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These works are considered Weil's primary essays and letters. In addition, Simone Weil's niece has contributed an introductory article entitled, 'Simone Weil and the Rabbi's: Compassion and Tsedekah,' which puts Weil's relationship with Jewish thought into perspective. She includes source material from the Rabbis that put Weil (however reluctantly) in line with rabbinical thought throughout her major themes. The book is the ideal English introduction to the works and thought of Simone Weil.
In this painfully moving memoir, take a firsthand look at anorexia through the eyes of a young girl. Even in kindergarten, Rachel Richards knows something isn't right. By leading us through her distorted thoughts, she shines a light on the experience and mystery of mental illness. As she grows up, unable to comprehend or communicate her inner trauma, Rachel lashes out, hurting herself, running away from home, and fighting her family. Restricting food gives her the control she craves. But after being hospitalized and force-fed, Rachel only retreats further into herself.
Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.
In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.
Lia and Cassie were best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies. But now Cassie is dead. Lia's mother is busy saving other people's lives.Her father is away on business. Her stepmother is clueless. And the voice inside Lia's head keeps telling her to remain in control, stay strong, lose more, weigh less. If she keeps on going this way - thin, thinner, thinnest - maybe she'll disappear altogether.
Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. At the age of 5, she returned home from ballet class one day, put on an enormous sweater, curled up on her bed, and cried because she thought she was fat. By age 9, she was secretly bulimic, throwing up at home after school, while watching Brady Bunch reruns on television and munching Fritos. She added anorexia to her repertoire a few years later and took great pride in her ability to starve. Marya's story gathers intensity with each passing year. By the time she is in college and working for a wire news service in Washington D.C., she is in the grip of a bout of anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Down to 52 pounds and counting, Marya becomes a battlefield: her powerful death instinct at war with the will to live. Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and slip into a netherworld where up is down, food is greed, and death is honor? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through 5 lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she recreates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders.
These works are considered Weil's primary essays and letters. In addition, Simone Weil's niece has contributed an introductory article entitled, 'Simone Weil and the Rabbi's: Compassion and Tsedekah,' which puts Weil's relationship with Jewish thought into perspective. She includes source material from the Rabbis that put Weil (however reluctantly) in line with rabbinical thought throughout her major themes. The book is the ideal English introduction to the works and thought of Simone Weil.
In this painfully moving memoir, take a firsthand look at anorexia through the eyes of a young girl. Even in kindergarten, Rachel Richards knows something isn't right. By leading us through her distorted thoughts, she shines a light on the experience and mystery of mental illness. As she grows up, unable to comprehend or communicate her inner trauma, Rachel lashes out, hurting herself, running away from home, and fighting her family. Restricting food gives her the control she craves. But after being hospitalized and force-fed, Rachel only retreats further into herself.
Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.
In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.
Lia and Cassie were best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies. But now Cassie is dead. Lia's mother is busy saving other people's lives.Her father is away on business. Her stepmother is clueless. And the voice inside Lia's head keeps telling her to remain in control, stay strong, lose more, weigh less. If she keeps on going this way - thin, thinner, thinnest - maybe she'll disappear altogether.
Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. At the age of 5, she returned home from ballet class one day, put on an enormous sweater, curled up on her bed, and cried because she thought she was fat. By age 9, she was secretly bulimic, throwing up at home after school, while watching Brady Bunch reruns on television and munching Fritos. She added anorexia to her repertoire a few years later and took great pride in her ability to starve. Marya's story gathers intensity with each passing year. By the time she is in college and working for a wire news service in Washington D.C., she is in the grip of a bout of anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Down to 52 pounds and counting, Marya becomes a battlefield: her powerful death instinct at war with the will to live. Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and slip into a netherworld where up is down, food is greed, and death is honor? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through 5 lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she recreates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders.
When Marya Hornbacher published her acclaimed first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have a piece of shattering knowledge: the underlying reason for her distress. At age 24, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is.
