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by: Annie Dillard
List Price: $13.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.40 You Save: $2.60 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 242
EAN: 9780060915438
ISBN: 0060915439
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: September 01, 1988
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: July 20, 1988
Sales Rank: 5912
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with 'one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person.' For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls 'the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea,' she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.
This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - My favorite book of all time
This has been my favorite book ever since I read it in 1994. Its perfection is other-worldly. If you are a Dillard novice, better to start with "An American Childhood," to get a sense of the author and her style. It is about growing up, experiencing wonder, becoming fully alive. "Holy the Firm" borders on a spiritual meditation; some of my friends have found it too abstract. Whatever you do, steer clear of "The Maytrees," Dillard's most recent book--it doesn't measure up.
Rating:  - A small, rather opaque work of beauty.
Annie Dillard is a creator of writing that frequently works like poetry trapped in prose's body. This little offering, in three jewel-like parts, is rather like her more extended "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek": a gorgeous and unflinching experience of the natural world, an angry wrestling with the problem of suffering and a theological discussion in light of these two other preoccupations. The theology in "Holy the Firm" is thus grounded in trauma and reality but expressed in heady, spinning, sometimes ... Read More
Rating: - Spiritually terse observations that can fling away logical and humanistic dribble.
In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard certainly can not be accused for excess verbiage. Her little book, consisting of less than eighty pages, is a thoughtful and sometimes intense investigation into the soul. One can almost imagine her staring deeply at a flowing river or a particular kind of tree and genuinely seeing Divinity in and around it, authentically feeling it and being transportated to the nether reaches of the unexplained. Yet, it is a good place or moment where nothing can touch you or hurt you. ... Read More
Rating: - Awe, sarcasm, hope and despair
This is a gift from Annie Dillard. She share her struggle with the question of "What kind of God would let --- happen?" Whose responsibility is it? Do we matter one whit to God? Dillard shares her pain, her longing for truth, her disappointment, her faith with grace and soaring language. It is a short book but is definitely not an easy read.
Ponder the definition of Holy the Firm, as believed by esoteric Christianity. "It is a created substance, lower than metals and minerals on a 'spiritual ... Read More
Rating: - Spilling the Beans
While attending Western Washington University I had the great good fortune to take a poetry class from Annie Dillard. My own poetry was abysmal and she gave me this advice, "writing is like prayer; you sit and listen for the still small voice." She had won the Pulitzer prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and was in the process of writing Holy the Firm while at Fairhaven College at Western. She read us the bits about the moth and the flame. This is her slenderest book, but the one in which she most takes her own ... Read More
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