Synopses & Reviews
Part of James Atlas’s Icons series, a biography of one of the leading intellectuals in postwar America, and the author of the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt was an eminent philosopher, a distinguished professor, and a famous journalist. When she wrote about the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann she not only recorded history but changed it. Her major works, The Origin of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, belong among the classics of Western thought. When she died in 1975 at the age of 69, she was revered as one of the major intellectual figures of her day.
In Anne Heller’s skilled telling, she was also an outsized personality, fearless and indifferent to the opinions of others. As a student in Germany, she had a controversial affair with her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, a supporter of the Nazi party. Barred from teaching because she was Jewish, she fled to France and, later, to New York. She made her way in the world of émigré Jews with force; Eichmann in Jerusalem, first published in The New Yorker, invoked a phrase — “the banality of evil” — that would forever alter how we view the Holocaust. Heller, the biographer of Ayn Rand, is accustomed to dealing with strong women; her portrait of Arendt engages both her private life — the philosopher Karl Jaspers was one of her professors, Mary McCarthy was her closest friend — and her role as a public intellectual in postwar New York. One of her most important books was a collection of biographical essays called Men in Dark Times; Arendt, too, lived through dark times, but managed to bring light.
Synopsis
Jay Parinis
Jesus brings the powerful narrative skills of an award-winning novelist to a figure who has affected and changed many lives in a profound way. Parini considers the story in all its mythical radiance, taking Jesus as the human face of God, a figure whose self-sacrifice has inspired men and women for twenty centuries.
Synopsis
Jay Parini brings a lifes worth of contemplation on Jesus to the first volume in ICONS, a series of brief, thought-provoking biographies edited by James Atlas. In Jesus, Parini turns the powerful narrative skill hes wielded over the course of a four-decade career to a figure whos dominated our collective imagination and cultural iconography for over twenty centuries.
The main trend of modern theology has hinged on the notion of “demythologizing” Jesus. Parinis book seeks to re-mythologize him, considering the story in all its mythical radiance, taking Jesus as the human face of God. It asks: Whats so moving about Jesuss story that millions of people over two millennia have considered it a paradigm for living?
Far from dogmatic, Parini looks at the many ways in which Jesus has been viewed and dramatizes the transformation from Jesus to Christ, man to myth, and obscure Jewish carpenter to someone who pointed a finger toward God and said with conviction: This is the way. Follow me.
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A cinematic and biographical assessment of the twentieth century's greatest filmmaker, by one of our most versatile critics.
Synopsis
Part of James Atlas’ Icons series, a filmic and biographical assessment of the twentieth century’s greatest filmmaker, by one of our most versatile critics. Alfred Hitchcock presides over the history of film with a magisterial authority expressed in the silhouette that has made him recognizable around the world. No director has produced a more familiar body of work. From North by Northwest to Rear Window, The Birds to Psycho, his films are classics of the genre. In 2012, Vertigo was named the greatest film of all time by the British Film Institute.
Michael Wood, one of our most versatile critics, has given us a compact study of Hitchcock that deftly melds biography and criticism. He gives us the life, from a provincial suburb of London to the most posh precincts of Los Angeles, and a fabled career that began as a designer of title cards in the silent film era. He reads the films as visual texts, studying their plots to tease out their sometimes elusive meaning. And he reminds us that what we see is a Hitchcock film isn’t always what we think we see, that menace and murder lurk just beneath the surface. Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much is a virtuoso performance by a critic who knows everything.
Synopsis
A revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time Every frame of David Lynch's work, from the '70s midnight movie Eraserhead to the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, to the digital-video DIY feat Inland Empire, bears his unmistakable imprint. But the paradox of the Lynchian is that it's easy to recognize and hard to define. Lynch is a master of the inscrutable gesture, the opaque symbol. His career evades the usual categories: pop culture icon and subject of academic study, cult figure and industry outsider. He's a Renaissance man—musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur—and a vocal proponent or transcendental meditation.
Dennis Lim, the newly minted director of Cinematheque programming at Lincoln Center, is a skilled cinephile wary of over-interpretation. David Lynch preserves the strangeness of the Lynch's universe and offers a personal meditation on the most distinctive filmmaker in modern American culture. It leaves what Lynch likes to call "room to dream," honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.
Synopsis
A biography of one of the leading intellectuals in postwar America, author of the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, which introduced the concept of banality of evil, changing in a single phrase our view of humanity.
