Weil, Simone Books

Waiting for God (Perennial Classics)

Simone Weil

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Simone Weil is an outsider's saint. The daughter of an agnostic French family of Jewish descent, Weil was never baptized ("God does not want me in the Church," she wrote), and her conversion to Christianity at the age of 23 took her by surprise. Until then, she had been a solemn, committed leftist intellectual. Now she was moving toward a life of divine encounters whose desolate ecstasy, as described by the journals, letters, and essays excerpted in Waiting for God, bear comparison to St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. As Leslie Fiedler writes in her introduction to Weil's book, "She speaks of the problems of belief in the vocabulary of the unbeliever, of the doctrines of the Church in the words of the unchurched." The book is most notable for Weil's lengthy letter titled "Spiritual Autobiography" and for her "Meditation on the Pater Noster," which is the discursive record of a spiritual process that led to her almost daily attainment of a mystical vision of God. This is not pretty writing; it is an agonized record of amazement. --Michael Joseph Gross

Gravity and Grace (Routledge Classics)

Simone Weil

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

They called her the Red Virgin 5 out of 5 stars.
63 of 72 people found this review helpful.

Simone Weil's writings were impenetrable for me in the fifties. Now I have most of her works and I am frequently amazed at how penetrating are her ideas and thoughts, and how contrary to most thinking today. That in itself recommends her. She understands people, life, and suffering, and sees its purpose. She sees through all falseness to the goodness. Simone Weil is the most honest person I know or have heard of. Yet while her classmate, Simone de Beauvoir is famous Simone Weil is relatively unknown. She loves Plato, Buddhism, Geometry, Jesus, working people, her homeland, France, but she rejected the Catholic Church, baptism, and Judaism (her background). She is a saint if there ever was one. I am profoundly grateful for having known something of her, her diamond mind, and her beautiful soul.

Editorial Review:

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals.

War and the Iliad

Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

War and the Iliad is a perfect introduction to the range of Homer's art as well as a provocative and rewarding demonstration of the links between literature, philosophy, and questions of life and death.

Simone Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is one of her most celebrated works--an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost. First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil's whose work similarly explored the complex relations between literature, religion, and philosophy. She composed her own distinctive discussion of the Iliad in the midst of World War II--calling it "her method of facing the war"--and, as Christopher Benfey argues in his introduction, the essay was very probably written in response to Weil. Bespaloff's account of the Iliad brings out Homer's novelistic approach to character and the existential drama of his characters' choices; it is marked, too, by a tragic awareness of how the Iliad speaks to times and places where there is no hope apart from war.

This edition brings together these two influential essays for the first time, accompanied by Benfey's scholarly introduction and an afterword by the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch.

Letter to a Priest

Simone Weil

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Editorial Review:

Simone Weil, the renowned French philosopher and political activist, originally wrote this letter to a priest in the autumn of 1942 while waiting in New York to join the Free French movement. The most accessable discussion that exists of her complicated ideas on religion and her lifelong spiritual struggle, Letter to a Priest outlines thirty-five key questions about Catholicism, its dogma and institutions, all of which had preoccupied Weil for years. Each point reveals Weil's simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion toward the Church as she contemplated its presence in her own life. In her letter, Weil asks the priest to reply categorically to each point she raises and to indicate whether her opinions will allow her to be received into the Church. Written just a year before she died at the age of thirty-four, it is believed that Weil never received a reply to this letter.

Simone Weil (Modern Spiritual Masters Series)

Simone Weil, Eric O. Springsted

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent introduction 5 out of 5 stars.
22 of 26 people found this review helpful.

Simone Weil was, among other things,a mystic,philospher,worker,intellectual and, in an odd way, a martyr. Her philosophy is dense,often lending itself to repeated readings. Her concepts are difficult,though worthwhile to say the very least. Simone Weil writings in this volume,which are very well edited by Eric O. Springsted{the president of the simone weil society},are from the later period of her life. She lived only until her thirities, though, like most saints and genius",she left an inordinate amount for those of us to follow. He philospohy here dpeneds heavily on what she calls the necessary or necessity{sort of natural cause and effect,as it were} though then which is far from an uncaring God or watchmaker who began the universe then sits idly by. This is the core of her philosophy and is quite obtuse at times. The writings on the Need of suffering are illuminating,her statement on what a jst society should be is vital and fresh. Simone Weil understood that modern technology had rendered many poeples lifelong way of life obsolete, therefore denying them of not only a right livelihood, but also their spiritual well being. The well oiled mechanism that is [was] capitalism was at that momet[along with its equally vaccuous counterpart Marxism] laying waste to the soul of Europe{and by proxy, the West}. Weil offered suggestions,and possible solutions,by her life. She lived the life she worte about as well as she was able. A truly extraordinary human being,and one to whom I will always be in debt. This is a superb introduction to the life and work of the truly astonishing woman.

