Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Kathleen Norris
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 1883
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1594489963
Dewey Decimal Number: 248.862
EAN: 9781594489969
ASIN: 1594489963
Publication Date: September 16, 2008 (In 8 Days)
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Product Description
Kathleen Norriss masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.
Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldnt drag herself out of bed in the morning, couldnt summon the energy for daily tasks. Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia. She had discovered the word in an early Church text when she was in her thirties. Having endured times of deep soul-weariness since she was a teenager, she immediately recognized that this passage described her affliction: sinking into a state of being unable to care. Fascinated by this noonday demon, so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris read intensively and knew she must restore this forgotten but utterly relevant and important concept to the modern worlds vernacular.
Like Norriss bestselling The Cloister Walk, Acedia & me is part memoir and part meditation. As in her bestselling Amazing Grace, here Norris explicates and demystifies a spiritual concept, exploring acedia through the geography of her life as a writer; her marriage and the challenges of commitment in the midst of grave illness; and her keen interest in the monastic tradition. Unlike her earlier books, this one features a poignant narrative throughout of Norriss and her husbands bouts with acedia and its clinical cousin, depression. Moreover, her analysis of acedia reveals its burden not just on individuals but on whole societies and that the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that we struggle with today are the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress.
An examination of acedia in the light of theology, psychology, monastic spirituality, the healing powers of religious practice, and Norriss own experience, Acedia & me is both intimate and historically sweeping, brimming with exasperation and reverence, sometimes funny, often provocative, and always important.
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| Customer Reviews:
Well written but unfocused memoir September 4, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Kathleen Norris is obviously a talented writer. ACEDIA AND ME certainly has some interesting and inspirational stories woven throughout. But overall, Norris uses her search for the meaning of the concept of acedia as a vehicle for relating her memoir. I found this to be a bit misleading. I had thought the issue of acedia, not Norris' memoir, would be the focus of this book. I suppose I had expected a more scholarly approach. I agree with the other reviewer who says that ACEDIA AND ME will appeal to fans of Kathleen Norris, but perhaps not the general reader.
For fans of Kathleen Norris August 31, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book was not what I expected. I anticipated a memoir, one of my favorite genres. Instead the book was an unstructured mixture of sermonlike discourses and epsidodic memories.
Fans of Kathleen Norris may welcome the book. But as someone who wanted to get to know the person behind the name, I would have preferred more concrete pictures - a sense of what her life was really like, growing up as a Navy brat, marrying a poet and creating a writing career.
Norris's themes were not novel. The theme of a wife caring for a troubled husband inevitably echoes more worldly memoirs, such as those of Jill Ker Conway and Katherine Graham. Psychiatry and religion have co-existed for years. At one point Norris's internist offers her samples of an anti-depressant without a psychiatric consultation. She accepts. That small interaction says more than the many pages comparing depression and acedia.
Clearly the book was written for a very specific audience -- an audience that wants to explain contemporary phenomena through a spiritual lens. To take just one example, Norris condemns marketing, especially branding. As a professional marketer, I suspect the vast majority of consumers wear their brands far more lightly than Norris imagines. In fact, today's consumer flits from brand to brand in butterfly fashion. Contrary to her example, many consumers really don't care what brand of toothpaste they buy.
I am not among the target audience for this book. I did enjoy some of Norris's stories about her life, although I was disturbed by the absence of humor.
But I came away with the feeling that the author was herself struggling with sadness as she struggled to meet a publishing deadline. And I suspect memoir may not be Norris's forte. She writes what I would call sermons. If you like them, and you accept her orientation, this book will be for you.
Acedia & consumerism, psychology, depression, biography ... August 28, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I found this to be less satisfying than most of Kathleen Norris' work; it seemed to me to be a series of meditations on acedia without an overarching structure. Without the structure, it often becomes repetitive in a way that allows the reader to lose their way (the context/logic of the text).
On the other hand, this is a useful reflection on how acedia manifests in our culture - ennui as an artistic stance, consumerism, frantic schedules ... Particularly interesting is her discussion (a topic frequently returned to) of the roles of the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers and of psychiatry/psychoanalysis. Here Norris does an excellent job of bringing their wisdom to bear on our contemporary human condition - reminding me of To Love As God Loves: Conversations With the Early Church.
Also interesting and useful are the biographic elements brought into the discussion - illness as a small child, her husband's suicide attempt, her sister's cancer, her own widowhood ... Through these events one sees how she balances wholeness as supported by her religious community with wholeness as supported by the medical community.
Closing the book is a commonplace book on acedia with quotes from a diverse group of people - Seneca, Evagrius (referred to frequently in the book), John Climacus, David of Augsburg, Dante, Chaucer, Pascal, Wordsworth ...
 A wise and bookish exploration of a concept. August 28, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is a thoughtful memoir, full of incisive literary quotes from the author's wide reading. You may not be acquainted with the term acedia, but surely you are familiar with its many symptoms, offshoots, and corollaries: among them, lethargy, apathy, paralysis, depression, and alienation.
The author tells the story of her marriage, of her husband's illness and death. Each chapter is a meditation, an essay on the author's search for clarity and meaning.
Kathleen Norris is also the author of AMAZING GRACE: A VOCABULARY OF FAITH. She is at her best when defining concepts, especially religious concepts. In ACEDIA & ME: A MARRIAGE, MONKS, AND A WRITER'S LIFE, she concentrates on the concept of acedia and you will be supprised to learn how common it is. She looks at acedia as experienced, then as observed.
Of course the author discusses Andrew Solomon's excellent study, THE NOONDAY DEMON, but she says that it is common to experience acedia without being clinically depressed. There are degrees of it, she says, respectable acedia and industrial acedia.
The last section of the book is devoted to quotes touching on acedia from the wealth of our literature, Thomas Merton, Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, Ian Fleming, Walker Percy, and many, many others. I read every one of them and looked up from the book struck anew by the significance of the the author's theme.
Those interested in reading more about intellectual acedia might want to start with Colin Wilson's THE OUTSIDER; those looking to read more on spiritual acedia might enjoy David Loy's take on it in LACK AND TRANSCENDENCE: THE PROBLEM OF DEATH AND LIFE IN PSYCHOTHERAPY, EXISTENTIALISM, AND BUDDHISM.
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