Synopsis
Widely regarded as the greatest filmmaker of the twentieth century, Alfred Hitchcock had a gift for creating suspense and a shrewd knowledge of human psychology. His film career, spanning more than half a century, is studded with classics from The 39 Steps to Psycho, North by Northwest to Vertigo (which in 2012 unseated Citizen Kane as the best movie of all time according to Sight and Sound). A master of intricate storytelling, Hitchcock was one of the first directors whose films belonged to both popular culture and high art. By the end of his life, he had gone from being the overweight son of a greengrocer in a London suburb to Hollywood’s reigning director, whose cameo roles in his own films were one of their most anticipated features, and whose profile was recognized by millions (thanks to the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents).
Michael Wood describes this journey with the wit and erudition that are the trademarks of his work, showcasing his singular ability to detect hidden patterns within apparently disparate forms. Whether he is writing about Henry James or Hollywood in the 1920s, he is alert to the fundamental truth lurking behind the stated meaning. In Hitchcock, Wood has found his ideal subject—an artist for whom explicit statement was anathema, who made conventional plot a hiding place rather than a source of revelation.
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A stirring account of the life of Paul, who brought Christianity to the Jews, by the most popular writer on religion in the English-speaking world, Karen Armstrong, author of The History of God, which has been translated into thirty languages
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Part of James Atlas’s Icons series, a revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time
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Hannah Arendt, one of the most gifted and provocative voices of her era, was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that arose after the publication of her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of the kidnapped Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Arendt was a woman of many contradictions. She was brilliant, beautiful when young, and irresistible to gifted men, even in her chain-smoking, intellectually provocative middle age. She learned to write in English only at the age of thirty-six, and yet her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations of Americans and Europeans viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous—and most divisive—work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, created fierce controversy that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the great romantic philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In this fast-paced, comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s apparent contradictions and her greatest achievements to her sense of being what she called a “conscious pariah”—one of those few people in every time and place who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.
Synopsis
A stirring account of the life of Paul, who brought Christianity to the Jews, by the most popular writer on religion in the English-speaking world, author of The History of God No figure in early Christian history had a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity than St. Paul, author of The Epistle to the Hebrews, a book that transformed a sect into a religion. Paul was first to advance the revolutionary idea that Christ could serve as a model for the possibility of transcendence, andquot;the new symbol that brought humanity to the divine.andquot; His life was a dramatic enactment of his beliefs, and his conversion on the road to Damascus is one of the central episodes in the Bible. Karen Armstrong is the ideal chronicler of this story, one that has particular significance for our own time. And for Armstrongand#39;s readers, who number in the millions, perhaps its greatest attraction will be that itand#39;s by her, a writer whose widely acclaimed books on religion have been translated all over the world.
Synopsis
At once a pop culture icon, cult figure, and film industry outsider, master filmmaker David Lynch and his work defy easy definition. Dredged from his subconscious mind, Lynch’s work is primed to act on our own subconscious, combining heightened, contradictory emotions into something familiar but inscrutable. No less than his art, Lynch’s life also evades simple categorization, encompassing pursuits as a musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur, and vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation.
David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Dennis Lim’s remarkably smart and concise book, proposes several lenses through which to view Lynch and his work: through the age-old mysteries of the uncanny and the sublime, through the creative energies of surrealism and postmodernism, through ideas of America and theories of good and evil. Lynch himself often warns against overinterpretation. And accordingly, this is not a book that seeks to decode his art or annotate his life—to dispel the strangeness of the Lynchian—so much as one that offers complementary ways of seeing and understanding one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema. Its spirit is true to its subject, in remaining suggestive rather than definitive, in allowing what Lynch likes to call “room to dream,” and in honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.
Synopsis
St. Paul is known throughout the world as the first Christian writer, authoring fourteen of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. But as Karen Armstrong demonstrates in St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate, he also exerted a more significant influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the world than any other figure in history. It was Paul who established the first Christian churches in Europe and Asia in the first century, Paul who transformed a minor sect into the largest religion produced by Western civilization, and Paul who advanced the revolutionary idea that Christ could serve as a model for the possibility of transcendence. While we know little about some aspects of the life of St. Paulandmdash;his upbringing, the details of his deathandmdash;his dramatic vision of God on the road to Damascus is one of the most powerful stories in the history of Christianity, and the life that followed forever changed the course of history.
About the Author
JAY PARINI is a poet, novelist, and biographer who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His books of poetry include House of Days and The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems. Among his eight novels are The Passages of H.M., Benjamin's Crossing, and The Last Station, which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner, and numerous works of nonfiction, including Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.
Table of Contents
Preface ix1. Ancient Palestine 1
2. In the Beginning 13
3. The Dove Descending: His Ministry Begins 30
4. Walking in Galilee: The Healer and Teacher 44
5. Entering Jerusalem 79
6. The Passion: From Gesthsemene to Golgotha 99
7. Resurrection 118
8. The Afterlife of Jesus 136
Acknowledgments 154
Notes 155
Select Bibliography 168