Elizabeth Marshall ThomasThe Old Way

Enjoyed reading this. It said by someone saying their experience with the bushmen people. and they are, what theyre way is like,the old way before it went away. Its very interesting, Simple and easy to read.

A fascinating story and real as well. The lost culture of the Kalahari bushmen as witnessed by the author when she was 19 y/o in the 50's. One old old place resonating with ancient vibrations, the root of where we came from, arguably one of the oldest and last remainders of this culture. Oh how we were for tens of thousands of years! how wise, beautiful and fragile the old way was! I was totally gripped with the book from the point where the people of the desert were met. Cannot recommend it more.

Many years after living in the Kalahari with the indigenous people, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas revisits her time there with intelligence, passion and the insight that comes wirh deep reflection and life experience. In 'The Old Way' she writes with greater power than in her earlier work, 'The Harmless People'. She cites and reflects upon the work of other anthropologists writing about the same people and provides extensive notes. It is interesting to see how Thomas uses her understanding of the hunter-gatherer life to create a sophisticated and complex world in her novel, 'Reindeer Moon'. 'The Old Way' is an excellent vehicle for any reader seeking to understand human survival as part of the environment, rather than, as we live now, feeling that we are superior and in control of all other life forms.

Good book

Love it:)

The Old Way is an excellent view of the world of the First People, how they lived for so many previous millennia, and what has happened to them in this one. Sometimes beautifully written, always wonderfully observed, it yet suffers from repetition, and the unavoidable lack of a normal narrative line for most of the book. These are people who survived by changing as little as possible, not constantly striving toward some far-off goal in the way we come to expect in histories. But this is an important book, and well worth the effort to read and finish.

The Old Way is an intimate profile of the Ju/wasi people, an ancient hunter-gatherer population that subsisted peacefully for centuries in the Kalahari desert until the 1950's when their efficient and industrious way of life fatally collided with modernity, poverty, drugs and alcohol abuse. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' portrait of the Ju/wasi is well-written, informative and not without humor. My favorite passages are the reflections on the author's interaction with women and children. Here's a representative example:"To lift a Ju/wa child is an interesting and wonderful experience. An American child is heavy by comparison and comes up off the ground like a sack of grain with arms and legs dangling--dead weight. A Ju/wa child almost lifts himself because he participates in the action with his arms and legs ready to clasp you so that the two of you instantly fuse as if you were a magnet and he a little piece of steel. And you don't have to hold him up--he clamps himself right on you and holds himself in place. You need merely to keep an arm around him. I love to carry Ju/wa children..." (114).Some parts were less warm and more clinical, reading like an ornithologist's description of a flock of birds. (The author makes no ontological distinction between man and beast.) While I don't agree with her view that the only fundamental difference between chimps and us is time, I still enjoyed her tenderly rendered portrait of a people she obviously cares very much about.

This was one of the best books on the subject that My wife and I have read for a long time. We went to that part of Africa and we could relate to every experience that she wrote about as we followed the San Bushman (original people) on a hunt.

I have always found anything written about the bushmen of the Kalahari fascinating. Many of Laurens Van der Post's books, for instance.This particular account was written by a woman who in her youth, along with family members, actually lived for some time among bushmen who were still living according to their ancient culture. I found it tremendously interesting, though sad in the parts that dealt with their difficulties brought about by the modern world.

This book caps off a lifetime of involvement with the hunter-gatherer people. Her first book, The Harmless People was from the eyes of a teenage Elizabeth Thomas. I enjoyed both immensely, and these brought me to her mother's books, Kung of Nyae Nyae, and Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites. These books have finally helped me fully comprehend our species as the animals we are, and not the civilized wonders we ideal ourselves. The Harmless People

This is a great read but with a very sad ending. Elizabeth Marshal Thomas talks about her time she spent living with the Bushmen of the Kalahari. The books talks about how they live, hunt, marry and live in harmony within their natural environment. It makes you think a lot about our society and how we are so out of tune with the natural world. Instead of destroying the way these remarkable people lived we should have studied how they lived and learned from them. The same can be said for the Australian Aboriginal people whose culture has been destroyed in much the same way. The ending is sad and like every ancient society that has been destroyed by western culture, the few remaining Bushmen that are alive have turned to alcohol and have no sense or purpose in life, just like what happened to the Australian Aboriginal people.

