In his “best achievement to date” (Harold Bloom), National Book Award- winner Roger Shattuck gives us a “deeply learned, highly intelligent, and beautifully written” (New York Times) study of human curiosity versus the taboo, from Adam and Eve to
Just before dawn on January 9, 1800, a mysterious creature emerged from a forest in southern France. Although he was human in form and walked upright, his habits were those of a young male animal. He was wearing only a tattered shirt, but did not seem tro
For any reader who has been humbled by the language, the density, or the sheer weight of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and
Who better than Helen Keller to write about optimism? Helen Keller became blind when she was nineteen months old. At the time children who were deaf and blind were simply given up on. But Helen's mother read that a deaf blind person had been educated and
When Guillaume Apollinaire died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight, as the result of a war wound, he was already known as one of the most original and important poets of his time. He had led migration of Bohemian Paris across the city from Montmartre to M
I believe, Andre Breton said, in the future resolution of the states of dream and reality--in appearance so contradictory--in a sort of absolute reality, or "
One of Time's women of the century, Helen Keller, reveals her mystical side in this best-selling spiritual autobiography. Writing that her first reading of Emanuel Swedenborg at age fourteen gave her truths that were "to my faculties what light, color and
Helen Keller had absolutely no hearing or eyesight from the age of two, but became one of the most inspiring and well known people to have ever lived. For a number of years she functioned, in her words, simply as "an unconscious clod of earth." Then quite
