Eric Lawton reviewed Prisons we choose to live inside by Doris Lessing
Review of 'Prisons we choose to live inside' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
Read it again. Short enough and powerful enough to read most years.
This is a short but powerful read, the text of the Massey Lectures that Lessing gave in 1985. It is only slightly dated, the worst being that her optimism about the future raises a wry smile in the face of current events.
Unlike the Goodreads summary, Lessing is not proposing answers to anything but suggesting some ways we should be questioning ourselves and our contemporaries, with particular focus on how we should be using the findings of sociology, social psychology and the like to understand how many of our assumptions are wrong and limiting and on taking a historical perspective, trying to see how people in the future might view our current ideas, especially when we think how we now view with horror or amusement the ideas that were taken for granted in other societies.
This is about …
Read it again. Short enough and powerful enough to read most years.
This is a short but powerful read, the text of the Massey Lectures that Lessing gave in 1985. It is only slightly dated, the worst being that her optimism about the future raises a wry smile in the face of current events.
Unlike the Goodreads summary, Lessing is not proposing answers to anything but suggesting some ways we should be questioning ourselves and our contemporaries, with particular focus on how we should be using the findings of sociology, social psychology and the like to understand how many of our assumptions are wrong and limiting and on taking a historical perspective, trying to see how people in the future might view our current ideas, especially when we think how we now view with horror or amusement the ideas that were taken for granted in other societies.
This is about my third reading.
Now fourth, though I mostly listened to the CBC Massey Lectures which were the source of the book, along with some readings from the book