This is a simply wondrous book. The author was one of the first modern white people to actually study the Bushmen, and liked the experience so much that she kept going back. If you have seen "The Gods Must Be Crazy" (and everyone should see "Gods" several times), the star is a real "wild" Bushman and personal friend of the author. For as much speculation as there is on "early humans", life among the Bushmen has probably not changed in 60,000 years. And they don't live on the edge of starvation and they don't spend their days plotting to kill the tribe who lives on the other side of the hill.

One cannot underestimate how important this book is. It is literally the last chance that anyone has had to observe a culture that had barely changed since paleolithic times and that still lived the paleolithic lifestyle. I bought the audio MP3 version, read by the author. This adds so much more. Not only is she easy on the ears, she pronounces the names and the vocabulary in the Ju/Wasi(Pronounced 'Ju [click] Wasi')click language that she is fluent in. Thankfully, the Marshall family turned out to be up to the job of creating a rich documentary record of paleolithic human culture that is comparable to what the Rosetta Stone was to ancient Egyptian culture.An incredible, story. The founder of Raytheon decides to take his wife and teenage children deep into the Kalahari Desert in what is now Namibia, where no human beings other than the Bushmen had ever ventured. No one in the family was a trained anthropologist, nor did they really know how to prepare for such a journey or what to really expect, but Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and her mother and brother became some of the most important contributors to the field ever. This book was written in 2006, decades after the "old way" had forcibly been extinguished by modern Africa.Venturing deep into the Savanna, they discovered a culture 150,000 years old, that had lived in the extremely harsh, unforgiving climate and dangerous conditions successfully since the early migration of homo sapiens out of Ethiopia. This is important, as other hunter-gatherer populations that survived to be available for modern anthropological study already survived the migration across Asia and Europe and had become relatively modern and certainly culturally different. My interest, as a Developmental Psychologist was to learn species-specific child-rearing practices in their purest form. This is an environment where a crying baby attracts and signals predators; children rarely if ever tantrum, and people grow up to be more in control of their aggressive impulses than our Western Societies could ever claim to be. They were not Noble Savages - they were every bit as human as you or I. A full range of personality types could be found in the tribe, but since they were so interdependent, the control of human's innately violent and aggressive nature had to be fully mastered early in life or all of them would die. Life was more precious to them than it seems to be to modern human cultures. They had no chiefs or appointed leaders, and men and women were entirely equal in rights. Sharing was much more important than possessions. And the amount of knowledge they need to survive in such a climate could easily be compared to Ph.D. climatologists, historians, botanists, and ethologists. It makes you wonder whether the biggest mistake the human race has ever made was the invention of agriculture.

I first heard of the Bushmen through National Geographic's Genographic Project (Spencer Wells "The Journey of Man") which found genetic evidence suggesting Bushmen are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, peoples in the world--a "genetic Adam" from which all the worlds ethnic groups can ultimately trace genetic heritage. Within the face of a Bushmen one can see all the genetic expressions of the world (Asian eyes, African nose, Indian skin, etc..) So I was delighted when this new book appeared by bushmen expert Elizabeth Marshall Thomas who, along with her brother and parents, were one of the first westerners to live with and scientifically document the Bushmen in the 1950s (when Elizabeth was a teenager). Her parents and brother went on to become famous Bushmen experts and proponents in their own careers.Older members of the Bushmen tribe were valued and respected for their wisdom, likewise Elizabeth is passing down her knowledge and experience for later generations. The Bushman way of life she saw in the 1950s, perhaps as old as 150,000 years, no longer exists - all it took was one generation and the long unbroken chain known as "The Old Way" has disappeared. It is the same sad story told the world over from Native Americans to Tibet to Eskimos. Yet Elizabeth reveals a deeper lesson, which is the "myth" that the Bushmen ever wanted it any other way - they want the comforts of modernization, just as we would prefer not to hunt and gather food each day. Bushmen want to travel, see the world, be a part of wider humanity, and for that we can celebrate and welcome all they have to teach. This book provides that introduction.

Interesting and very written. The author is a writer and it shows. She is passionate too. That adds to engage the readers. Only thing is the book is printed on poor quality paper.