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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN num: 9780312425326
ISBN number: 0312425325
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 280
Printing Date: November 01, 2005
Publishing house: Picador
Release Date: October 13, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 50957
Studio: Picador
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Product Description:
In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing 'Calvinism' and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive 'puritan' stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bible and Darwinism, Marilynne Robinson repeatedly sends her reader back to the primary texts that are central to the development of American culture but little read or acknowledged today.
A passionate and provocative celebration of ideas, the old arts of civilization, and life's mystery, The Death of Adam is, in the words of Robert D. Richardson, Jr., 'a grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book.'
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Rated by buyers 
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Our author takes the position that not only are we the product of the "dumbing down of America", but we've allowed our thought processes to become "dumbed down" as well. She then gives us a series of essays to prove her point, essays that are peppered with obscure words utilizing their most obscure meanings! I ran for my Websters soft cover dictionary, but had to resort to my unabridged for most of them. She does make some good points about how inacurate research has developed some long-held ideas resulting in flawed thinking. And, I suppose resorting to long sessions with the dictionary is good for me. All in all, I felt this to be a thoughtful and engaging book.
Rated by buyers 
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This will be a very critical review, but it is an honest one, and I hope it can get a hearing here.
From reading these essays, I get the impression that I would very much enjoy a wide-ranging discusion of books, ideas, and religion with the author, subject to one condition outside my control--that she deemed me a worthy interlocutor rather than classing me with the mass of idiots and prigs she seems to consider just about all of her contemporaries in these pages. It's an unlikely condition, I judge from this book, where almost every point is made with irrelevant (and unwittingly unflattering to the author) polemics.
This is not the very first time I've encountered a peculiar paradox that besets writers who drip contempt of those who, unlike themselves, have not discovered and appreciated the books that should compel our attention. Some readers will welcome such a jeremiad, of course, but many readers will wonder, "If I am the sort of person who picked up with great interest a book I had heard makes an untimely plea for the thought of John Calvin and the unappreciated Puritan legacy in the United States, why does she address me as if I were someone who could never consider these insights." Basically, the book will please those whose prejudices are flattered by being told that NO ONE ELSE! cares about the issues raised in its pages, that they have been silenced as impossible thoughts by political correctness--those who can buy the assertion that the Old Testament is an "unread classic," that Marguerite de Navarre is an obscure writer. Such a reader, especially if he has never read and will never read most of the texts discussed (and, it has to be pointed out, Robinson damns us all for not reading the books she's discovered, but she doesn't actually dispense any practical reading suggestions, as that would require a faith she lacks in your ability to pick up a book by John Calvin and to read it), might read this book and swallow a lot of what Robinson thinks he SHOULD think about these books. The glaring irony is that this is supposed to be the kind of reader Robinson contemns--but she serves better readers but poorly.
The introduction already sends out many signals of gratuitous hostility. Without naming any names, she insists that everyone (it's always this amorphous everyone based on the belief that everyone cannot compete with Robinson in literacy) thinks Jefferson was "unconscious of the irony of the existence of slaver in his land of equality" and takes him to task for this failing. But anyone with a passing serious interest in what Jefferson thought has picked up something like The Portable Thomas Jefferson and has read the deleted passage of the Declaration of Independence in which he called the slave trade an un-Christian "opprobrium." Amazon currently has "101 used and new copies starting at $0.47": hardly obscure material. (Likewise, anyone who's dipped far into Milton knows that Puritans' ideas about women and marriage are more complex than merely "puritanical.") Yes, there are a lot of people in this country who can't be bothered to seek out learning about anything or read books, and they are likely to have some caricature in their minds in place of information (most of them would probably be honest enough to admit that these caricatures are not in fact a reasonable approximation of the intellectual history of the 16th-18th centuries, so that maybe it would be better to teach them kindly than to attack them). Here's the point, though: Robinson's "gotcha" points about the world's ignorance mostly work best when measured against such lowest-information readers, and yet her ambition is to declare every gifted scholar from Max Weber to Simon Schama an idiot. As a reader who has read the Old Testament, and Max Weber, and who has held extracurricular discussions about the Chansons spirituelles of Marguerite de Navarre with a reader who managed to find them on her own, I find Robinson's condescension unbearable.
I would bear it if her polemical criticisms of everyone else were justified--then I would willingly place myself in the hands of a great intellect and gather up all the pearls she strewed as she lashed the 21st century's miserable literary sinners. Weber is a good case in point. She seems to believe that Weber had nothing better to offer in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism than the gut-intuition thesis that "Calvinists lack Gemütlichkeit." At the same time, Robinson proves herself the kind of superficial reader she hates, and asks her readers not to read a worthwhile book because of a superficial prejudice (precisely what keeps the world from discovering Calvin! she can be hanged by her own words, "drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf"). In the introduction, she cheerily indicates she will not bother to learn much more about the contemptible idiot Max Weber. Well, ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Overall a worthwhile read, in somewhat of a personal confessional mode. Weak discusion of Darwin and implications of his works. Some thoughts are totally vexatious: see chptr. Family, and comment in para 2, pg 95. "..increased availability of skilled labor will lower its value.." and lead to "erosion of prosperity". Really?
Rated by buyers 
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I have only read two of the essays in The Death of Adam; Darwinism and Family, yet, on the strength of these, I have no reservation in endorsing the book as a whole.
The greatest impediment to sensible discourse is the unwarranted typecasting, or affixing of labels, which typifies the debate on current intellectual issues. One finds an example of it amongst the reviews of this book; Robinson is described as a "conservative" and the case is closed without much further ado. Besides being patently false, the review neatly shows the malaise which Robinson pinpoints in the Introduction of this book: the refusal to engage with the reality of the original text.
For from the text it is clear that the thinking runs too deep to be comfortably and exclusively embraced by any camp. It demands the same standard from Darwinists and Biblical Literalists, of which consistency is a significant element. (So, if you demand a literal adherence to the Genesis text regarding creation, surely the same can be expected regarding biblical demands to turn the other cheek, etc? Likewise, like it or not, history has offered an opportunity to see the values implicit in Darwinism put into practice in various guises (Nazism being one), the grim results of which has to be faced.)
Along with the profundity, I have enjoyed her willingness to state the obvious, the sort of thing any reader might have wondered. For instance, the rejection in Darwinism of all that cannot be rationally shown (the intuitions of religion, for example) seems to be strangely at odds with the unreal, abstract implications of quantum theory. Put another way, the quantum-theory constitutes a world which is nothing short of miraculous, which is not what Darwinism can receive.
Of necessity, the complexity of some topics (economics in the essay Family, for example)cannot be fully addressed in this format. But this brings me to the final appreciation of her writing in this collection: It is thought-provoking to the point that it encourages embellishment and counterpoint, as the case may be, from the reader. Which is, I think, the point of the Essay as literary form.
Rated by buyers -
"The Death of Adam" is unapologetically written for folks who actually value the activity of thinking. Robinson's writing style, as with her novels, requires some adjusting. She actually expects us to hold a thought in our head as she rambles a bit as the muse of reflection gathers her thoughts, but her penetration is exquisite.
I am a Christian of conservative persuasion, though Robinson is not. There are points of departure in her thought that run counter to my own inclination. But Robinson's iron sharpened mine in distinct areas and I greatly profited by her thought. I have not found a better debunking of Darwinism (in contrast to evolution) written anywhere. Her insistence that people ought to actually read Calvin and Darwin and others before they ridicule or embrace them is refreshing in the extreme. Her winsome insistence that intellectual courage begins by standing against the "Petty Coercion" of faddish opinion takes the best thought that could be gleaned from Jean Paul Sartre (though she does not trace her thought there) and firmly takes it captive under a Christian banner. These essays are a reminder that people can think and a moral admonition that it is an activity we ought to undertake more often.
Warning: Robinson warns you up front that she will not stoop to using simplistic language when nuanced thought demands complex phrasing. If you are looking for "bumper sticker" philosophy you will not find it here. If you are up to the challenge of pondering what she says and why she says it as she does, the fruit is well worth the effort.
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