Oppression and Liberty (Routledge Classics)

Simone Weil

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Editorial Review:

The remarkable French thinker Simone Weil is one of the leading intellectual and spiritual figures of the twentieth century. A legendary essayist, political philosopher and member of the French resistance, her literary output belied her tragically short life. Most of her work was published posthumously, to widespread acclaim. Always concerned with the nature of individual freedom, Weil explores inOppression and Liberty its political and social implications. Analysing the causes of oppression, its mechanisms and forms, she questions revolutionary responsesand presents a prophetic view of a way forward. If, as she noted elsewhere, 'the future is made of the same stuff as the present', then there will always be a need to continue to listen to Simone Weil. to listen to Simone Weil.

The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (Routledge Classics)

Simone Weil

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Editorial Review:

"What is required if men and women are to feel at home in society and are to recover their vitality? Into wrestling with that question, Simone Weil put the very substance of her mind and temperament. The apparently solid edifices of our prepossessions fall down before her onslaught like ninepins, and she is as fertile and forthright in her positive suggestions . . . she can be relied upon to toss aside the superficial and to come to grips with the essential and the profound." -- Time Literary Supplement

Simone Weil's the Iliad or the Poem of Force: A Critical Edition

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Brilliant analysis of the Iliad 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

There's been a lot of renewed interest in The Iliad lately- some of it stems from "Troy", the Brad Pitt vehicle, but much of it comes from the inevitable drawing of parallels between yesterday and today. With more and more talk of America as "empire", reflections on empires and wars fought in years past has been a hot topic of discussion. Lewis Lapham, in his excellent collection of essays "Theater of War", has one particularly astute essay drawing a parallel between the Peloponnysian war and the current wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other works, particularly recent books by Chris Hedges, have attempted to delve into the psychology, the reason, of war, rather than just the methods used to wage it. Simone Weil writes in a similar vein, albeit over 50 years ahead of her time. The book itself is an extended essay- in French and English. She picks through the Iliad, drawing out a verse and following it with analyses, successfully laying out her thesis- that the main character of the Iliad is, in fact, "force". Not Achilles, not Hector, but force itself. The use of it, the misuse of it, and the fates of those who rely on it. Citing some of the most insightful passages in the Iliad, and sometimes just a single line ("Ares is just, and kills those who kill"), Weil uses the Iliad as a launching pad into the psychology of war and violence. Having lived through WWII, one can imagine Weil didn't look far for contempory situations to draw parallels to. Overall, this is an excellent work- any fan of the Iliad, or any student of war, would do well to pick it up.

Editorial Review:

Simone Weil, a brilliant young teacher, philosopher, and social activist, wrote the essay, The Iliad or the Poem of Force at France at the beginning of World War II. Her profound meditation on the nature of violence provides a remarkably vivid and accessible testament of the Greek epic's continuing relevance to our lives. This celebrated work appears here for the first time in a bilingual version, based on the text of the authoritative edition of the author's complete writings. An introduction discusses the significance of the essay both in the evolution of Weil's thought and as a distinctively iconoclastic contribution to Homeric studies. The commentary draws on recent interpretations of the Iliad and examines the parallels between Weil's vision of Homer's warriors and the experiences of modern soldiers.

The Simone Weil Reader

Simone Weil

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Editorial Review:

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a teacher, classical scholar, philosopher, political activist and seeker after truth. She confronted the rootlessness of modern life and the death of the spirit in an age of materialism. Her writing was visionary and her vision, radical. She wrote "The conditions of modern life destroy the mind-body equilibrium in everything, in thought and in action - in all actions: in work, in fighting...and in love, which is now a luxurious sensation and a game...In its aspect, the civilization we live in overwhelms the human body. Mind and body have become strangers to one another. Contact has been lost."

Born in France, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Weil inspired T.S. Eliot to say of her, "We must simply expose ourselves to the personality of a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of a saint." Today, nearly sixty years after her death, her work has, perhaps, an even greater immediacy and relevance. This book is a collection of the best of her writings from The Notebooks of Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty and Gravity and Grace.

Now presented in a beautifully re-designed edition, The Simone Weil Reader is a source of inspiration; it reflects a towering faith and the ultimate triumph of the spirit.

Need For Roots

Simone Weil

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