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SAINT AUGUSTINE’S MEMORY

Name: SAINT AUGUSTINE’S MEMORY
Author: Garry Wills
ISBN: 0-670-03127-5

CONFESSIONES, BOOK TWO

by Garry Wills ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2002

Essential for students of the Church, and a vigorous and readable version of one of Western literature’s canonical works.

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The second installment in prolific classicist and political theorist Wills’s ongoing, thoroughly brilliant translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions (St. Augustine’s Childhood: Confessiones, 2001).

“The scope of memory is vast, my God, in some way scary, with its depths, its endless adaptabilities—yet what are they but my own mind, my self?” Thus Augustine of Hippo, on the road to sainthood, contemplating himself contemplating the divine. Two-thirds of Augustine’s 13-volume Confessions (which Wills also renders as Testimony), written in the fourth century, concerns his life before his conversion to Christianity. Book Ten, which takes up most of the present volume, is, as Wills (Why I Am a Catholic, p. 870, etc.) notes, a hinge, “making the turn between an account of God’s graces shown to Augustine before his baptism . . . and a meditation on his life as baptized into the Trinity.” Concerning memory and the innermost workings of the human mind, Book Ten is notoriously difficult: it seeks to establish the memory not just as a vast warehouse wherein unordered experiences are stored and retrieved, but as one of the many dwellings of God. Augustine writes with crystalline clarity of the contents of his own memory: “I can, while smelling nothing, identify the wafture from a lily, contrast it with that of a violet.” But, turning from his own experience to the universal, he sometimes wanders into snarls of prose: “So if I remember not forgetting itself, but forgetting’s representation, then forgetting must have been present when the representation was formed from it.” Wills helpfully guides his readers through such knots in his endnotes, remarking, “Chesterton said that we tend to call this an odd world, though it is the only one we know. This is akin to Augustine’s discussion of the experience of remembering that we forgot, which is almost like sensation in a lost limb.”

Essential for students of the Church, and a vigorous and readable version of one of Western literature’s canonical works.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002

ISBN: 0-670-03127-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WHAT THE QUR'AN MEANT
by Garry Wills

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FUTURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH POPE FRANCIS
by Garry Wills

- BOOK REVIEW
WHY PRIESTS?
by Garry Wills

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.