The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
Stephen Greenblatt
Religion, art, philosophy
This is a pretty good, readable account of the purposes to which people have put the Adam and Eve story. (As a person with no religious background whatsoever, I found some of it decidedly odd.) Greenblatt is at his best when he resists the temptation to theorize; happily, the bulk of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve takes the form of good, clear, interesting accounts of what other people have thought.
The account is perhaps a little uneven. There are big chunks devoted to St. Augustine and to John Milton, for example, but there's not much in between them. I didn't mind, particularly--a comprehensive survey would surely have been unreadable--but it's of a piece with Greenblatt's other books, which make it clear that in his mind everything between Rome and the Renaissance was a mistake. The book also digresses from Adam and Eve in spots, but the digressions are interesting, so I didn't mind that either. Pay attention and you may learn a little bit about paleoanthropology, a certain amount about art, a few snippets of poetry, and (in a surprisingly moving closing essay) something significant on chimpanzees.
This is, then, the kind of book that's ideally suited to the pondering classes. It's not a deep philosophical-theological dive. It's not an exhaustive history. You could call it a highlights reel, picking out some key ideas and interpretations of the Adam and Eve fable. No doubt readers who are more theologically sophisticated than I will find little new here, but I quite liked it.
There's a strong connection between The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve and Born Bad, which I read in 2015. Greenblatt's book is better, though.
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