- Paperback
- Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) (September 1988)
- ISBN-10: 0060910984
- ISBN-13: 978-0060910983
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 0.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 91 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,291,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"A book of great richness, beauty and power." -- -- New York Times Book Review
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Book Description
In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.
This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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First Sentence
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning,
By
This review is from: Holy the Firm (Paperback)
This is definitely not work that I would usually read for pleasure. However, it was entirely pleasurable. Beautiful images, words, skill, observation, and construction. I both laughed and, unexpectedly, cried. Perfect contemplative reading.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps the perfect essay,
By
This review is from: Holy the Firm (Paperback)
I don't like using words like "perfect" but I think it is warranted here. This is an incredibly literate piece of work, in which not one single word has been wasted. Each time I read it I come away exhililrated & humbled by Dillard's mastery of language & the enormous depth of scholarship that lies behind every line and every metaphor. This is writing by someone drunk on language & learning, try not to stuff it into any pre-conceived notions of literature -this is music. Dillard has crafted a classical symphony for us in which certain movements come back over and over in variations of harmony and melody that will sweep you away. Now, that being said, I must also say that it seems that half my best students love Dillard & half hate her. Very little in between. Yesterday one of my brightest (who loves Dillard) threw up her hands and said "Now I hate her, I will have to spend seven years reading to know what she is saying". Yes, of course! but the joy of Dillard's immersion in Anglo-American theology and literature is that she draws you along -it isn't name dropping, thesefolks have been useful to her & she wants us to come too. Read Holy The Firm with Eliot's Four Quartets in the other hand, then you can have a go at Johnson, Martin Luther.... AND YOU WILL!
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that saved my sanity,
By A Customer
This review is from: Holy the Firm (Paperback)
Annie Dillard is one of those writers who is all or nothing. Many people don't "get" her and find her bewildering. But to some of us, she speaks to some unspoken hunger in our souls that we never knew we had. The year after a personal tragedy I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm incessantly, finding in Dillard's thoughts and imagery a necessary verbalization of my pain and spiritual confusion. She is able to capture in one short phrase the complex muddle of emotions found at certain times in one's life and the reader knows that she's been there. To filch a line from another book: "When one walks in the shadow of insanity, the finding of another footstep on the sand is something close to a blessed event." I do not exaggerate when I say Holy the Firm saved my mind. This is not to say that Dillard is all gloom-and-doom. Many of her lines are extremely witty and can make you burst out laughing with her insight and sardonic humor. Either she clicks with you or she doesn't. But for those of us with whom she does, Dillard is wonderful.
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