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"In his best-selling The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, William Irwin Thompson intrigued readers with his thoughts on mythology and sexuality. In his newest book, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, he takes the reader on a journey from the preverbal communications of early stone carvings to the writings of Marcel Proust and around the monumental wrappings of Christo to the rebirth of interest in the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tsu. Owing as much to the rhythmic constructions of jazz as to established methods of scholarship, Thompson riffs on biology and culture, seeing the birth of the mind in Proust's madeleine, the displacement of humanity in Christo's wrappings of the Reichstag, and the path forward into a new planetary culture in the Tao Te Ching. In Coming into Being, William Irwin Thompson presents a fascinating vision of our past, our present, and our future that no one will want to miss."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Library Journal Review

Thompson, a poet, essayist, historian, philosopher, and prolific author (Imaginary Landscape, St. Martin's, 1990) who has taught at Cornell, MIT, and other universities, integrates a synthesis of science, the arts, and his New Age faith and philosophy into a prediction of "planetary culture." Thompson maintains that scientific narrative is structured like folklore and a performance of myth, as illustrated by the theories on hominid evolution and their lack of "factual truth" in hominization. He sees contemporary society as a dark age leading to the establishment of the last of "five evolutionary stages or quantum jumps." The narrative is witty at times, especially when Thompson is discussing Zecharia Sitchin, the 12th planet, and Van Daniken's "pot-boiler" space alien theories. Familiarity with basic New Age jargon and concepts is assumed. Those who can move in such philosophical and spiritualizing thought, whether or not they agree, will find his work compelling.‘Eugene O. Bowser, Univ. of Northern Colorado, Greeley (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In these wide-ranging, deep essays, cultural critic and philosopher Thompson (At the Edge of History) continues his investigation of what he perceives to be an emerging planetary culture. An unorthodox, adventurous thinker, he applies Buddhist concepts to map the evolution of life from bacteria to humans, skips from prehistoric Mother Goddess sculptures to Christo's outdoor environmental wrappings, jumps from Proust to the Bible. He wrestles with the emergence of consciousness, the advent of patriarchy and the postindustrial breakdown of literate middle-class culture. For Thompson, anthropological bestsellers like Richard Leakey's Origins and Donald Johanson's Lucy are myth-laden projections by "the men's club of anthropology" onto the African savanna, while the story of Mary and Jesus, deeply embedded in Near Eastern mythology of the dying male, is a retelling of the ancient Egyptian legend of Isis and Osiris. In Taoist sage Lao Tzu's classic Tao Te Ching, with its celebration of anarchic decentralization and the feminine principle, Thompson finds "the road not taken," an alternative to our world of hierarchy and rigid polarities. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Polymath Thompson ranges broadly--from biology to the Rig-veda, from geometry to Gilgamesh--but the poles between which he oscillates are always myth (and its literary expressions) and science. As in his best-seller, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (1982), he basically burrows for metaphor, examining the ways in which scientific explanations of everything from the form of matter to the origins of humankind are functionally mythic and the ways in which myth predicts and expresses scientific knowledge. Like his hero, Marshall McLuhan, Thompson employs a dense, aphoristic style to make his sharpest points. "Smart weapons mean that war can't be played in real time," he quips, and so the mythic warrior archetype is now deflected onto gangs and soccer matches. "Patriarchy is not going to go out blowing kisses to the feminists," he says, continuing to observe that its demise may result instead in "some sort of sexual Bosnia." Comic books, cyberpunk, and the web brush shoulders with Osiris and the spirochete. Rich, provocative, demanding, and compelling. --Patricia Monaghan