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In my review of Robinson's previous book The Givenness of Things: Essays I already held an ode to her delightful non-conformism, deliberately opposing some of the sacred houses of our modernity (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) . I could repeat most of it here again, because Robinson recapitulates her favorite themes in this book. Again it is a collection of lectures, this time from the periode 2015-2017. Robinson continues to conduct a fierce crusade against the reductionism and de...
This was very hard to read. The vocabulary was above me. The prose was complicated and nuanced. The subject matter was very deep from Christianity to the malignancy of our current affairs. She deals with science, Puritans, old English history, conscience, philosophy of "being" and the interplay of these issues and others. I spent the entire book nodding in assent even when I had to re-read some sentences (indeed some multiple pages) over and over. I learned many tidbits from this book and feel l...
Summary: A collection of essays based on talks given, mostly at universities, between 2015 and 2017, questioning what she sees as a surrender of thought to ideology."I know it is conventional to say we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite--in essential ways we share false assumptions and flawed conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared" (Preface, p. ix).The thread that connects these essays, mostly transcript...
I did not realize until recently that Robinson, received a 2012 National Humanities Medal, from President Barack Obama, for "her grace and intelligence in writing." Amen! One of my favorite fiction writers, I was unaware of her career at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Now that her academic writing has been revealed to me, i will be busy, dictionary and reference works at the ready, to digest her amazing talent demonstrated in other nonfiction books.This is an incisive, challenging col...
These essays, as academic rather than literary artifacts, are so much stronger than the pseudo-philosophy that so many writers attempt. In many of these essays, Robinson engages seriously with the debate between science and religion, and has much to offer on the nature of human consciousness and the role of beauty ("We have in ourselves grounds for supposing that Being is vaster, more luminous, more consequential than we have allowed ourselves to imagine for many generations"). She also makes a
What are we doing here? Wasting my time. This book is so dry and annoying, it's somehow both religious and anti religious at the same time, and I can pretty much sum the whole book up with don't be a dick. It seems like she's trying to fix the world, specifically the US, and if everyone lived by the slogan don't be a dick, we'd be pretty ok. The one redeeming essay was A Proof, a Test, an Instruction, which was primarily about Obama, and it was interesting, but at 11 pages it's a small gold nugg...
Marilynne Robinson is an immensely intelligent person. Not in her fiction and non-fiction essays such as this book, she delves into early colonial history, modern day racial issues, American society, religion and theology. While I have no doubt she is brilliant, it is on these latter two topics that I must profess I struggled to keep up with both her vocabulary and her ideas (perhaps my not understanding her is the true sign of her intelligence). Where she, and this book, truly excel however
