Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

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Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

by Marilynne Robinson

3.55 · rating details · 173 ratings · 52 reviews

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robins...more

Hardcover, 176 pages

Published May 25th 2010 by Yale University Press (first published 2010)

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Sep 14, 2011

Tyler Grant rated it

Shelves: reviewed

The author was featured on The Daily Show and is from Iowa. The book sounded interesting so I picked it up. It is a short book, but don't let that fool you. The author writes in difficult prose more suited for a book on philosophy.

The main premise is very interesting and relevant as a balance to the scientific discoveries of the past few centuries. The premise is that evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis have taken away from our inward self. They do this by claiming to be able...more

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Feb 28, 2011

Justin Evans rated it

Shelves: essays

Eh. A rambling, less coherent extension of the essay 'Darwinism' in her "Death of Adam," this one deals with what Robinson calls 'parascience,' essentially, the kind of populist journalism written by Dennet, Dawkins, Pinker and their ilk, with the 'problem' of altruism for their dogma, and with Freud. The argument here is weaker than in 'Darwinism,' and simultaneously more polemical, which means people are going to give this one star on the basis that Robinson is a crazy religious nut-...moreEh. A rambling, less coherent extension of the essay 'Darwinism' in her "Death of Adam," this one deals with what Robinson calls 'parascience,' essentially, the kind of populist journalism written by Dennet, Dawkins, Pinker and their ilk, with the 'problem' of altruism for their dogma, and with Freud. The argument here is weaker than in 'Darwinism,' and simultaneously more polemical, which means people are going to give this one star on the basis that Robinson is a crazy religious nut-bag who doesn't understand science, or five stars on the basis that she is a crazy religious nut-bag who rejects science. That she isn't, and doesn't, won't deter those reviewers.

The basic approach here is: many modern theories use supposedly scientific claims to make social-scientific claims; the scientific claims are often mistaken and the social-scientific claims are almost always ludicrously reductionist (people are not, in fact, ants). Instead, we need a model of intellectual inquiry which grants to human beings a special kind of rich experience that we can call, say, 'mind' or 'culture' or 'art' or any of those big words. Parascientific attempts to 'explain' this experience are very bad, which should be obvious to anyone who has a facebook account and has friends who constantly link those 'scientific' experiments proving, for instance, that men in relationships lie to themselves about how attractive they find women, based on the assumption that all men find all women who are at a certain stage of their menstrual cycle attractive (and ignoring, for instance, the possibility that *not* all men find all women at that stage attractive). Maybe being in a relationship is something valuable that men want to hold onto more than they want to bang hot chix?

But nobody needs a hundred and fifty pages to make that argument, and the great one liners and beautiful sentences that you'll find in "Death of Adam" are sorely missing here, and her inability to understand German philosophy from Fichte through Nietzsche to Freud is on greater display. Too bad. (less)

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Jan 23, 2011

Drew rated it

Disclaimer up front: I did not finish this book. I know many folks in the 'true believer' camp presume to review scientific-based books or those critical of woo without having bothered to read them.

We on the skeptical side have truth on our side and with truth comes the integrity to be open and honest. I didn't read the whole book because it presents a pattern started with the dust jacket and carries on through as far as I could stomach.

That pattern is this- Robinson seems to...more

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Aug 16, 2010

Georgiana rated it

Shelves: non-fiction, philosophy, religion

p.xviii Is the self no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly?

p.72 Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism over shot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehen...morep.xviii Is the self no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly?

p.72 Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism over shot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension.

p.36 [Title sentence:] Indeed, there is now a suggestion of the pervasive importance to the deep structures of reality of something of a kind with consciousness. The elusiveness of the mind is a consequence of its centrality, which is both its potency and its limitation. The difficulty with which objectivity can be achieved, to the extent that it ever is achieved, only demonstrates the pervasive importance of subjectivity. I would argue that the absence of mind and subjectivity from parascientific literature is in some part a consequence of the fact that the literature arose and took its form in part as a polemic against religion. And it has persisted, consciously or not, in a strategy for excluding thought of the kind hospitable to religion from the possibility of speaking in its own terms, making its own case. Metaphysics in general has been excluded at the same time, even from philosophy, which since Comte has been associated with this same project of exclusion.

