A Grief Observed

Lewis, C.S.

ISBN 10: 0553256149 / ISBN 13: 9780553256147

Published by Bantam, 1983

Good Condition. Five star seller - Buy with confidence! Seller Inventory # X0553256149X3

Synopsis:

Written as he mourned the loss of his wife, C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed is an elegant and honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith. This intensely personal memoir has helped countless others find courage and hope.

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

Bibliographic Details

Title: A Grief Observed
Publisher: Bantam
Publication Date: 1983
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good