The Life You Save May Be Your Own
An American Pilgrimage
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Narrated by:
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Lloyd James
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By:
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Paul Elie
About this listen
Called the School of the Holy Ghost, for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read each others' books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common".
Paul Elie tells these four writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past to the chaos of post-war American life. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change, and to save, our lives.
©2003 Paul Elie (P)2004 Blackstone AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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The Seven Storey Mountain
- By: Thomas Merton
- Narrated by: Sidney Lanier
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Abridged
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The Seven Storey Mountain is the extraordinary spiritual testament of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a man who experienced life to its fullest in the world before entering a Trappist monastery. By the end of his life, he had become one of the 20th century's best-known and beloved Christian voices. This autobiography deals...not with what happens to a man, but what happens inside his soul.
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Letter to Audible
- By Victoria A. McCargar on 08-06-17
By: Thomas Merton
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Lincoln's Battle with God
- A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America
- By: Stephen Mansfield
- Narrated by: Stephen Mansfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Abraham Lincoln is the most beloved of all US presidents. He freed the slaves, gave the world some of its most beautiful phrases, and redefined the meaning of America. He did all of this with wisdom, compassion, and wit. Yet, throughout his life, Lincoln fought with God. In his early years in Illinois, he rejected even the existence of God and became the village atheist. In time, this changed but still he wrestled with the truth of the Bible, preachers, doctrines, the will of God, the providence of God, and then, finally, God’s purposes in the Civil War.
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Outstanding
- By Thomas Streveler on 07-23-21
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Bonhoeffer
- Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
- By: Eric Metaxas, Timothy Keller
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner, Eric Metaxas
- Length: 23 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and author. In this New York Times bestselling biography, Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life—the theologian and the spy—and draws them together to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil.
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Mandatory Reading
- By cmb on 03-10-20
By: Eric Metaxas, and others
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Metaphysical Animals
- How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
- By: Clare Mac Cumhaill, Rachae Wiseman
- Narrated by: Alex Dunmore
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations.
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Book about nothing
- By Gerardo Naranjo Gonzalez on 06-14-22
By: Clare Mac Cumhaill, and others
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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Philosopher of the Heart
- The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
- By: Clare Carlisle
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence - how to be a human being in the world? - while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.
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Fatally flawed
- By Citizen M on 02-26-23
By: Clare Carlisle
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American Philosophy
- A Love Story
- By: John Kaag
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In American Philosophy, John Kaag - a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career - stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy.
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Awesome Book! But..
- By Kye Sonne on 04-02-17
By: John Kaag
What listeners say about The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tim
- 02-09-24
Gripping, thought-provoking, though incomplete to an agnostic
I enjoyed this listen and will re-read. Worth the re-read.
This was like sitting in a room with four incredible, good people: people concerned with poverty, social welfare, war…
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Overall
- Richard D. Shewman
- 04-28-06
well worth the price and time
This book/audio follows the lives and thought of four Catholic literary figures from the 20th century: Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. The perspective is clearly on the literary aspect of the lives of these well known Catholics. This is its strength and its weakness.
I found the work to be insightful and informative regarding the life stories of its protagonists, giving a helpful understanding of the contexts in which these persons lived and wrote. I was particularly taken by the portarits offered of O'Connor and Percy. Of course, these were to two persons of whom I had the least detailed knowledge.
The author's handling of Day and Merton left me somewhat frustrated. Perhaps this is because I have a better working knowledge of these two authors. The scheme of a life story with a literary focus worked well with the protagonists whose focus was literary. It didn't prove satisfying with those protagonists whose literary output was not the primary focus of their life's work.
These frustrations duly noted, my over all impression was that the tale told by the author was well worth the time spent listening. The audio quality of the spoken version is excellent and the narrator is quite good.
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41 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Joey A.
- 05-31-09
Great detail of information
Writer gives great insight into the lives and writings of these four Catholic writers. I liked the insight into their lives set in the context of historical events as well as the reference to their writings and their interaction with each other.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- no name
- 10-11-19
Great book!
I totally enjoyed listening to this book and it inspires me to seek out books written by the authors mentioned in it.
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- Albert C Reichelt
- 02-28-17
4 life long pilgrimages worthy to walk along with
When you walk along with them, you begin to reflect upon what your own pilgrimage is.
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- Adam Shields
- 12-19-24
A joint biography
I have been wanting to get around to The Life You Save May Be Your Own since it came out in the early 2000s. After having read a brief biography of Dorothy Day and a book of essays about Thomas Merton earlier this summer, I decided it was time. I have also read three books about O’Connor, a more academic look at her work, a short biography, and a collection of her early journals I felt like I had a pretty good handle on O’Connor. But I knew nothing about Walker Percy outside of his novels.
Elie mostly tells the story chronologically. Dorothy Day is almost 20 years older than Merton and Percy and nearly 30 years older than O’Connor. But she also lived longer than both Merton and O’Connor. And while Percy lived until 1990, and Day passed away in 1980, Day was 83 when she passed away, and Percy was only 73.
All four are well-known Catholic writers who were consciously Catholic in different ways. O’Connor was the only cradle Catholic, the other three were all adult converts to Catholicism. O’Connor and Percy were both also very much Southern Writers while Day was most identified with NYC and her non-fiction writing. Merton was the most clearly a “spiritual” writer and the only clergy member of the group.
As a biography or a group of biographies, this was well written and included good detail on their lives as well as context on their writing. But as a stand-alone, I think it was too long. It was too long to feel like a brief biography and it was too short to be a definitive biography of any of them. It was interesting to see how much the four of them interacted and wrote one another, although there were very few personal interactions. Merton considered joining the Catholic Worker movement but decided instead to become a monk. They all had mutual friends, and drafts of different books were passed around.
The value of the book was in the exploration of the different ways to think of themselves as writers and “Catholic” writers and how they related to the church more broadly. I don’t regret reading The Life You Save May Be Your Own, but I did pick it up over the summer when I tend to hit a reading slump. And the length of the book did not help the reading slump.
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