5/31/2023 0 Comments The book of jacob olga![]() It is a dauntingly ambitious piece of work and one of the responses it arouses is just plain amazement at the patience and tenacity that have gone into its construction.Įnglish-speaking readers will have encountered Tokarczuk’s writing in the two previous novels of hers also published by Fitzcarraldo. It takes in esoteric theological arguments, diplomatic history, alchemy, Kabbalah, Polish antisemitism and the philosophical roots of the Enlightenment. ![]() As crowded as a Bruegel painting, it moves from mud-bound Galician villages to Greek monasteries, 18th-century Warsaw, Brno, Vienna and the luxurious surroundings of the Habsburg court. Over a thousand pages long, dense with history and incident, it is vast enough to make this reader’s knees buckle. The Books of Jacob by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk is an epic chronicle of the life and times of Frank and his followers. Furthermore, the course of his turbulent 80-year life coincided with huge political and philosophical changes in Europe, as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapsed and traditional religious beliefs were usurped by the rival claims of science. Charismatic, transgressive and downright loopy, Frank comes across today as a Monty Python mashup of Osho, David Koresh and Mormon leader Joseph Smith, but he was highly influential in his time. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 'This brilliant book is a wholly unexpected and central contribution to its subject. Leading up to the time of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, the book aims to enlarge and confirm the value of contemporary evidence, some of which has only recently been discovered. How did this monumental conversion come about? How did Christianity compare and compete with the pagan gods in the Roman Empire? This scholarly work, from award-winning historian Robin Lane Fox, places Christians and pagans side by side in the context of civic life and contrasts their religious experiences, visions, cults and oracles. The transition from pagan to Christian in the ancient Mediterranean world was a process whose effects we still live with today. From the second century AD to the conversion of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World gives a fascinating new perspective on an extraordinary era. ![]() 5/31/2023 0 Comments One lonely night spillane![]() ![]() ![]() Love, Mick" No other writings or markings of any kind save for Spillane's inscription. Spillane's inscription, written directly to the front flyleaf, reads in full: "Dear Ma and Dad - Don't know what the hell to write so I'll just say you're too old to read stuff like this anyway. From Spillane's own library with his personal bookplate loosely inserted in - NOT bound to - the book. Inscribed by author to his parents "Ma and Dad"! First Edition, First printing of Spillane's spectacular, "angrily anti-Communist" Mike Hammer novel, Ayn Rand's favorite (The Objectivist, August, 1969). There's no shame to killing an evil thing" (Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night). Saul did it when he slew his tens of thousands. David did it when he knocked off Goliath. ![]() |