interspersed throughout are short fictional excerpts by authors Rafi Zabor, Alejo Carpentier, and Junichiro Tanazaki.
The audio material for the book, available online at http: //www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/musicandnaturecd/, includes fifteen tracks of music made out of, or reflective of, natural sounds, ranging from Babenzele Pygmy music to Australian butcherbirds, and from Pauline Oliveros to Brian Eno.

A celebrated figure in myth, song, and story, the nightingale has captivated the imagination for millennia, its complex song evoking a prism of human emotions,—from melancholy to joy, from the fear of death to the immortality of art. But have you ever listened closely to a nightingale’s song? It’s a strange and unsettling sort of composition—an eclectic assortment of chirps, whirrs, trills, clicks, whistles, twitters, and gurgles. At times it is mellifluous, at others downright guttural. It is a rhythmic assault, always eluding capture. What happens if you decide to join in? As philosopher and musician David Rothenberg shows in this searching and personal new book, the nightingale’s song is so peculiar in part because it reflects our own cacophony back at us. As vocal learners, nightingales acquire their music through the world around them, singing amidst the sounds of humanity in all its contradictions of noise and beauty, hard machinery and soft melody. Rather than try to capture a sound not made for us to understand, Rothenberg seeks these musical creatures out, clarinet in tow, and makes a new sound with them. He takes us to the urban landscape of Berlin—longtime home to nightingale colonies where the birds sing ever louder in order to be heard—and invites us to listen in on their remarkable collaboration as birds and instruments riff off of each other’s sounds. Through dialogue, travel records, sonograms, tours of Berlin’s city parks, and musings on the place animal music occupies in our collective imagination, Rothenberg takes us on a quest for a new sonic alchemy, a music impossible for any one species to make alone. In the tradition of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Invention of Nature, Rothenberg has written a provocative and accessible book to attune us ever closer to the natural environment around us.

At the very heart of American respect for nature, historically and philosophically, is the notion of the wild. This notion comes under scrutiny in "Wild Ideas", a collection of essays that bring a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the centre of our civilization. Blending well-known and new voices, the volume surveys classical and romantic concepts of wilderness, from the scary to the sublime, and shows why neither serves us anymore. Instead, the authors argue for a "wild culture", in which nature is not opposed to humanity, a mere matter of resources and consumers. A cogent reassessment of the ideas that drive the conservation movement, "Wild Ideas" points out a new direction for future environmentalism. Among the topics discussed are the confluence of wilderness, empire, and race; the way the ecology movement uses language; gendered views of the wilderness; maps and topology, and how they affect our view of the wild; healing by the wilderness experience; and the idea of an urban wilderness.

Although he is known primarily as the inventor of the phrase "deep ecology," Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess's thoughts and approaches have waded through all the major streams and events of our times. From a childhood during World War I through the study of psychoanalysis in Freud's Vienna, through the midcentury hardening of ideologies to the most recent decades with the emergence of ecology as a political force, his life in the throes of nature has always fuelled a will to espouse precise and clear thinking in the face of the great contemporary dilemmas. Through a series of conversations covering the whole span of Naess's rich and complex life, David Rothenberg presents the grand old man of natural philosophy in his own words. What emerges is the personal vision of a life imbued with ecology, which reveals in the most human terms how respect for and contact with the natural world can provide the foundation for a total view of the vast problems of humanity and our place in the world. "Is it Painful to Think?" reveals insights and inspiration, hypotheses and conclusions, but above all paradox, as the difference between ideas and events comes to the surface. These are issues that all philosophers of nature must come to terms with, and this unconventional book seeks not to provide answers as much as stir discussion and reflection. This, says Naess, is where philosophy differs from religion, where conversation veers from pronouncement.

"Wisdom in the Open Air" traces the Norwegian roots of the strain of thinking called "deep ecology" - the search for the solutions to environmental problems by examining the fundamental tenets of our culture. Although Arne Naess coined the term in the 1970s, the insights of deep ecology actually reflect a whole tradition of thought that can be seen in the history of Norwegian culture, from ancient mountain myths to the radical ecoactivism of today. Beginning with an introduction to Norway's emphasis on nature and the wild, Reed and Rothenberg explore the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is a collection of writings by prominent Norwegian thinkers on humanity and nature, most never before published in English. From Peter Wessel Zapffe, a twentieth-century Kierkegaardian figure, the list goes on to include Arne Naess, activist/critic/artist Sigmund Kvaloy, wilderness educator Nils Faarlund, novelist Finn Alnaes, sociologist Johan Galtung, and social reformer Erik Dammann. Their points of view offer thoughts on the significance of modern life and what it means to be human in the face of deteriorating environmental global trends of the 20th century. "Wisdom in the Open Air" asks and answers a fundamental question concerning the ecomovement: what is the role of deep, often abstract, thinking in the attempt to avert a very real ecological crisis?

