Ivan Illich was born in Vienna in 1926, and became a parish priest in New York in 1951. He was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico in 1956, and in 1961 he founded CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) at Cuernavaca in Mexico where he developed many of the ideas in his books. He is the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Disabling Professions, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. He died in 2002.

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Ivan Illich argues for individual personal control over life, the tools and energy we use. A work of seminal importance. The conviviality for which noted social philosopher Ivan Illich is arguing is one in which the individual's personal energies are under direct personal control and in which the use of tools is responsibly limited. A work of seminal importance, this book claims our attention for the urgency of its appeal, the stunning clarity of its logic and the overwhelmingly human note that it sounds.