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Overview
Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David’s life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing on the biblical chronicle of David’s life as well as on the later commentaries and the Psalms--traditionally considered to be David’s own words--Pinsky teases apart the many strands of David’s story and reweaves them into a glorious narrative.Under the clarifying and captivating light of Pinsky’s erudition and imagination, and his mastery of image and expression, King David--both the man and the idea of the man--is brought brilliantly to life.
Synopsis
Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David s life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing on the biblical chronicle of David s life as well as on the later commentaries and the Psalms--traditionally considered to be David s own words--Pinsky teases apart the many strands of David s story and reweaves them into a glorious narrative.
Under the clarifying and captivating light of Pinsky s erudition and imagination, and his mastery of image and expression, King David--both the man and the idea of the man--is brought brilliantly to life.
The New York Times - William Deresiewicz
The Life of David grows increasingly strong as it moves from David's early years to the years of his reign. The evolution from disconnected legends like David's battle with Goliath to the fuller record of a sitting king allows Pinsky to move from the waters of speculation to the solid ground of interpretation. Pinsky's reading of David's mystifyingly disastrous attempt to take a census as the embodiment of everything threatening about his revolutionary transformation of the Jewish people "from a masked, uncataloged, exclusionary, taboo-ridden culture of tribes to a visible, enumerated, inclusive civilization," is a tour de force of historical imagining.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Religious thinkers and lay readers have been grappling with the image of David ever since biblical times. Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky approaches Israel's greatest king with respect but not idolatry, dismissing the simplistic view of him as a callow shepherd who slew Goliath. With graceful force, he presents this biblical patriarch as a complicated man capable of murder, adultery, and other crimes. The breadth of Pinsky's learning enables him to relate the issues of David's life to Greek literature, Talmudic thought, and even the poetry of Robert Frost.William Deresiewicz
The Life of David grows increasingly strong as it moves from David's early years to the years of his reign. The evolution from disconnected legends like David's battle with Goliath to the fuller record of a sitting king allows Pinsky to move from the waters of speculation to the solid ground of interpretation. Pinsky's reading of David's mystifyingly disastrous attempt to take a census as the embodiment of everything threatening about his revolutionary transformation of the Jewish people "from a masked, uncataloged, exclusionary, taboo-ridden culture of tribes to a visible, enumerated, inclusive civilization," is a tour de force of historical imagining.— The New York Times