The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness (Walker Large Print Books)
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Karen Armstrong
- Publisher: Walker Large Print
- Release Date: May 2005
- ISBN-10: 1594150672
- ISBN-13: 9781594150678
- List Price: $16.95
Price Comparisons
E-mail these Cheap Book Prices to a friend!
| Store | Price | Condition | Free Shipping? | Online Coupons and Deals | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Half.com | $4.42 as of 11/21 11am EST | Used | NO, $3.49 to $3.99 |
| |||
| Amazon | $5.05 as of 11/21 11am EST | Used | NO, $3.99 |
| |||
| Amazon | $5.94 as of 11/21 11am EST | New | NO, $3.99 |
| |||
| Alibris | $6.00 as of 11/21 11am EST | Used | NO, $3.99 |
| |||
| Alibris | $6.53 as of 11/21 11am EST | New | NO, $3.99 |
| |||
| Half.com | $6.89 as of 11/21 11am EST | New | NO, $3.49 to $3.99 |
| |||
| Amazon | $11.53 as of 11/21 11am EST | New | YES, spend $25+ |
| |||
| button not working? Click Here | |||||||
Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryKaren Armstrong speaks to the troubling years following her decision to leave the life of a Roman Catholic nun and join the secular world in 1969. What makes this memoir especially fascinating is that Armstrong already wrote about this era once---only it was a disastrous book. It was too soon for her to understand how these dark, struggling years influenced her spiritual development, and she was too immature to protect herself from being be bullied by the publishing world. As a result, she agreed to portray herself only in as "positive and lively a light as possible"---a mandate that gave her permission to deny the truth of her pain and falsify her inner experience. The inspiration for this new approach comes from T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, a series of six poems that speak to the process of spiritual recovery. Eliot metaphorically climbs a spiral staircase in these poems---turning again and again to what he does not want to see as he slowly makes progress toward the light. In revisiting her spiral climb out of her dark night of the soul, Armstrong gives readers a stunningly poignant account about the nature of spiritual growth. Upon leaving the convent, Armstrong grapples with the grief of her abandoned path and the uncertainty of her place in the world. On top of this angst, Armstrong spent years suffering from undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy, causing her to have frequent blackout lapses in memory and disturbing hallucinations---crippling symptoms that her psychiatrist adamantly attributed to Armstrong's denial of her femininity and sexuality. The details of this narrative may be specific to Armstrong's life, but the meanin! g she makes of her spiral ascent makes this a universally relevant story. All readers can glean inspiration from her insights into the nature of surrender and the possibilities of finding solace in the absence of hope. Armstrong shows us why spiritual wisdom is often a seasoned gift---no matter how much we strive for understanding, we can't force profound insights to occur simply because our publisher is waiting for them. With her elegant, humble and brave voice, she inspires readers to willingly turn our attention toward our false identities and vigilantly defended beliefs in order to better see the truth and vulnerability of our existence. Herein lies the staircase we can climb to enlightenment. --Gail Hudson |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong
Rating:
This is a wonderful account of Karen Armstrong's struggle with her life as a nun and eventual departure into the world of books and learning. She is a superb writer and has a brilliant mind. Her battle with depression was moving and academic disappointments disheartening. But she has triumphed over adversity and is now a world-renowned and respected academic with a vast knowledge of the Middle East. Her other books are difficult for the average reader but this one is abundantly readable. I highly recommend it!
Deeply engrossing, inspiring, but . . .
Rating:
I haven't been this engrossed in a book since college, half a century ago. Karen Armstrong writes beautifully and her concerns resonate sympathetically in my heart. Indeed, she had me with her until almost the end of the book. It is not a criticism of the book to say that I cannot agree with her conclusions. She puts compassion, the Golden Rule, at the center of religious teaching, and insists that we must love our neighbor even when he has done us grievous harm. I am obliged to admit that I don't love, say, a man who kidnaps a young girl and keeps her as his sex slave for 18 years; or surgeons who perform unnecessary operations for the money; or people who run torture chambers and then boast about it. Moreover, I don't think that most people who think of themselves as religious would agree that compassion is central - rather, God is (see the First Commandment).
She goes on to write: "The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing." This is simply wrong. Those myths and laws may be useful for that reaon, it doesn't make them true. It may enhance your life to believe that the world is 6,000 years old, that doesn't make it true. As for the laws being life enhancing, for practicing Jews among the most important laws are those of Kashrut, that is complying with the kosher rules. I do not find a prohibition of eating lobster, shrimp, oysters and clams, or of sprinkling Parmesan cheese on your meatballs, life enhancing.