Ecology, Community and Lifestyle is a revised and expanded translation of Naess' book Okologi, Samfunn og Livsstil, which sets out the author's thinking on the relevance of philosophy to the problems of environmental degradation and the rethinking of the relationship between mankind and nature. The text has been thoroughly updated by Naess and revised and translated by David Rothenberg.

In the spring of 2013 the cicadas in the North Eastern United States emerged from their seventeen year cycle - the longest gestation period of any animal. In listening to cicadas, as well as other humming, clicking, and thrumming insects, Bug Music is the first book to consider the radical notion that we humans got our idea of rhythm, synchronization, and dance from the world of insect sounds that surrounded our species over the millions of years over which we evolved. Completing the trilogy he began with Why Birds Sing and Thousand Mile Song, David Rothenberg explores a unique part of our relationship with nature and sound - the music of insects that has provided a soundtrack for humanity throughout the history of our species.

The astonishing richness of birdsong is both an aesthetic and a scientific mystery. Evolutionists have never been able to completely explain why birdsong is so inventive and why many species devote so many hours to singing. The standard explanations of defending territories and attracting mates don't begin to account for the variety and energy that the commonest birds exhibit. Is it possible that birds sing because they like to? This seemingly naive explanation is starting to look more and more like the truth. "Why Birds Sing" is a lyric exploration of birdsong that blends the latest scientific research with a deep understanding of musical beauty and form. Drawing on conversations with neuroscientists, ecologists, and composers, it is the first book to investigate the elusive question of why birds sing and what their song means to both avian and human ears. Whether playing his clarinet with the whitecrested laughing thrush in Pittsburgh, or jamming in the Australian winter breeding grounds of the Albert's lyrebird, Rothenberg immerses himself in the heart and soul of birdsong. He approaches the subject as a naturalist, philosopher, musician, and investigator. An intimate look at the mostlovely of natural phenomena, and now with a CD with over one hour of music and birdsong, "Why Birds Sing" is a beautifully written exploration of a phenomenon that's at once familiar and profoundly alien.

Through essays, poetry, stories, and images, writers and artists offer their perceptions of how we fit into the world and where we might be headed. The theory of evolution connects us to the natural world, explaining how and why we are a part of nature. The idea of progress, on the other hand, projects a destination. "If nature can supply wonderfully elegant solutions to the problem of survival by trying out test models derived solely by chance, then surely it's possible for us to find our way forward," write David Rothenberg and Wandee Pryor, setting the terms of the discussion. But is society going somewhere in particular? Is nature improving? The stories, poems, essays, and artwork in Writing the Future examine the concepts of evolution and progress through a variety of artistic and scientific lenses and speculate on how these ideas can help us appreciate our place in the world. The first section of the book, "Science, Mustard, Moths," looks at evolution's founding concepts and personalities, and includes Theodore Roszak's challenge to a Darwinian orthodoxy, which he traces back to another pioneering theorist, Alfred Russel Wallace. The second section, "Steps from the Cave," focuses on human change, and features Ellen Dissanayake's unusual look at prehistoric cave paintings in France, poetry by John Canaday, and a richly layered short story by Floyd Skloot. The third section, "Places in Time," moves outward to examine the world evolving and includes a reminiscence by Leslie Van Gelder of growing up "in the church of Darwin" and Eva Salzman's account of an infinitely reverberating walk through a Long Island neighborhood. In the fourth section, "Getting to the Future," the writers consider different manifestations of progress: Katherine Creed Page examines a "future perfect" through reproductive technology, Kevin Warwick reports on linking his nervous system to a computer by means of a small electronic circuit implanted under his skin, and Joan Maloof meditates on our possible future "de-evolution"-an abdication of our dominating role and gradual return to nature-which brings the book full circle.

"Hand's End" offers a new philosophy of technology as the fundamental way in which humans experience and define nature - the tool as humanity extended. Rothenberg examines human inventions from the water wheel to the nuclear bomb and discusses theories of technology in the thought of philosophers including Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Marx, Heidegger, Spinoza, Mumford, and McLuhan.