Books : Saint Augustine's Childhood: CONFESSIONES BOOK ONE (Testimony, Bk 1)
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by: Augustine of Hippo
List Price: $23.95Amazon.com's Price: $17.96 You Save: $5.99 (25%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 9 to 14 days
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 270.2092
EAN: 9780670030019
ISBN: 0670030015
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: October 01, 2001
Publisher: Viking Adult
Release Date: October 11, 2001
Sales Rank: 614773
Studio: Viking Adult
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Editorial Review:
Book Description:
In Garry Wills's biography of Saint Augustine for the Penguin Lives series, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author brilliantly documented the life of the great Christian thinker. His translations of passages of Saint Augustine's influential Confessiones were hailed as 'sizzling' (Peter Brown, New York Review of Books). James Wood, writing for the London Review of Books declared, 'Augustine flourishes in Wills's hand.' Now, Wills has taken on a translation of the first of four books of the Confessiones, 'Childhood.'
Wills's broad-ranging and incisive discussion of the style, structure, and themes of 'Childhood' brings a fresh perspective to this classic work, including the juxtaposition of Augustine's concept of childhood and the learning of language with the ideas of Noam Chomsky and current research. Beautifully designed and translated by 'America's greatest living intellectual' (The American Prospect), 'Childhood' will be sought after by academics, Christians, and the general reader.
Translated by Garry Wills, author of the bestselling Penguin Lives biography of Saint Augustine.
Amazon.com's Best of 2001:
The traditional title for St. Augustine's classic devotional work The Confessions can be misleading. Because it is a transliteration, not a translation, of the Latin title, it encourages readers to think of the work as an autobiography, when in fact it is a prayer. Saint Augustine's Childhood, Garry Wills's translation of the first book of the Confessiones renders the work in fresh language, corrects scores of misinterpretations, and explains the prayerful nature of the book's structure, style, imagery, and rhetoric. The text describes infancy and the period during which children learn to talk, seamlessly incorporating scriptural allusions that have pockmarked previous translations. The concise notes and commentary, and a crucial appendix, bring Augustine's ideas about language acquisition into dialogue with more contemporary theories, such as Noam Chomsky's. Like Wills's short biography of Augustine for the Penguin Lives series, this project is masterfully rendered, and will be appreciated equally by scholars, students, and the general reader. Wills's sophistication is leavened by an appealing lightness. He describes one Latin term as 'a nice frog-croak of a word'; a period of Augustine's adolescence is 'a year of mild hell-raising'; and, paraphrasing Chesterton, Wills memorably suggests that 'original sin becomes easier to understand at the moment when, on a long summer's afternoon, bored children begin to torture the cat.' --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Riding the Augustine Channel
Nobody has tackled the Augustine works like Mr. Wills. He has painstakingly translated from the Original idiomatticaly complex Latin, and wrung the nuance right out of it, making it transparent and pliable to even the average Intellect, while not pandering to the pretentious rabbleness normally exhibited by their ilk. It's like Shakespeare with the grammar fixed.
I look forward to his treatment of St. Thomas Aquinas!
(Disclaimer: Please insert humourous intent ... wherever; ... Read More
Rating:  - A travesty of Augustine's work
The absurdities produced by Wills' eccentric treatment of Augustine multiply like rabbits. One example: Wills insists on calling Augustine's son Adeodatus "Godsend" rather than Adeodatus. It is true that the etymology of the name roughly corresponds to "Godsend," but given the fact that almost every name in antiquity "meant something," this tick is supremely annoying. His translations are clunky to the extreme. He translates the classic line, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you" (inquietum ... Read More
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