A Grief Observed - Softcover

Lewis, C S

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553235397 ISBN 13: 9780553235395

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1983

Synopsis

"The book helped inspire a 1985 television movie 'Shadowlands,' as well as a 1993 film of the same name." Please see Wikipedia: /wiki/C._S._Lewis

About this title

Review

C.S. Lewis joined the human race when his wife, Joy Gresham, died of cancer. Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he's got an answer for everything, experienced crushing doubt for the first time after his wife's tragic death. A Grief Observed contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: "Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high," Lewis writes. "Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is the book that inspired the film Shadowlands, but it is more wrenching, more revelatory, and more real than the movie. It is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings. --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Publisher

C. S. Lewis' classic confession of near-despair and rediscovered faith probes the issues of life, death, and hope in the midst of loss.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0553235397
• ISBN 13: 9780553235395
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 151