Saint Augustine, Garry Wills
Saint Augustine, Garry Wills
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Saint Augustine

Author: Garry Wills

Narrator: Alexander Adams

Unabridged: 4 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/21/1999

Synopsis

For centuries, Augustine's writings have moved and fascinated readers. With the keen eye of a writer whose own intellectual analysis won him a Pulitzer Prize, Gary Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker whose grounding in classical philosophy informed his interpretation of Christian doctrine. Saint Augustine explores Augustine's thought as well as the everyday man who set pen to parchment. It challenges many misconceptions, including those regarding his early sexual excesses. It portrays Augustine as being "peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture" who didn't even know Greek. Here is a lively and incisive portrait of a man who helped shape Western thinking.

"Wills's agile mind matches the agility of Saint Augustine. He presents his subject with candor and with empathy."—New York Times Book Review

About The Author

Garry Wills is a historian and the author of the New York Times bestsellers What Jesus Meant, Papal Sin, and Why Priests?, among others. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications, Wills is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.Alexander Adams is a pseudonym for narrator Grover Gardner. His most high-profile book to date is the unabridged novelization of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, recorded in a joint effort by BOT and Random House under the Adams moniker. He lives in Maryland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by robin on September 09, 2022

History And Spirit I read and reviewed Garry Wills' "Saint Augustine" in 2001 and thought about Wills' study after reading Augustine scholar Peter Brown's review of Susan Ruden's new translation of Augustine's "Confessions". (New York Review of Books, October 26, 2017) As I read Brown's review, Ruden......more

Goodreads review by Philip on January 27, 2010

A young African man with a taste for sex and a highly developed sense of both religion and mission travels across the Mediterranean. He decides to sail. Once in Italy, he communes with the rich and powerful and then, some years later, makes the return journey via the same means of transport, and the......more

Goodreads review by David on August 27, 2024

It is a daunting task, methinks, for a biographer to tackle a subject who has already written his/her own life story. Augustine's 'Confessions' (author Wills prefers to refer to the book as 'The Testimony') is one of the classics in the field and has stood the test of time. But Garry Wills has tackl......more

Goodreads review by Terence on January 15, 2010

As with Karen Armstrong's Buddha (review: [URL not allowed]), I can't do justice to Garry Wills' biography of Augustine of Hippo because I listened to it via audio cassette as I drove to and from work. I will say this, despite its brevity (less than 200 pages in print), Wills'......more

Goodreads review by Roxanne on December 01, 2009

I really enjoyed this sharp little biography of Augustine. It was really valuable to read an account by someone who is specifically a writer, not a historian or philosopher or religious scholar. Wills does a good job of evoking life in late antiquity and gearing his approach towards the layman rathe......more

Quotes

"Less the history of a man than the progress of a frank, dynamic, jazzy and fiercely serious mind . . . The writing is exceptional throughout-- rich and surprising with detail."
--Chicago Tribune

"Seldom has this long-familiar figure . . . emerged so fresh and challenging from under so masterful a hand."
--The New York Review of Books

"A brilliant biography . . . Garry Will's agile mind matches the agility of St. Augustine's. He presents his subject with candor and with empathy."
--The New York Times Book Review  

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