p.130 Why this ancient instinct for the greatest questions? It is striking that Freud identifies religion with the meaning of life, and Pinker identifies it with the high-order questions humankind has posed to itself from antiquity. Then both writers for all purposes dismiss these things as insoluble, as if that were a legitimate reason to dismiss any question We may never know why gravity is so much weaker than, in theory, it should be, or know if we are the only one among any number of actual and potential universes. But every real question is fruitful, as the history of human thought so clearly demonstrates.

p.131 So long as the human mind exists to impose itself on reality, as it has already done so profoundly, what it is and what we are must remain an open question.

p.132 Who is that other self needing to be persuaded that there are more than genetic reasons for rescuing a son or daughter from drowning?

p.132 William James says data should be thought of not as givens but as gifts, this by way of maintaining an appropriate humility in the face of what we think we know.

p.133 A bird is not a latter-day dinosaur. (We can assume the ancestor ate and slept and mated, carrying on the universal business of animal life. Still, whatever the shared genetic history of beast and bird, a transformative change occurred over the millennia, and to find the modern sparrow implicit in the thunder lizard is quite certainly an error, if one wishes to make an ornithological study of sparrow behavior. (less)

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Jun 23, 2010

Jon rated it

I have a hard time with Marilynne Robinson's non-fiction--I find her essays to be a little too allusive, too oblique, too given to assuming I know things that I don't know. I just have a hard time following her. I'm often unsure whether she's being ironic. Other readers seem not to have these problems. Nevertheless, from the 66% of this that I think I understood, I certainly was convinced. She comes down very hard on the "parascience" of our time--the Steven Pinkers, E.O. Wilsons, Dani...more

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Mar 04, 2010

Steve rated it

Shelves: christianity

Awesome. Totally refreshing. Robinson argued intelligently for some things I'd been thinking for some time now. It's good to know I have such an ally.

Robinson takes aim at greedy reductionism, particularly the denigration of the human being, which many scientists and popularizers of science have giddily endeavored to do for the past century, especially EO Wilson, Steven Pinker, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett, Sigmund Freud, and August Comte.. As noted above, these are not my favor...moreAwesome. Totally refreshing. Robinson argued intelligently for some things I'd been thinking for some time now. It's good to know I have such an ally.

Robinson takes aim at greedy reductionism, particularly the denigration of the human being, which many scientists and popularizers of science have giddily endeavored to do for the past century, especially EO Wilson, Steven Pinker, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett, Sigmund Freud, and August Comte.. As noted above, these are not my favorite people, and I have criticized them and their flock many times.

Robinson starts with what we all have in common: mind. This, one would think, would be the one thing which cannot be denied. However, she laments, the one thing all forms of modern thought have in common is that mind is written off as an illusion or something not to be trusted, even though all of this modern thought is, in fact, thought, and therefore mediated through subjective consciousness.

She criticizes Freud as being simply wrong, but stands up for him by doing the one thing no one does with him: contextualizing him (in her words, Freud is a thinker of such power that he seems "like a meteor," that is, beyond culture, beyond history. However, he is not.). She retells Freud's story against the backdrop of pan-German and especially Austrian anti-Semitism at the time of Freud's philosophical work (Hitler was living just a few blocks away at this point, trying to hack it as an art student). Imagine being a young Freud, living in a city whose mayor vocally favored the extermination of all Jews. This, she says, best explains why Freud took upon himself the project of creating a universal story of origin to counteract the philological and racial theories of the time. It was, in other words, a protection against anti-Semitism and simultaneously an attempt to save what Freud loved about European culture and ditch what he didn't like.

With this sympathetic picture, Robinson then tells stories Jung remembered about his time as a student of Freud, where Freud said that art was either "repressed sexuality" or REALLY repressed sexuality. This, of course, is not science, but Freud's eloquence enabled him to dress it up as such, even at a time when the greatest post-Bacon philosopher of science Karl Popper was revolutionizing our understanding of scientific statements.

