Name: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
ISBN: 9780393356267

Stephen Greenblatt

Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award- winning literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt ponders one of humankind's most powerful stories.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

With the insight, eloquence, and erudition that have thrilled hundreds of thousands of readers of his books about Shakespearean England and the Italian Renaissance, Stephen Greenblatt now breathes new life into the ancient story of Adam and Eve. He tracks the story's origins back into humanity's deep past and its first written form to the Hebrews' exile in Babylon. He brilliantly animates the sexual and moral conflicts that led Augustine to enshrine it at the center of Christian faith. He limns its diverse offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny, and, finally, astonishing artistic representation--brought most miraculously to life in the Renaissance in Durer's etchings and Milton's Paradise Lost. Greenblatt awakens us to the strangeness and wealth of a tale that generation after generation have found profoundly meaningful. While it was once mortally dangerous to question the story's literal truth, we now turn to science to explain human origins. What has been gained and sacrificed as tellings and interpretations of the story of our first human ancestors evolved through Western culture? Returning to us a precious cultural inheritance, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is an exploration of the value of the humanities through the life of one of humankind's greatest stories.

I can't begin to describe how much I love Greenblatt's books. (I've read this and Swerve, Will in the World is next.)

Tracing an idea from its origins—no matter how distant—to its impact on modern thought is, of course, not new. What is exceptional is the clarity with which Greenblatt writes, and his insatiable curiosity and passion for his subjects, both of which are evident in every word. 

Throw in a natural talent for storytelling and it becomes obvious how Greenblatt hooks his readers (at least this reader). He's generous without being patronizing, informs without pretentiousness, digresses without losing his thread.

Rise and Fall is no different. Greenblatt starts in ancient Babylonia with the Jewish exile there, noting how that experience must have impacted the writers of Genesis. He traces the Genesis story from those humble beginnings to Augustine and his insistence on transforming what had largely been considered allegory into a literal interpretation. Eventually we reach Milton and his attempt to shape Adam and Eve into real (almost too real) people of flesh and blood. Finally, we reach the modern day. 

Along the way, of course, Greenblatt marvels at how the history of Adam and Eve has paralleled the history of our species. Not one for religious dogma, he does not condemn religion or the religious along the way. Instead, his awe for the story told within those opening pages of the Bible is always evident, always kind, always curious. 

The result is a generous, fascinating read.

jacob ketcham

Mat Connor

Selected as a book of the year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times What is it about Adam and Eve’s story that fascinates us? What does it tell us about how our species lives, dies, works or has sex? The mythic tale of Adam and Eve has shaped conceptions of human origins and destiny for centuries. Stemming from a few verses in an ancient book, it became not just the foundation of three major world faiths, but has evolved through art, philosophy and science to serve as the mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires. In a quest that begins at the dawn of time, Stephen Greenblatt takes us from ancient Babylonia to the forests of east Africa. We meet evolutionary biologists and fossilised ancestors; we grapple with morality and marriage in Milton’s Paradise Lost; and we decide if the Fall is the unvarnished truth or fictional allegory.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve

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