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What Are We Doing Here?

Essays

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith.

Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 13, 2017
      This collection of 15 essays by Pulitzer-winning author Robinson (The Givenness of Things) is sometimes cranky and rambling, but always passionate. Robinson’s crankiness comes out in her love of Puritans, Calvinists, and Oliver Cromwell, and her annoyance at history’s maligning of them. Yet it also stems from her passion for art and beauty, a humane deity, and a world run more by moral compass than balance sheet. Following Robinson’s train of thought can make for a bumpy and circuitous ride, no doubt in part because most of the essays originated as spoken addresses. Yet with Robinson as guide, details in the cultural terrain emerge that one might otherwise miss. She points out in “The American Scholar Now” that when the U.S. actively funded the humanities, its prosperity simultaneously grew. Elsewhere in the same piece, she notes that “the Citizen has become the Taxpayer” as civic ideals have eroded. In “Slander” she looks with approval at the long Christian tradition of curbing one’s tongue and unequivocally places blame for a now uncivil society on an unhappy convergence of “dystopian media” with right-wing Christianity. An essay or two rambles too much—“Untitled” is aptly named—but Robinson’s overall trajectory is clear and important. Her eloquent work stands up for a compassionate faith, the value of education, and a sense of decency.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Carrington MacDuffie brings her vocal skills and narrative art to this remarkable collection of Robinson's essays--originally speeches given at various colleges and universities. MacDuffie's elegant intonation comes through in these challenging and thought-provoking works. Her clear delivery gives shape to the complex arguments and rewards the listener as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist ranges from her contrarian appreciation of Puritan texts to contemporary critiques of deterministic science. She particularly lambastes those who miss the connections between metaphysics and the idea of the soul, thereby detaching beauty from religious faith. Robinson's brilliance illuminates this audiobook, and she could have no better narrator than MacDuffie. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

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Languages

  • English

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