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Summary: How to overcome grief and God's silence
Review: In this genuine diary, C. S. lewis recall his journey of grief following his wife's death of a cancer. Four chapters for four stages of sorrow and recovery. Grief is a process and not a stage. Some may be mommified in the past memories, but Lewis refused to let another death take place in his life. His deep belief in God is not a consolation for a better place in paradise. Lewis express his anger, frustration to God who seems to be in "an empty house". Who knows if pain stops or continues after death? In the midst of our tears there's no place to hear God's answer because we are too self-centered with our pain. If our belief in God is like a "card house" then, let it fall apart. God must be trust for who He is and not for How we can use Him... Alain Lescart
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Summary: Gave form to feelings I was unable to express.
Review: Most of us know the story of C.S. Lewis and Helen Joy Gresham through the movies "Shadowlands". This little volume with a forward written by Douglas H. Gresham, is the most poignant expressive, deeply personal accounts of what it means to grieve over someone you love, that I have ever encountered. He gave form to feelings I was unable to express and provided the words that will remain in my heart as the expression of loss I feel, as I faced the final chapter with my husband Tom. Tom died of Alzheimer's disease in his home as he wished. It is rare that a volume such as this one enters one's life.
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Summary: Grief as a sacred passage
Review: It was A Grief Observed that finally comforted me by sharing the brutal truth of grief. Self-help books trivialized this monumentous passage I was forced into when my husband died. C.S. Lewis stands out like neon against all the so-called 'self-help' books that are useless with their hideous recipes for 'getting over' grief as if it is a blip on Life's path, instead of the sacred passage that it is. It was this book that kept me sane by it's searing truth, and inspired me to write all those things that I was afraid to say out loud. Stephanie Ericsson, Author of: Companion Through the Darkness, Inner Dialogues on Grief - Also available at Amazon.com
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Summary: An Honest View into the Agony of Loss.
Review: Lewis journals the agonized philosophical wrestling with the lucid thought that earmarks his other writings. Having been a long time Lewis fan, I found this book strangly comforting when I lost my wife to cancer. His candid account of his journey through overwhelming emotional pain to a deeper spiritual commitment served as validation for my journey.
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Summary: Honest and sincere
Review: Absolutely heart-breaking. I could almost feel my own heart break just reading the authors words. This man--a man who waited a long time to marry, but finally did in the later years of his life--must have had so many feelings wrapped inside of him when he wrote this book. He wrote fiction, fantesy, theology, apologetics, but this book represent C.S. Lewis, the person he was while here on earth. The striking and almost embarassing sincerity of this book is what makes is so wonderful. I often read parts of this book over and cry, because it clearly illustrates our fragility as humans and how God comforts us in the midst of our pain. It's so good to see how the Lord worked in this man's life to overcome despair.
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Summary: A widower's confession of grief and doubt
Review: The synopsis, the publisher, and the reader from Colorado are all right on target with their comments about this honest, emotionally moving book. Lewis does not hid behind a mask of professorial hubris or pull any punches as he openly confesses his doubts about God and vents his grief in the pages of his journal. He pours out his emotions in what is probably the most "personal" of all his books. Both those suffering the loss of a loved one and those who aren't will be helped by reading this book. Certainly worth obtaining.
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Summary: An antidote to pious grief counseling
Review: A person of towering Christian faith has that faith devastated by the death of his beloved. His brutal honesty about his struggle with God is an antidote to the customary "comforters" who mouth bromides like "It's God's will" and "Trust God". Lewis' honesty is far more helpful to the grieving than the syrupy efforts of pious "believers", for he deals with life as it is, rather than as religious people wish it were.
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Summary: No Hype, Straight HELP: coping, understand, surviving Grief
Review: Mister Lewis starts to the heart of where most of us have been
when dealing with the sudden loss of a love one through death.
He gives the words to those errant feelings and horrid thoughts that challenge our day-to-day surviving of that death, that moment where we have been gothically cheated by this world...and maybe feel cheated by our God, or deceived into following a faith we now find repugnant to practice. BUT that is not where Mister Lewis leaves us. This book is real, solid help, and hope when it seems so much more probable to believe that there is none.
A lot of authors push hype. They are the TV sensation with a fashion of the latest phrases, and tag-lines to sell their next
deluded idea. They come up short or just plain empty.
I hope you find, as my family has, that this author and this book sit in a far better realm--unvarnished truth. Treat yourself!
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Summary: LEWIS'S A GRIEF OBSERVED
Review: Written in the aftermath of his beloved wife's death, C.S. Lewis's "A Grief Observed" is the great Christian apologist's literary attempt to make sense of the emotional and mental chaos in which he finds himself following that tragic event. A far cry from the scholarly analysis of most of his other books, "A Grief Observed" is in many ways a book of questions in which the author grapples with trying to understand why God would take his beloved from him, what sort of being God must be, what his wife is now experiencing in the next world and what all this means to his own faith and the rest of his life. Lewis, quite understandably, is not his usual self here, and the voice of "A Grief Observed" is not at all the same one of "The Screwtape Letters" or "Mere Christianity." Indeed, it is the naked, heartbroken pain with which Lewis infuses this book (originally published pseudonymously)that makes it such an important, vital, and universal literary achievement. Unfortunately, there are many (quite a few of them have written Amazon reviews)who seem to take some sort of ghoulish delight in Lewis's anguish, as though "A Grief Observed" in some way invalidates all that Lewis had written before, as if Lewis's other books are all irrelevant because he had not previously suffered enough to have written authoritatively on matters like spirituality, pain, and the afterlife. That is sadistic balderdash, and metaphorically kicking a great man when he is down. But there's no denying this is Lewis's most personal, heartfelt work, and its power is awesome. Ultimately, the reader will see a powerful mind and will "come to misunderstand a little less completely" one of this world's most agonizing puzzles, the paralysis of loss, and that in the end faith and God remain.
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Summary: If you like C.S. Lewis . . .
Review: . . . like I do, I strongly suggest We All Fall Down, by Brian Caldwell. Like Lewis, Caldwell takes an intellectual aproach to the concept of Christianity. His novel is very much in the vein of The Screwtape Letters and The Great divorce. I highly recomend it for discriminating Christian readers.
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