Synopses & Reviews
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a distinguished scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature who taught at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. After his conversion to Christianity, Lewis began writing Christian apologetic works aimed at a popular audience. It is for these
works that Lewis is now best remembered; especially in the U.S., where his books have sold in the millions and continue to be popular today. Perhaps because of this popularity, however, Lewis's Christian writings are generally dismissed by theologians as oversimplified and conceptually flawed.
With this book, Wesley A. Kort hopes to rehabilitate Lewis and to demonstrate the value and continuing relevance of his work. Kort not only retrieves Lewis from the now-dated context of his writings, but also wrests him from the hands of evangelicals who have turned his word into gospel and
mistaken his attacks on modernity for a retreat from the world. Kort addresses and refutes common prejudices about Lewis and shows that, although Lewis was sharply critical of the materialism and narcissism of modern culture, he nevertheless insisted that only through culture can Christian
teachings effectively shape moral character. Lewis's desire for a fruitful, interactive relationship between Christianity and culture sharply distinguishes him from neo-orthodox theology and many contemporary Christian rejections of culture.
Review
"An admirable effort to rescue from politics the greatest upheaval of modern times and reclaim it for history."--Newsweek (on the previous edition)
Synopsis
This provocative and eminently readable work looks at the many upheavals of the Russian Revolution as successive stages in a single process. Focusing on the Russian Revolution in its widest sense, Fitzpatrick covers not only the events of 1917 and what preceded them, but the nature of the social transformation brought about by the Bolsheviks after they took power. Making use of a huge amount of previously secret information in Soviet archives and unpublished memoirs, this detailed chronology recounts each monumental event from the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918-1920, through the New Economic Policy of 1921 and the 1929 First Five-Year Plan, to Stalin's "revolution from above" at the end of the 1920s and the Great Purge of the late 1930s.
Lucid and concise, this classic study makes comprehensible the complex events of the revolution.
About the Author
Sheila Fitzpatrick is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago.