This book provides a practical guide for people who are concerned about the direction of our future. It can help anyone interested in making personal and social changes that will model for and teach the children of tomorrrow how to relate in partnership with each other and our planet. I recommend this book to anyone that would like guidance and help in creating a culture of peace.

The Power of Partnership is a readable, "doable" book! It starts with the individual, moves to intimate relationships, relationships in organizations, workplaces, and communities. For all of life is relationships and until we learn how to live them out in a respectful (partnership) mode, we are stuck in the control (dominator) model.
Eisler's guide at the end of each chapter tells us where to go from here: from thinking to next steps action and even more.
Great for book study groups, peace and justice groups and even for an individual who is ready to take a leadership role, or even just one next step.

Riane Eisler has written another book with the potential to transform culture and our perceptions of what is and what can be. Highly recommended!

Tomorrow's Children is an innovative and remarkable book for the contemporary educator. It provides an indepth understanding of the struggles of teaching and is an amazing resource for people looking to reform the educational framework of our country. This book needs to be in the hands of every parent, teacher and educator.

Eisler puts forth a formula for hope for a future that works for everyone. It does start with the children and every teacher AND parent should read this book...PLEASE!

Cudos to the author for putting forth a recipe for a more hopeful future for the world.

Riane Eisler's new book is a stunning contribution to multicultural pedagogy. Using her macrohistorical theory of dominator/partnership swings, she offers a new framework, structure and content for education. This is one of the most important books to come around in a long time. I hope my children will grow up in a world that has realized the blue print for partnership education that she offers. Rigourously argued, detailed in documentation, this book offers and creates a new future for all.

When I picked up this book, with it's provocative blurb from Ashley Montague boldly splashed across the front cover --"The most important work since Darwin's "Origin of the Species."" -- I was expecting a well reasoned and intellectually honest work on the history of social/sexual organization in the ancient world. A more general and approchable version of Gerda Lerner's "The Creation of Partiarchy." Instead what I found what utopian claptrap masquerading as history and archeology.

Apparently, according to Eisler, there really was a golden age when human societies were as close to perfection as is humanly possible. The key, she tells us, to that perfection was worship of "the Goddess" and an "equalitarian" society in which women were more equal than men. Great stuff if you're interested in political and social theory, particularly of the faddish kind, the problem with "The Chalice and the Blade" is that it pretends to base this theory in arceological fact -- historical fact, unfortunately for Eisler, actually having a written record of what people believed and how their societies were organized.

Eisler's penchant for putting theory that agrees with her premises above an actual pursuit of real knowledge of the ancient world is revealed in many elements of the work. In the way she equates matrilineal and matrilocal societies to peaceful communities that come off as being something akin to a combination of agrarian commune and art colony, rather then evil, "dominator" warrior societies which are the doing of men and men alone. This, I'm sure, would suprise the descendants of the numerous historically attested cultures that were very much warrior societies that were both matrilocal and matrilinial, the Maori of New Zealand, and most of the Algonquin speaking Indians of eastern North America including the Iroquis and the Powhattan Empire, for example.

Another example is her reliance on only two sources for the bulk of her archo! logical support, and of these, Gimbutas is really the primary source of Eisler's history, to the extent that I began to wonder if I was just reading a rehash of Gimbutas work paraphrased by Eisler.

The most striking fault I could find, however, was the degree to which Eisler (and I'm assuming from the footnotes, Gimbutas) see to be able to derive entire social structures, religious beliefs and socio-political philosophies of people who left no written records (or in the case of the Minoans, no records yet translated) from the scant material remains -- foundations of buildings, grave goods, potsherds, and small decorative items -- that would seem to this trained historian to be relatively mute on such matters. Yes, there have been found several small statuary renditions of female figures. But it is a leap of faith to claim them as icons of "Goddess" worshippers when they could just as easily be votive items, decorative items, attempts at portrature, etc... When people start making definitive statements about what prehistoric art must have meant to its makers, they've left the realm of history and archeology and stepped into the land of speculation. Unfortunately, Eisler seems to have crossed that boundary before she even began work on this book. Her almost constant use of emotionally charged adjectives such as "brutal" and "insensitive" also makes it clear to me that an objective history of social/sexual systems was never what she had in mind. Instead of a work of history, she has presented us with a screed masquerading as history.

Of course many people who've read this far have probably labelled me a reactionary anti-femnist for the tone of this review, and that's unfortunate, because, I do believe that many elements of Eislers theories have a basis in fact that has been underappreciated outside of academic circles. But politicised social theory made up to look like history isn't the way to go about bringing those facts to the light of day. It should not be necessary to ! manufacture a feminine "golden age" to demonstrate that nomadic herding cultures appear to have tried very hard to stamp out fertility based religions of conquered agriculturalists, just as its shouldn't be necessary claim all Greek culture came from Egypt to prove that Black Africans could produce Egyptian culture, or that the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States were evangelical Christians to prove that Christian mores played a role in the development of the US government. I don't object to Eisler's femnism, or even to most of the thrust of her theories, it's her disregard for proper historical interpretation that ultimately soured me on "The Chalice and the Blade."

Before I read this book, I knew very little about Goddess worship. So for me this book was informative. What I liked about this book is it opened my eyes to see the world from a different perspective. I'm sure that this book was written with her own bias. Every book, whether fiction or non-fiction, has this element. It did get me to ask questions about where we are headed as a society where dominating people (considered a male trait) is rewarded. I've noticed since I was a young woman in the seventies and eighties that women are becoming more masculine in their behavior and viewpoint of life. You see this exemplified in popular culture. I would like to see a partnership society where we work together instead of a 'survival of the fittest' mentality. Maybe Ms. Eisler doesn't have the all the facts. I don't know. I would have to read other books on pre-history and Goddess worship to make that decision. Still, if you want to explore the ideas of what it might have been like during pre-history and of what a society based on humanist ideas could be like instead of a world of materialism, this book is for you.

Based on the work of the remarkable archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and many other scientists and scholars, Riane Eisler discusses Truth after Truth of our world's wonderful Prehistory in which, rather than the caveman Lie, our ancestors were peaceful, highly artistic, compassionate people who loved and celebrated all Life and worshipped the Goddess. The remains of their cities prove that they lived communally with no slaves and no signs of war for 2000 years until the cruel, bloody invasions of the peripheral, nomadic Indo-Europeans. Our "civilization" has ever after been based on the Dominator model: a history filled with wars, slavery, murder, rape, violence; men dominating women, children, and other men; in which values of compassion and peace are set aside or suppressed. I was continually amazed that in each chapter, Eisler brings up new points for discussion, speaking directly to the Soul about our history and the Present. And from the Truth of our Prehistoric past, when people were developing a truly peaceful and egalitarian society, we definitely can make this a reality for our future. This can be a world in which every Person is truly Free and Equal, a world without war or violence, in which the Arts flourish, creativity has no bounds, and we live at peace with all of Nature and ourselves: "the power of creativity and love - symbolized by the sacred Chalice, the holy vessel of life - is the governing principle."