Mark C. Taylor
Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living
Cloth $190
ISBN: 978-0-231-14780-4 Published October 2009 by Columbia University Press
馬克・泰勒，知名神學教授、公共知識分子、教育改革家、德里達（Jacques Derrida）生前好友，五年前大病不死，此後一直出入鬼門關，活在癌病的陰影下。由死及生，泰勒決定執筆以第一身寫下多年來的哲學與宗教思考。大限臨近，回顧一生，他在這自傳式的52個章節裏重整回憶，思索死亡、犧牲、孤寂．捨棄等等扣連我們每個人的共同生命經驗。
Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere is an intoxicating whirl of a book, an engine of thought and feeling that touches on everything that counts most to us: living and dying, families, faith, friendship, and the quest to ground oneself in the real. To the best of my knowledge, it is a work without precedent.
— Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy, among other novels
Mark Taylor has been a magisterial but impersonal presence in his pathbreaking work on art, religion, and the ebbing of modernity. In Field Notes from Elsewhere, he takes us out of the library and into his life in a series of death-haunted meditations. Neither a summation nor a memoir, Field Notes from Elsewhere is an epilogue offered, provocatively, as the prologue to a sequel that someone other than Taylor must write.
— Jack Miles, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography
In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. “These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand,” Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. “After the past year, I am persuaded that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary.”
Field Notes from Elsewhere is Taylor’s unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir’s fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. “You never come back from elsewhere,” Taylor concludes, “because elsewhere always comes back with you.”
Mark C. Taylor is the Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. A leading figure in debates about post-modernism, Taylor has written on topics ranging from philosophy, religion, literature, art and architecture to education, media, science, technology and economics. He is the author of twenty-five books, most recently After God, Mystic Bones, and Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption.
伸延閱讀｜of related interest
Robert Faggen (ed.)
The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Paperback $170
ISBN: 9780674034662 Published November 2009 by Belknap Press
Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost’s complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion–his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War–as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America’s greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.
Edited by preeminent Frost scholar Robert Faggen and annotated to help readers with the poet’s more elusive references, the notebooks are also thoroughly cross-referenced, marking thematic connections within these and Frost’s other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost’s writings.
Eduardo Galeano
Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone
Hardcover $190
ISBN: 9781568584232 Published May 2009 by Nation Books
Eduardo Galeano is one of our greatest storytellers. Throughout his career he has transcended genre and turned our understanding of history and reality on its head. Mirrors is his latest book of wonders, his most ambitious project since Memory of Fire—that landmark recreation of 500 years in the Americas. Mirrors is a sometimes bawdy, sometimes irreverent, sometimes heart-breaking unofficial history of the world seen—and mirrored to us—through the eyes and voices of history’s unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano asks, “Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind?”
Taking in 5,000 years of history, recalling the lives of artists and writers, gods and visionaries from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York and Mumbai, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes that resurrect the lives of the “thinkers and the feelers, the curious, condemned for asking, rebels and losers and lovely lunatics who were and are the salt of the earth,” Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.
Terry Eagleton
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Hardcover $190
ISBN: 9781568584232 Published April 2009 by Yale University Press
Terry Eagleton’s witty and polemical Reason, Faith, and Revolution is bound to cause a stir among scientists, theologians, people of faith and people of no faith, as well as general readers eager to understand the God Debate. On the one hand, Eagleton demolishes what he calls the ’superstitious’ view of God held by most atheists and agnostics, and offers in its place a revolutionary account of the Christian Gospel. On the other hand, he launches a stinging assault on the betrayal of this revolution by institutional Christianity.
There is little joy here, then, either for the anti-God brigade - Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular - nor for many conventional believers. Instead, Eagleton offers his own vibrant account of religion and politics in a book that ranges from the Holy Spirit to the recent history of the Middle East, from Thomas Aquinas to the Twin Towers.
鄺國惠
再生號
