Regular marked price: $12.95Discount Price: $10.36
Cost Savings: $2.59 (20%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 236.2
EAN num: 9780060652951
ISBN number: 0060652950
Label: HarperOne
Manufacturer: HarperOne
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 160
Printing Date: 2001-02
Publishing house: HarperOne
Release Date: February 06, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 2037
Studio: HarperOne
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
C. S. Lewis takes us on a profound journey through both heaven and hell in this engaging allegorical tale. Using his extraordinary descriptive powers, Lewis introduces us to supernatural beings who will change the way we think about good and evil.
Amazon.com:
The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis's Divine Comedy: the narrator bears strong resemblance to Lewis (by way of Dante); his Virgil is the fantasy writer George MacDonald; and upon boarding a bus in a nondescript neighborhood, the narrator is taken to Heaven and Hell. The book's primary message is presented with almost oblique tidiness--'There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'' However, the narrator's descriptions of sin and temptation will hit quite close to home for many readers. Lewis has a genius for describing the intricacies of vanity and self-deception, and this book is tremendously persistent in forcing its reader to consider the ultimate consequences of everyday pettiness. --Michael Joseph Gross
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
CS Lewis great theologian or great Christian apologist as some would say was one heck of a writer.
The Great Divorce C.S Lewis good as a stand alone story or as a more deeper spiritual book. I continue to be blown away by how good C.S Lewis is one of those authors where sometimes you get the strangest sensation that he is actually speaking directly to you.
The Great Divorce serves to remind all of us that while sin does indeed have an eternal penalty the very first commandment for all Christians is love.
Rated by buyers -
I read a review on here that said: "If you read this book HONESTLY, you will find pieces of yourself as well."
This statement cannot be more true. This book is an adventure, a page turner, an experience of self-inquiry and self-reflection, and shows human nature and egoic nature in the most recognizable forms.
Rated by buyers -
This is one of only two books I usually re-read annually (the other is Elizabeth Goudge's "The Dean's Watch"). As the official review says, some of the vignettes hit quite close to home. I have a couple of them engraved in my mind such that I can catch myself when I am tempted to succumb to selfish behavior.
Rated by buyers 
-
C.S. Lewis always fascinates. In this easy-to-read small volume, he takes us through a fictional dream about the afterlife. Starting in a dark, rainy and grimy town, he boards a bus that takes him and a number of grumbly souls for a trip to heaven. There, they meet relatives and friends who try to get them to stay. It's Lewis's perceptive genius that his lost souls are rarely inherently wicked, but have turned back on themselves and away from the ultimate source of love. There's the mother who demands to see her long-lost son; the wife who intends to continue improving her husband in the afterlife; the well-meaning religious person who is more interested in lecturing about God than experiencing God firsthand. To the saved, the dark town is only a purgatory - the place where they finally shuck their human attachments. To the lost, even heaven itself seems like hell, and they long to return to their gray and dismal existences.
Other than a line or two here and there, as with the mention of Purgatory, there is little to indicate that this work was written by a committed Catholic. Frankly, you don't even have to believe in the afterelife to apprecciate Lewis's ability to see through human illusions and attachments. An interesting exploration of human frailty by a subtle and gifted writer.
Rated by buyers 
-
It took me a long, long time to get through this short book. I had difficulty following all the thees and the yees, tracking the differences between the spirits and the ghosts, deciphering the solid beings from the translucent ones.
I can sit through an amount of philosophizing; I don't think I can sit through much theologizing.
But there are times when something--and the gift of this book is you feel it is addressed to you. . .the meddlesome wife. . .to you the vain artist. . .to you the knowing teacher--is said just right. Listen:
"We met several Ghosts that had come so near to Heaven only in order to tell the Celestials about Hell. Indeed this is one of the commonest types. Others, who had perhaps been (like myself) teachers. . actually wanted to give lectures about it: they brought fat notebooks full of statistics, and maps, and (one of them) a magic lantern. Some wanted to tell anecdotes of the notorious sinners of all ages whom they had met below. . . `You have lead a sheltered life!' (these teachers) bawled. `You don't know. . .We'll tell you. We'll give you some hard facts.' . .All alike, so far as I could judge. . .were wholly unreliable, and all equally incurious about the country in which they had arrived. They repelled every endeavor to teach them, and when they found that nobody listened to them, they went (away)."
If you are a teacher--as I am--you should be arrested by the truth of that scold. So I plodded--at times reluctantly along a paragraph a day, a page a day--to get to the subsequent bit of truth. And--at times--I was similarly arrested. Here, about the consequences of habitual "small" sin, listen:
"I am troubled, Sir," said I, "because that unhappy creature doesn't seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn't wicked: she's only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling."
". . .The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman--even the least trace of one--still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there's one spark under all those ashes, we'll blow it till the whole pile is blue and clear. But if there's nothing but ashes. . .they must be swept up."
"But how can there be a grumble without a grumbler?"
"The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences. . .it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it. . .Ye can repent and come out of it. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left. . .just the grumble itself."
I benefited from these, and similar insights, disappointed, though I was, in the book.
Find other books like this one:
