enotalone Home  |  Forum  |  Search    
Simone Weil
by Francine Du Plessix Gray
List Price: 19.95
Price: 15.96

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Hardcover: 246 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult (June 25 2001)
Costumer Rating: Costumer rating

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: The Factory of Genius
Growing up in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century were two contented children from whose household all toys and dolls had been categorically banned. It had been their mother's intent to nurture their intellectual skills.

Chapter 1: Part 2
A few months after the war's end, as her family was settling back into their apartment on Boulevard Saint-Michel, Mme Weil noticed that Simone was nowhere to be seen.



Book Description

Francine du Plessix Gray's biography of the Marquis de Sade, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a "boldly imaginative retelling" of his life and garnered the critically acclaimed author a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self-doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty-four prematurely after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foresaw many of the twentieth century's great changes and continues to influence philosophy today. 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 readers.

About the Author

Francine du Plessix GrayFrancine du Plessix Gray

Francine du Plessix Gray is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of numerous essays and books, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She lives with her husband, the painter Cleve Gray..

  » More by Francine du Plessix Gray