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Start giftingWhat Are We Doing Here?
Essays
Narrator
Carrington MacDuffie
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Length
11 hours 7 minutes
Language
English
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith.
Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”
Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Lila, Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Housekeeping, and five books of nonfiction: The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind. She lives in Iowa.
Carrington MacDuffie is a voice actor and recording artist who has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has been a frequent finalist for the Audie Award, including for her original audiobook, Many Things Invisible. Alongside her narration work, she has released a new album of original songs, Only an Angel.
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Reviews
“Carrington MacDuffie brings her vocal skills and narrative art to this remarkable collection…MacDuffie’s elegant intonation comes through in these challenging and thought-provoking works. Her clear delivery gives shape to the complex arguments…Robinson’s brilliance illuminates this audiobook, and she could have no better narrator than MacDuffie.”
“With this volume, Robinson claims her place as an essential thinker—a modern, homebred Tocqueville—and offers a wake-up call for the soul, and for the nation.”
“Dwells on the current political and cultural climate, and defends the importance of the public university.”
“As a grieving daughter, What Are We Doing Here? supplied me with the nourishing attention to beauty and grace that is everywhere present in Housekeeping and Gilead."
“Robinson’s gorgeous, demanding, and enlightening essays, propelled by her intricate vision of unity, radiantly recharge both mind and soul.”
“Trenchant essays about faith, values, and history, most delivered as lectures at religious institutions and universities from 2015 to 2017…Sharp, elegant cultural analysis.”
“Robinson’s overall trajectory is clear and important. Her eloquent work stands up for a compassionate faith, the value of education, and a sense of decency.”
“Addressing our current political climate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Robinson, not unexpectedly, does so by considering how writers such as Emerson and Tocqueville have shaped our political thought, encouraging us to continue their tradition and play a role in ‘a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.’”
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