|
 |
View Cart | Help |
|
An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western...
|
Home > Mathematics Books > Infinity > Item 6
 |
|
 |
 |
An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western...
|
by Nancy Klein Maguire
Sales Rank: 177425
|
List Price: $26.00
$7.99
At Amazon
on 12-6-2008
|
|
Hardcover: 258 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs February 22, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1586483277
ASIN: B000MKYKD6
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Carthusians are contemplative monastics who live in community but spend most of their days alone in their private dwellings. With a lifestyle similar to that of their 11th-century French founder, they wear hair shirts, practice self-flagellation and eat just one meal a day from mid-September to Easter (though some monasteries reluctantly have begun allowing such luxuries as electricity, hot water and flush toilets). Maguire, a Renaissance scholar married to an ex-Carthusian, examines this living museum of a bygone age by following the lives of five young men who entered St. Hugh's Charterhouse in England between July 1960 and March 1961. As they work, pray and live in solitude, they discover not only God but also themselves. They do not, however, learn much about the rapid changes taking place beyond their walls, and the men who leave the monastery in 1965 find themselves in a strange new world. Through painstaking research including countless phone conversations, 5,000 pages of e-mails and a reunion of the five men in France, Maguire creates a personal, sympathetic and amazingly detailed description of an ancient order and its contemporary adherents, traveling "toward inner space within the confines of their solitary cells." (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Review
"A moving look at the human search for communication with God at perhaps its' most extreme." -- Kirkus, March 30, 2006
"A page-turner Sensitively written" -- America, April 3, 2006
"A riveting and sympathetic account." -- Washington Post, 4/6
"It is fascinating to enter into this way of life, where extreme devotion formsa bulwark against humanity's digressions." -- LA Times, 3/8
"Maguire has produced a vivid, gripping and deeply touching picture of a world that is now lost. For an outsider to enter such a closed society and to capture its essence is an astonishing achievement: this is a work of history, but it has all the best qualities of a psychological novel." Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of The Reformation: A History "A warm, readable account of life in Parkminster Charterhouse during the 1960s." The Bookseller"
"Maguire's years' of labor bore fine fruit." -- Seattle Times, April 7, 2006
"Nancy Klein Maguire immerses us into the mysterious world of this ascetic order with admirable detail and clarity." -- (San Diego Union-Tribune, March 12, 2006)
"The level of detail is astonishing… Reading "An Infinity of Little Hours" is almost like praying." -- (MSNBC.com, 3/27/06)
"[An] outstanding work of cultural anthropology and oral history… it probes, it teaches, it unsettles, it amazes." -- (American Scholar)
An unpredictably interesting and well-written tale that, like a good novel, plunges you into their world and makes you wonder how you would fare. -- Catholic News Service, 5/27
Gripping tale of five young men who entered Catholicism's most rigorous contemplative monastic order. Founded in 1084, the Carthusian order remained virtually unchanged through the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, declares Maguire, scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library. (It is now slightly more democratic, though post-Vatican II members do not generally consider the changes substantial.) Emphasizing prayer, members of the order led very individual lives, speaking rarely, living austerely and having virtually no contact with the world outside the monastery's walls. Drawing upon copious letters, e-mails, conversations with former and current members of the order and several nearly unprecedented visits to the English Carthusian monastery of Parkminster, Maguire recreates the personal stories of five men who entered Parkminster in 1960 and 1961. Her goal is "to capture this slice of history that had been frozen in time for nearly 1,000 years." She does that and more. Her interwoven accounts of the five Parkminster novices convey a deep engagement with their emotional struggles as they grappled month after month with an enclosed world of solitude and silence, encountering, for the most part, only their deepest selves and God. As Maguire describes the psychological pressures that mounted upon these five men, driving some near to madness, the reader comes to understand better the concept of the contemplative lifestyle, and what it demands and promises. The author opens the monastery door, providing a vivid account of the order's lifestyle and worship, while also exploring the inner struggles of that life. A moving look at the human search for communion with God at perhaps its most extreme. (Kirkus Reviews)
Nancy Klein Maguire provides an intimate look at the day-to-day life of this incredible [Carthusian] order." -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3/26
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
|
An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western...
Available from Amazon
Price: $7.99
Updated on 12-6-2008
|
|
|
|
|
NOTICE: All product prices, availability, and specifications
are subject to verification by their respective retailers.
Copyright © 2008 Dominant Systems Corporation
info@bookdigger.com
Privacy Policy
Last Modified : 12-6-2008
|
|
|
|