Robinson has some very funny critiques of some very stupid things said by some very brilliant people: for example, Pinker's snobbish statement that the wrong people are breeding (not the geniuses but the high school dropouts--true, but snobbish no less for its truth), Pinker's pointless comparison of the United States to a small band of African hunters (comparing the death of one hunter to the death of 5 million Americans--both a 2% death rate) to which Robinson--in her characteristic ability with understatement, humorously asks, "is this a meaningful statement?" She goes on to critique EO Wilson's triumphalist yet incoherent claim that there is no location in the nervous system left where one might find an immaterial soul (uhh if it's immaterial, obviously you can't LOCATE it...). Robinson spares no one and I enjoyed every page of it.

She concludes with some hope that science can concede that it doesn't yet know everything and that reality is harder to explain than we, in our weakness, wish it were. Science, she says, is the search for truth not a mission to convert the masses to mind-body monism or to explain international relations using entomology data (which, I suppose, is what EO Wilson does, though put crudely). It is no more scientific to try to explain Everything using natural selection than to use gravity, another law of the universe. It is not scientific to judge people based on their "loyalty" to a given prevailing theory.

We could use Popper about now, though Robinson says that his definitions are too restrictive. I disagree on this point. We need Popper to correct the excesses of the irrationally exuberant evolutionary psychologists like EO Wilson, DS Wilson, Pinker, and others. As Chomsky put it, "if you fight, they say it's because of evolution. If you don't fight, they say it's because of evolution." Chomsky is illustrating the untestability of the increasingly bold claims of this generation of scientists. I find it especially humorous that these people who so detest dogma, and so eschew anything which is not questioned, give in to outrage at the slightest measure of skepticism towards their certitude. As Allan Bloom pointed out, a good way to get to know about a group of people is to know what makes them angry. The skeptics get angry when you question them. Something is wrong here.

To give some perspective on the density of this book, I should tell you that I took 10 pages of notes. That's a lot for me and it's not a long book. I read it all in one day but had a major headache at the end and had to lie down afterward, just like after taking a test. It's hard, but worth it. I recommend it wholeheartedly. (less)

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Jan 11, 2012

Corinne E. Blackmer rated it

Robinson was invited by Yale to give the Terry lectures on the relationship between science and religion. These essays are the result of that invitation. It is quite easy to see why Yale wanted Robinson to give these lectures (in 2009). She had produced a first novel that was luminescent in its implied spirituality and, after that, Gilead, which explicitly deals with two Christian ministers and their theological beliefs--in an extraordinarily moving fashion. She had also published her fine e...more

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Dec 28, 2011

Mike rated it

Equal parts un-engaging and disengaged, Absence of Mind teems with unprecedented insularity. Robinson invests her full intellectual capacity towards analyzing antiquated primary texts, commandeering the marginalized voices of evolutionary thought and planting them center-stage as a surrogate for the movement of modern thought as a whole.

One of the glaring fallacies I believe Robinson's book is almost completely predicated upon is the fallacy of composition. What happens more often th...moreEqual parts un-engaging and disengaged, Absence of Mind teems with unprecedented insularity. Robinson invests her full intellectual capacity towards analyzing antiquated primary texts, commandeering the marginalized voices of evolutionary thought and planting them center-stage as a surrogate for the movement of modern thought as a whole.

One of the glaring fallacies I believe Robinson's book is almost completely predicated upon is the fallacy of composition. What happens more often that not is an overtly polemical assault on a mode of thought based on one person's attitude, assessment, or even de-contextualized quote. That any one voice, philosopher, or quote from one individual could be used as a mouthpiece for the current trajectory (weird, granted the lack of current references) is hypocritical given the utter complexity championed by Robinson's point. Placing the blame for Freud's ideas on the zeitgeist by simply drawing thematic parallels between Freud's analyses and the sociological anxieties of the time period is poetic, metaphorical thinking. It reads as if a writer is trying to make a Leverkuhn out of a living individual; it is unconvincing precisely because it is not scientific. Simply because analogies can be drawn - grand, symbolic analogies - between one entity and another does not immediately entail a concrete, detailed relationship. I found this assessment of Freud peculiarly reductive, given how vehemently anti-reductionist Robinson's stance intends to be. If a polemical collection of essays cannot avoid the pratfalls of reason that its own foes traditionally espouse, perhaps we should look for a greater, broader problem regarding the "absence of mind," or perhaps, our incompetence to reason.

