A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses - Tapa blanda

Praise for "A Pelican in the Wilderness"

"Few books contain a cast of characters as fascinating as those who populate "A Pelican in the Wilderness", Isabel Colegate's charming meander through the history of hermits and solitaries. Elegantly written . . . a small gem of a book." --"The Wall Street Journal"

"A bright and highly literate study of asceticism in both the East and the West." --"Los Angeles Times"

"This is a charming book . . . witty and sagacious, entertaining and persuasive. It is not a volume that can be characterized as history or memoir or even a travel book but contains the best elements of all." --"The Washington Times"

Praise for A Pelican in the Wilderness

"Few books contain a cast of characters as fascinating as those who populate A Pelican in the Wilderness, Isabel Colegate's charming meander through the history of hermits and solitaries. Elegantly written . . . a small gem of a book." --The Wall Street Journal

"A bright and highly literate study of asceticism in both the East and the West." --Los Angeles Times

"This is a charming book . . . witty and sagacious, entertaining and persuasive. It is not a volume that can be characterized as history or memoir or even a travel book but contains the best elements of all." --The Washington Times

From Lao-tse and the Buddha, St. Anthony and the early Celtic hermits, through Rousseau, Thoreau, Ruskin, and up to the present day, certain gifted persons have shown a vocation for living alone and apart, finding in simplicity and attention to nature a spiritual space to be explored and rejoiced in. Others, retreating from the world in scorn or cut off from it by scandal, have found that solitude is Hell, a pit of melancholy and morbid fancy. In this, her first work of nonfiction, novelist Isabel Colegate gives us the lives of the solitaries — male and female, medieval and modern, divinely inspired and patently fraudulent. But this is no mere gallery of saints and sinners, poets and misanthropes. It is also a reevaluation of solitude for our times, and a reminder that it is in solitude that the soul meets itself, refreshes itself, and from there goes out to join the communal dance.