From Publishers Weekly
It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance and breadth of vision of this Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet and prose writer. This collection, spanning five decades, demonstrates an uncommon rigor, respect for truth and refusal to bend to intellectual fashion. While Milosz (The Captive Mind, etc.) an exile since 1951 and a professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley has the trappings of a traditional European man of letters, he brings a unique modern perspective to topics of longstanding intellectual debate, including belief in God, poetry's social relevance and the limitations of Western liberalism. His adventurous, varied prose style calls upon different literary traditions: sketches, letters, aphorisms and philosophical essays. Underlying Milosz's writing is the constant, pained consciousness of having lived through WWII and the Holocaust, during which time he experienced a spiritual crisis as a Catholic which does not seem fully resolved (his favorite philosophers are the contradictory Simone Weil and Lev Shestov). From his harsh judgment of himself ("to preserve an untarnished image of [one]self is rarely possible") to his meditations on the nature of evil ("purely bestial sadism, naked and plain, occurs much more rarely than motivated sadism, equipped with all the arguments needed to make it into a noble and positive inclination"), Milosz's thoughts stem from the pressure that reality exerts on theory. Even in moments of relative levity ("America... has always suffered from a certain weakness in historical imagination... which is perhaps why in American films both ancient Romans and astronauts from the year 3000 look and act like boys from Kentucky"), a seriousness of purpose predominates. Seven of these pieces are translated into English for the first time, helping to make this indispensable reading.
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Poems and essays cover the same emotional and intellectual terrain but with different gaits and rhythms, and Nobel laureate Milosz writes with both mastery and serious philosophical purpose. This invaluable retrospective presents a wealth of his reflective, beautifully wrought prose works, in which he weaves autobiography and portraits of people, famous and otherwise, who have influenced him into graceful and provocative musings on time, history, religion, science, and art. An exquisitely receptive observer of place, Milosz, now in his nineties, remembers his boyhood bliss on his grandparents' Lithuanian farm in "Happiness," the volume's most recent essay. Elsewhere, he conjures up the lost streets of Wilno and his first trip to Western Europe; then, in his most riveting and pivotal narratives, he writes piercingly of America, the country of his long exile. But as brilliantly as he evokes place, it's people who inspire him the most profoundly as he seeks understanding of the horrors of the twentieth century--totalitarianism, genocide, Hiroshima--and the splendor of our persistent desire to "lift ourselves over new thresholds of consciousness."
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