Through the course of this frustratingly erudite read, I found Absence of Mind to be more or less an opportunity to instigate the contrarian impulse within the reader. But, further than that, the hugest omission here is the complete and utter lack of mention of current neuroscience. For a book so invested in the capacities and mysteries of the human brain, little to no mention is made to the crisis of free will that current neuroscience lends us. Why is this not dealt with? Why did Robinson - instead of addressing the concepts of 'self' with our most up-to-date assessments on the brain - opt to berate old-hat scientists? Darwin is most assuredly respected, but it seems ignorant to assume that current advocates of Darwin still take his ideas wholesale; they have undoubtedly been expanded upon, appended, and some replaced and modified. This is not my point: my point is that not a single neurotransmitter is mentioned in a polemical assault regarding modern thought's portrayal of the brain. This ought to be disconcerting, and only lends more credence to the reputation Robinson possesses of being shackled to the past. I myself am ignorant of the offers neuroscience brings to the table regarding senses of self, morality, even subjectivity. But intuitively I find it the field through which Robinson can make her point within a contemporary framework. It is not terribly pressing to dissect the modernists when the post-modernists are currently making the decisions.

However, I ultimately find these to be minor concerns despite the length granted them earlier. Absence of Mind is as enjoyable as it is rigorous, namely the brilliant essay regarding the problem of altruism in Darwinist and neo-Darwinist thought. There is a quote here that will always resonate: "To say there is no metaphysics is in and of itself a metaphysical statement." Woah. Robinson is indisputably a genius. The book serves as startling evidence of this. But Robinson is being critical instead of revolutionary. Perhaps Darwin receives the reverence he gets because he pioneered an entirely new and provocative - and ultimately viable - means of interpreting the data in the natural world. This gets people more places than dissecting and re-visiting discarded philosophical text. The spirit of invention trumps the spirit of negation. This clearly goes for both science and religion.

At heart, Absence of Mind instigates degrees of provocation I would not have thought possible. Robinson's still beyond superb.
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Sep 29, 2010

Steven rated it

Robinson dazzles me again with her non-fiction, this a somewhat continuation of what she explored in "The Death of Adam," that is the lack of intellectualism in today's religions. The difference is here she explores the proliferation of what she calls "parascience" - those thinkers from Bertrand Russell to today's Hitchens and Hawkins, who believe that since science has explained much of what the brain does, religion is no longer necessary. She refutes this claim and instea...more

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Nov 12, 2010

Andrew rated it

Aside from the nonsensical subtitle and a weird, kind of misplaced chapter on Freud, this was a good book. It's actually more of a long essay, in which the author addresses some of what she sees to be the shortcomings of the more arrogant atheists and writers on the mind, such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, who she refers to as 'parascientists'. This is not a scientific, logical refutation of the parascientists or their approach, and it's a better book for not being that. Robinson is an...more

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Feb 03, 2012

Gretchen rated it

I read three of the essays in this lecture series before running out of time. This is not easy reading--every pregnant sentence offers a tight, urgent argument--and it doesn't provide easy answers, but I like where Robinson is headed. Her beef is with largely those social sciences/social scientists who propose to reduce human experience to a single quantifiable factor (or two) that supposedly explain everything. She finds this radical reduction bad science, in that it ignores human consciousness...more

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Jan 07, 2011

Caroline Rothnie rated it

Shelves: nonfiction-criticism

I heart MR, a lot. Her non-fiction is tougher than her fiction, both more difficult and less gentle. A bit polemical, and I don't think she'd disagree with me. But it's also incredibly eye-opening. In this book, she takes on the "scientific" models of modern life and finds them wanting. As someone raised unquestioning on these modern doctrines, this book made a chink, or added to a chink, and shifted and opened my perspectives. Whether or not you agree with her, I think it's wort...more

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Sep 14, 2010

Kimi rated it

i read 'gilead', one of her fiction works, and was blown away (so one can grow up in a religious family with intelligent theological discussions?) so when i saw this book come out this summer, i told my sister to read it. i wonder if some of her comments are directed at the recent deluge of atheists' arguments (dawkins, etc.). anyway, i found it a challenging read, and encountered many interesting arguments from the 'other side', (eg. in the debate between science and religion, 'religion' is nev...more

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Apr 20, 2010

Robbie rated it

In quintessential Robinsonian non-fiction style (intelligent, well-read, affirmative, sarcastic), Marilynne Robinson refutes an atheism which posits itself as scientific. The book is not a vindication of religion or of theology, per se, but rather a rejection of what Robinson calls the "parascientific" nature of writings which seek to deny much of human experience. It is an affirmation of the complexity of the mind and of existence. My least favorite chapter was "The Freudian Self...more

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Jun 28, 2011

Teresa marked it as to-read

Haven't started yet, but as it was recommended to me by Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute, I think it will be a revealing read. He said it is an expose on how some of the influential thinkers of our day are trying to effect a post-humanistic movement to change our image of who we are as persons based on the responsiblity we have for thinking and doing things for the good of the masses instead of being individualistic. Sounds to me like George Orwell's 1984 'mind-thought' type of nightmare! I...more

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Oct 23, 2011

Stephen rated it

I have to admit that, as a fan of some of Robinson's other work (Gilead, The Death of Adam, a few essays and reviews), I was disappointed with Absence of Mind. As a religious person who agrees with her thesis--that atheists like Dennett and Harris have missed something crucial about human consciousness--I didn't find the kind of rigorous argument for which I had hoped. Like the New England Transcendentalists, on whom she draws, Robinson is coyly vague about just how specific religious beliefs re...moreI have to admit that, as a fan of some of Robinson's other work (Gilead, The Death of Adam, a few essays and reviews), I was disappointed with Absence of Mind. As a religious person who agrees with her thesis--that atheists like Dennett and Harris have missed something crucial about human consciousness--I didn't find the kind of rigorous argument for which I had hoped. Like the New England Transcendentalists, on whom she draws, Robinson is coyly vague about just how specific religious beliefs relate to specific, theoretically understood aspects of human existence. While she gets in some good jabs and some gotcha-style criticism, as Sarah Palin might put it, she ends up coming across as a bit of a know-it-all and less of a careful thinker here.

Some sections (such as the extensive historical background on Freud) seem oriented more toward showing off her (relatively) original research rather than toward building a coherent case for why her opponents are wrong. In the end, her case seems to amount to the worst kind of "God of the gaps"-type argument. Like intelligent design theorists do with biology, Robinson seems to use human cognition as a means of saying "It's really complicated, too complicated for us to understand, therefore something beyond the physical world likely exists, QED."

Unfortunately, this is neither philosophically nor theologically satisfying. Theologically, it claims very little beyond that human beings are searching for something spiritual (which is true, but gives us little that someone like Sam Harris wouldn't affirm). Philosophically, it meanders through a ton of issues that are hotly debated by specialists without the kind of rigor that would convince a non-specialist like myself that Robinson has done more work in those fields than various specialists (philosophers of mind, metaphysicians, philosophers of religion, etc.) already have. Still, I gave this three stars because it is characteristically well-written, even if not perfectly argued or conceived.(less)

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Jul 26, 2011

Daniel Adsett rated it

In Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson criticizes what she calls 'parascience' along with its attempts to submit all mysteries - the mind, religious phenomena - to materialist explanations. While Robinson never gives a complete definition of 'parascience', throughout her short book she points to several of its defining features: it is confident (33), allegedly anti-metaphysical, and opposed to diversity (38). While these attributes are not necessarily bad, Robinson contends that they are unwarra...more

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Aug 17, 2010

Doug Shera rated it

Challenges contemorary definitions of what it means to be human expounded by psychologists, sociologists based on para-science. A definition of self is more than simply one's genes battling to survive. The author explores the problem that altruism presents for neo-Darwinists. If human behavior is simply genes acting in their own self-interest to survive, how is a kind act towards a stranger (non-kin) without the chance of a future reward or payback possible?

