Simone Weil: A modern pilgrimage (Radcliffe biography series) - Hardcover

Coles, Robert

3.32

63 ratings by Goodreads

9780201022056: Simone Weil: A modern pilgrimage (Radcliffe biography series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201022052 ISBN 13: 9780201022056

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 1987

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A wonderful biography of Simone Weil (1909 - 1943), a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the Anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a laborer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class. Taking a path that was unusual among twentieth-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, though most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. The exact cause of her death remains a subject of debate. She died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34 but whether it was from a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, or from refusing to eat remains unanswered. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous on continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her. Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times". The author, Robert Coles (b. 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University.

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From Library Journal:

The spiritual characteristics and influence of these two women, rather than their historical or even psychological lives, concern psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Coles. Himself a Catholic convert and personally acquainted with co-founder of the Catholic Worker Day, Cole gives us a biography that reads more like a meditation on a mentor in faith than a dynamic study of someone's habits of living. Because he did not meet Weil, Coles is more dependent on his analytic skills in his portrait of her faith life whose details he gathers from her writings and his discussions with her brother. In both cases, Coles utilizes Anna Freud's psychiatric observations on Day and Weil but for the most part fails to go beneath the surface characteristics upon which he and Freud seem to agree. Unlike other titles in the "Radcliffe Biography " series, such as Joseph Lash's definitive Helen and Teacher ( LJ 5/15/80), Coles expects his reader to bring background knowledge of his subjects' lives to his texts. In short, these two books reveal more about Coles's religious temperament and development than about Day or Weil. More complete accounts of their lives are available in both their autobiographical writings and in numerous recent critical commentaries. Coles's books seem best suited to inspirational collections.Francisca Goldsmith, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

A new study of this brilliant, perplexing and "unnerving" French thinker and moral heroine, who died in 1943 at age 34, is certainly called for, and this perceptive one does her justice. Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Children of Crisis, examines Weil's radical sociopolitical views, astringent moral philosophy and mystical Christianity, as revealed with penetrating lucidity in such posthumous collections of her writings as The Need for Roots and Gravity and Grace. He covers the facts of Weil's brief life (her death from TB was precipitated by her refusal of food) and ponders her strange ambivalence toward Judaism and Catholicism. Also included are interesting discussions on Weil that took place between the author and Anna Freud.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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