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At the Center of All Beauty
- Solitude and the Creative Life
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
A profound meditation on accepting and celebrating one's solitude.
Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community.
Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. He delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic "solitaries" he considers his kindred spirits, from Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emily Dickinson in Amherst, to Bill Cunningham photographing the streets of New York, from Cezanne (married, but solitary nonetheless) painting Mt. St. Victoire over and over again, to the fiercely self-protective Zora Neale Hurston. Each character portrait is full of intense detail, the bright wakes they've left behind illuminating Fenton Johnson's own journey from his childhood in the backwoods of Kentucky to his travels alone throughout the world and the people he has lost and found along the way.
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Takes of wonder for sure, by a wonderful man.
- By Dr. D. Brian Austin on 04-03-19
By: Huston Smith
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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A Religion of One's Own
- A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World
- By: Thomas Moore
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times best-selling author and trusted spiritual adviser offers a follow up to his classic Care of the Soul. Something essential is missing from modern life. Many who've turned away from religious institutions - and others who have lived wholly without religion - hunger for more than what contemporary secular life has to offer but are reluctant to follow organized religion's strict and often inflexible path to spirituality. In A Religion of One' s Own, best-selling author and former monk Thomas Moore explores the myriad possibilities of creating a personal spiritual style, either inside or outside formal religion.
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Powerful and Inspiring
- By Amazon Customer on 05-25-16
By: Thomas Moore
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The Fellowship
- The Literary LIves of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
- By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 26 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
- By Ray M on 07-14-16
By: Philip Zaleski, and others
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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Becoming Elisabeth Elliot
- By: Ellen Vaughn
- Narrated by: Connie Shabshab
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Elisabeth Elliot was a young missionary in Ecuador when members of a violent Amazonian tribe savagely speared her husband, Jim, and his four colleagues. Incredibly, prayerfully, Elisabeth took her toddler daughter, snakebite kit, Bible, and journal...and lived in the jungle with the stone-age people who killed her husband. In this authorized biography, Ellen Vaughn uses Elisabeth’s private, unpublished journals, and candid interviews with her family and friends, to paint the adventures and misadventures God used to shape one of the most influential women in modern church history.
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Great book!
- By Dove on 09-27-20
By: Ellen Vaughn
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Emerson
- The Mind on Fire
- By: Robert D. Richardson
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.
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Finally!
- By Douglas on 08-15-14
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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Genius & Anxiety
- How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947
- By: Norman Lebrecht
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
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Post-anxiety
- By Amaze on 03-27-20
By: Norman Lebrecht
What listeners say about At the Center of All Beauty
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- J. Lamun
- 06-02-20
A Memoir Of Sorts
Fenton Johnson uses his memoir expertise to explain and celebrate solitudes and the destinies we create. As an artist, I continuously search for process and practice. Fenton reminds us that in the silence of solitude we find more ideas, more character and a clearer sense of oneness and community. Contemplation in solitude is beautiful and necessary; if for a time, or a lifetime.
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- Rich S.
- 01-08-22
The Book I Needed to Read 50 Years Ago
I can't help wishing this book had been written 50 years ago. Magical thinking, I know. When I was first out of college I watched one of those TV medical dramas popular in the 1960s. An intern on the show described himself as a solitary.
And I thought that's me!
But when I shared my revelation with friends, they collectively said, "Oh, no. You can't be that. You've got to get married and have a house in the suburbs and two-point-six children, and one-point-four dogs, plus three cats, and, of course, a respectable job.
Zero support for the solitary man in 1970.
I fumbled along with life trying to fit in and put up what one girlfriend called a "couple front." I married twice but refused to have kids. A big problem from my parents' perspective. What had they done wrong that I didn't want a family? One dog and numerous cats didn't count. Why was I rejecting the American Dream?
In high school and college, I read several books with characters I could identify with like Holden in Catcher in the Rye. There was the famous anti-marriage novel A Farewell to Arms as well as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I somehow missed Colin Wilson's The Outsider. It might have helped. Knowledge is power and all that.
But this book on Solitude and the Creative Life would have been life-changing had it been around when I was a young man. It would have given me role models from real life and helped me understand myself as a solitary.
Times have changed and being a solitary does not carry all the social taboos that existed in 1970. But it still can't be easy.
So l hope this book finds its way into the hands of young people who need support on a sometimes lonely path.
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- C. FREEMAN
- 12-25-20
Learn about others and yourself
What a wise and elegant exploration of those who are—have chosen to be—solitary. I am recommending this to so many friends. And excellent performance by Sean Runnette.
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2 people found this helpful
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- A. Henry
- 05-25-20
Stunning and reflective
This is a book I wish I had available to me when I was a senior in high school. I wonder of it would have changed my life. The reader does a wonderful job, as well.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Simon and Debbie
- 04-14-20
literary gem
memoir at its best.
thought provoking and analytical.
who knew there were so many solitaries.
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1 person found this helpful