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On Evil

By: Terry Eagleton
Narrated by: David Thorn
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Publisher's summary

For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, and for most on the political left, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgements and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world.

In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?

©2010 Terry Eagleton (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks
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Critic reviews

"An absorbing, stimulating, awfully entertaining discussion." ( Booklist)
"Highly recommended for anyone interested in the intersection between literature, philosophy, and religion." ( Library Journal)
"Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution attacks the new atheism as a kind of secular counter-fundamentalism… Better than any previous book of its kind." (James Wood, The New Yorker)

What listeners say about On Evil

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prescient ride thru linking tunnels beneath glib Gatsby pretense

timely, erudite, current affairs having a very dungeon affair with modern constructs.
Refreshingly neither Main Stream Media propaganda, nor conspiracy, nor fundamentalist dogma.
The greatest thinkers pondered formations of society & it's attendant pressures & needs. Leaders, despots, politburos & Kangaroo courts were the arms of those illuminating & (oftentimes) revolutionary ideas. The poly-sci of hundreds of years of polemics, treatises & doctrine have yielded ... some very rich politicians.

Would it actually were a Shakespearean play.
But, so wonderfully written [★ & Narrated!★ 】 that one feels a gut punch of being involved in it all. Truly here is a book which turns the spotlight on the World as a stage, and we as it's current players - with every role a va
Vaunable one.

Thank you for this education.

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Wow. Magnificent book

this book is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually clarifying, as well as intensely funny at times. Eagleton is brilliant, witty, and a good sam

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That Marxist, Terry Evilton!

This is a good philosophical, religious, literary, and political account of the genealogy of evil, but it lacks any connection to biology, ecology, history, or systems theory, and seems to hold that evil can be understood from a purely humanist standpoint. This makes the discourse fairly monolithic, descriptive, moralistic, and reliant upon the author's stylistic flair and critical skills to carry the argument.

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