Robert Coles first met Dorothy Day over 35 years ago when, as a medical student, he worked in one of her Catholic Worker soup kitchens. He remained close to this inspiring and controversial woman until her death in 1980. His book, an intellectual and psychological portrait, confronts candidly the central puzzles of her life.
The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump's vision - a radical deregulation of the US economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on "radical Islamic terrorism", and sweeping aside climate science to unleash a domestic fossil fuel frenzy - will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks to the economy, to national security, to the environment.
This now classic book revealed Flannery O’Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy.
In her debut memoir, Controlled, Neesha Arter shares the year of her life that followed a harrowing crime. When she was 14 years old, she was sexually assaulted by people she had no reason to mistrust. She tried, subsequently, to reconcile feelings of guilt and shame by searching for a means of control. In a whirlwind of legal proceedings, family conflicts, and loss of identity, Arter succumbed to anorexia as the only way to find her childhood self in an unraveling world.
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
Simone Weil traces this seminal thinker's transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher, as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. In this thoughtful and compelling biography, du Plessix Gray illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience of listeners.
"Du Plessix Gray does an exemplary job of bringing this complex, intelligent yet tortured woman to life." (Library Journal)
"A virtuosic achievement, possibly unique among popular treatments of Weil: a short, measured biography of a short but startlingly unmeasured and unmeasuring life." (Publishers Weekly)
"Gray's portrait is fascinating, and Donada Peters's reading is, as usual, perfection." (AudioFile)
The other Simone, one could say. A psychologically perceptive portrait of one woman's attempt to live a life of deep contemplation, principle, and action. The author deals well with the multilayered terrain of Weil's life, weaving history, philosophy, and psychology. The bio describes Weil's many shifts, from socialism to Catholicism, to her rejection of body and food, and her hatred of her Jewish roots, her friends, and her family. A truly astonishing life, Weil was one who fought every stricture placed upon her, including her own privilege, brilliance, and success. A woman of tremendous contradiction who lived at once intensely and narrowly, who the world was not ready for, whose mind could not find peace in ordinary things. She wins in the end, I think: as she believed, the accumulated actions of a life is truly one's opus. And indeed, her brief, intense life is, above all of her writings, the most authentic, and the most powerful, work that she left us.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful
This work is a very well written bio of a staggeringly unusual and complex person, Simone Weil. One cannot emphasize enough how strange and determined was this subject. And being such, what a difficult job it was for the author to convey the essence of Weil in these pages. But the author suceeded wonderfully in beautiful, literary prose. Also, the narrator excels in bringing the tale to life. I can't say enough about her, either. A wonderful job all round.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful
What did you like best about Simone Weil? What did you like least?
If a listener has, as I do, an interest in Simone Weil, he/she will find this biography disappointing. A great deal of emphasis is placed on pedestrian aspects of Weil's life, with a great deal of emphasis on her physical struggles and what they signify. Very little attention is given to her spiritual life or her theological writings. The implication seems to be that her mysticism and her spiritual understanding were a result of anorexia and a strong attachment to her mother. One would do better to read about her on Wikipedia and then attack her writings. The reader, however, is excellent.
What could Francine du Plessix Gray have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
See above
Which character – as performed by Donada Peters – was your favorite?
Not application, as this was a biography.
Was Simone Weil worth the listening time?
In some sense, yes, if just to get an idea of how this biographer sees her.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
This was one of the first audiobooks I listened to; it convinced me that audioboooks could be more than a distraction during a commute and started a daily listening habit.
The author paints a detailed portrait of a complex woman in a fashion that could be thought of a "biography of a soul," psychological warts and all. It's also a portrait of the first half of the 20th century life in France, touching on class struggle, social change, the build up to war, and major religious and philosophical debates.
This is a woman whose story ought to be better known.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
The book was less about ideas than about the life of an eccentric person. People more interested in women's issues might have more insight to bring to these stories.
What could Francine du Plessix Gray have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
more ideas. The book also smacks of Eurocentric views of culture and history.
What three words best describe Donada Peters’s voice?
Elite and authoritative.