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Jul 11, 2010

Roger Burk rated it

Robinson took up her pen to write about the mind-body problem. She is a fiction writer, of all things--the author of the delightful and prize-winning Gilead among other works. She argues that the popular semiscientific materialism and Darwinism is wholely inadequate to explain the explosion of human culture, not to mention the vivid play of experiences going on inside our heads. I am not sure she totally nails the argument, though I am very sympathetic to the project. It's just delightful to...more

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Jul 20, 2011

Tara rated it

I liked this. She has some real points, yet whenever she gets towards the thick of an argument she suddenly becomes dreamy. If she was willing to take the gloves off and write hard-thought philosophy, she'd be unstoppable. I'm unclear as to why she disagrees so vehemently with our current scientific/political/cultural consensus, but won't flesh out the needed rebuttal. It's in here, but she's just so polite and wise. Regardless, she's a gem.

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Apr 14, 2011

Jane rated it

Robinson challenges us to think of a place between scientific inquiry and religious beliefs that values the still unknowable "mind." She has posited a polemic that challenges our age's parascience with the continual unfolding of culture, arts, and civilization. She makes no bones about falling on the side of culture by reminding us to place some theories and assertions in their historical context, particularly Freud.
This was a dense read and I had to warm up my academic readi...more

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Dec 01, 2011

Andrew Bertaina rated it

Marilynne Robinson is intelligent. I enjoy this about her. At times it makes her essays harder to access. In short, I wish Marilynne would dumb it down every once in a while. Interestingly, when I've heard her speak she's mentioned that she believes her readers, and people in general, are way more intelligent than most people give them credit for. Anyhow, she's giving us too much credit.

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Oct 22, 2010

Phil Mullen rated it

Stylistically, I think she's done a suberb job; the sentences were crafted & balanced into real euphony.

Philosophically, her arguments are less lucid than she hoped; one finds better-crafted ones in real philosophers' papers.

But as a solid witness to a layperson's concerns about the down-emphasis on felt consciousness, -- this is a fine little introduction.

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Dec 18, 2010

James rated it

Breathtakingly elegant, as always. It chastens my liberal pieties that the most magisterial voice in contemporary English prose and, so far as I'm concerned, the most erudite person in America, is a Congregationalist Christian. Marilynne Robinson has read the entire Western canon. Here, she takes on the pseudo-intellectual hortatory genre she dubs "parascience," i.e. shrill down-on-God bad boys like Richard Dawkins. Her specific subject is the willful elimination of a subjective, felt ...more

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Jul 21, 2011

Ruthette rated it

Fans of Marilynne Robinson's luminous works of fiction will find little here which they recognize: instead, they will be treated to a short but dense work of philosophy. Unless you have at least a moderate grasp of science, religion, philosophy, and the names and works of leaders in those fields, I would not recommend that you pick this one up.

Note: Three stars is too low a rating for this book, I know, but I rate solely on the enjoyment factor. If I were judging on quality, this would...more

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May 02, 2011

Sydney Lea rated it

My son went to the famous Iowa Writers' workshop and took a class with M. Robinson. To read this bok- I've read every one of her books -- is to confirm his report that 'she must be one of the three or four smartest people in America.' The grace and lucidity with which she negotiates enormous ideas is nonpareil.

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Jun 26, 2010

Lyndon rated it

Shelves: cultural-criticism, theology

What is lacking from accounts of the human that reduce us to mere accidents of biology or mechanisms of unconscious motives, is, Robinson maintains, "an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are" (p. 135). Adapted from her Terry Lectures at Yale, Absence of Mind is Robinson's exploration of the discourse on 'mind' that has shaped the modern imaginary.

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Jun 12, 2011

Kristin Boldon rated it

Shelves: 2011, borrowed

I liked the things she was writing about, such as the lazy science deployed by those who seek to "disprove" religion and altruism. But the essays, though brief, were a slog for me. I like and admire her other works, but this one didn't work for me.

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Nov 23, 2010

Matty rated it

In reading this, I set out to challenge some of my views, and I was looking forward to wrestling with some troubling arguments. It didn't really happen. In a lot of ways, I just don't think she gets what she's arguing against.

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Oct 11, 2010

Toni Pereira rated it

Finaly, someone states the obvious: Our experiences are relevant!! Marilynne Robinson holds no science degree, but puts idiots like wilson and pinker in their proper place. Thank you!!!

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About Marilynne Robinson

Her 1980 novel, Housekeeping, won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Her second novel, Gilead, was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005 Ambassador Book Award.

Her third novel, Home, was published in ...more

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Books by Marilynne Robinson

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

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