Eire, Carlos

Princeton. 2009. Princeton University Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 9780691133577. 268 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Leslie Flis. keywords: Philosophy Eternity. FROM THE PUBLISHER - What is eternity? Is it anything other than a purely abstract concept, totally unrelated to our lives? A mere hope? A frightfully uncertain horizon? Or is it a certainty, shared by priest and scientist alike, and an essential element in all human relations? In A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire, the historian and National Book Award-winning author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, has written a brilliant short history of eternity in Western culture. Tracing the idea from ancient times to the present, Eire examines the rise and fall of five different conceptions of eternity, exploring how they developed and how they have helped shape individual and collective self-understanding. A book about lived beliefs and their relationship to social and political realities, A Very Brief History of Eternity is also about unbelief, and the tangled and often rancorous relation between faith and reason. Its subject is the largest subject of all, one that has taxed minds great and small for centuries, and will forever be of human interest, intellectually, spiritually, and viscerally. While esteemed religion scholar Carlos Eire has published many scholarly texts, it is his scorching memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana that brought him to the public's attention and garnered a 2003 National Book Award. As Eire confides in our exclusive interview, ‘The greatest and sweetest irony of all is this: Readers are thanking me for Waiting for Snow, yet writing that book was the easiest and most pleasurable thing I have ever done.' inventory #37521 ISBN: 9780691133577.