Saint Augustine's Memory

Garry Wills's "sizzling" (The New York Review of Books) renditions of Saint Augustine's prose in his Penguin Lives biography of the great thinker foreshadowed his translation of Saint Augustine's Childhood, the first book in Augustine's Confessiones. Now, in Saint Augustine's Memory, Wills brings his superb gifts of language and intellect to this important chapter. Acting as the hinge volume of Augustine's confessional opus, Saint Augustine's Memory makes the turn between the writer's life before and after baptism and stands as a meditation on the Confessiones's central concept.

Here in private, Augustine seeks to fathom himself-to emerge later as a visionary for others on a large public stage. To him the "vast treasure store of memory" is where identity is forged, the context of present and future in which we continually relive original experience and refashion everything we remember. It is a place where we remake ourselves, interact with others, and glimpse God. Masterfully rendered and beautifully designed, Saint Augustine's Memory is sure to fascinate academics, Christians, and the general reader.