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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 271.12502
EAN: 9780374271008
ISBN: 0374271003
Label: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Number Of Pages: 177
Publication Date: 1996-12
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Sales Rank: 1088290
Studio: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In a selection from their ten-year correspondence from 1958 to 1968, the Trappist monk and the Polish writer debate the role of communism in the Cold War era, share advice about literature, and exchange contrasting views on the natural world.
Amazon.com Review:
These letters, written from 1958 to 1968, trace the growing friendship and fascinating arguments between the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, the poet who was later exiled from his native Poland, yet went on to win the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature. The quest to make sense out of the human condition is the bridge between their worlds of literature and religion, and the two men have a lot to say to one another. Is humanity inherently good? Can art save us from ourselves? Can war be justified? These letters are worth reading strictly for the quality of the writing and the thinking, but they are also valuable as literary biography and cultural history.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - 4.1 stars: A candid, sharp, sane, respectful exchange
This volume consists of about a decade's worth of correspondence (1959-68) between the sometimes sagacious Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, later to become a Nobel laureate for Literature. Milosz was residing in Paris when the correspondence began, but he soon moved to Berkeley, California, to teach at the university. Merton was writing from Gethsemani, Kentucky, apart from one or two notes from his travel in 1968.
These are two alert minds, ... Read More
Rating:  - A Moment of Clarity Captured
Czeslaw Miloscz and Thomas Merton have always been two of my favorite writers; until this book I had not known they were friends. This book celebrates that rare thing I remember from youth: a friendship of ideas between kindred spirits. These letters were written at the beginning of the 1960's -- a rare moment of cultural clarity on both sides of the "iron curtain." Forty years later, with the triumph of capitalism and our so-called "individualism" all but assured, with religious questions making the ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 271.12502
EAN: 9780374271008
ISBN: 0374271003
Label: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Number Of Pages: 177
Publication Date: 1996-12
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Sales Rank: 1088290
Studio: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)