I am suprised at the negative reviews which accuse Ms. Armstrong of blaming others for her own failings. I thought she did the opposite, even to a fault, always accepting the blame even when she was treated poorly. She repeatedly states that her failure as a nun was just that, her failure - that she was simply not made for that role, although others have done fine under that regimen. One of the things I most liked about this book was the generosity of spirit of the author. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the spiritual quest.
Expansive - A Beautiful Gift
Rating:
There are few books that grab you in the way this chronicle of Ms Armstong's spiritual "death" and journey to rebirth does. Her anger at the archaic sturctures that kept her in spiritual chains comes through on every page. But as you read you find that her story in many ways in your story, just with different settings and characters, for have we not all struggled with innocent belief that turns to unbelief when human institutions and personalities fail us? Her intellectual gifts, however, which are many, cannot overshadow the spiritual hunger which continues to draw her into her life's true calling, which is to be a modern prophet of God and God's beneficience, which we are challenged to embody through compassion ("suffering with" not "pity for"). It was as I read another book by Ms. Armstrong ("The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism") that I felt drawn to learn more about this brilliant author and hence, found this autobiography. Long after finishing it, it continues to ressonate and inspire, expanding my interior perceptions, like leaven in bread. A beautiful gift.
Do NOT do unto others . . .
Rating:
Once again Karen Armstrong has penned a best seller. This account of her intensely personal journey from the depths of despair and tragedy to a fully human spiritual existence is compelling, a page turner and will lead the open-minded reader to introspection of his or her own belief systems. An amazingly honest read demonstrating compassion and vulnerability tempered with intellect and self-awareness.
Armstrong takes us through her youthful exuberance at entering a convent to find god, to the seven years of pain and disillusionment of the ascetic life and finally through angrily discarding any respect for the religious institutions as she knew them. And all with good reasons, not the least of which was the lack of compassionate treatment of her pleas for help with an obvious physical illness.
Her struggle with re-entering the secular life was particularly heart wrenching and especially so when we find that after years of failed psychiatric encounters, Armstrong is finally correctly diagnosed as suffering from Epilepsy. Correct treatment for her condition then frees her to go on to do her best work as a religious historian and comparative theology commentator. She contributed in very significant ways to the calming voices after the 9/11/2001 attacks on the U.S.
The Spiral Staircase is an extraordinary memoir showing how to remake a life and live a spiritual existence without the confines of religion - a story from which we all can learn.
Victimhood and Tired Bias
Rating: 
I really expected to like this book and did until about half way through when I became tired of the author's repeated portrayal of herself as a victim. It got worse from there. It is disturbing to realize that as an autobiography this is something of a do-over. She had previously written the story of her departure from a Catholic convent and difficulty adapting to secular life years earlier. By her own account the book, Beginning the World, was dishonest; though in a pattern seen throughout the Spiral Staircase, she doesn't accept blame for writing a dishonest book, she passes this off as the demands of her publisher, as if that was a sufficient excuse. I have not read Beginning the World, but the Spiral Staircase seems to have plenty of dishonesty of its own. For the first 100 pages or so I found the author a sympathetic character but the victimhood theme ultimately becomes suffocating. She occasionally makes self deprecating comments but always in concert with blame for the battering external factors in her life and always in a way that invites the reader to say/ think "Oh no Karen, It wasn't your fault; it was the fault of ... the Catholic Church, men, Oxford, your publisher, your psychiatrist, western culture..." As a neurologist I took a little pleasure in the portrayal of her Freudian psychiatrist as a blinkered dim wit and of the favorable treatment she gave the neurologist who eventually diagnosed her (obvious) seizure disorder. But as a neurologist I was put off by Ms. Armstrong's implication that her suicide gesture/ attempt was beyond her control and occurred as a component of a seizure. Sorry Ms. Armstong, a seizure can not create the complex behavior required to open a bottle of pills and ingest an overdose. It was at that point in the book that I first started to doubt the honesty of the author and to tire of her refusal to take responsibility for any of the misfortunes of her life.
The last third of the book describes the author's gradual awakening to some sort of mushy politically acceptable spirituality, just the sort of spirituality that can find praise from the political left. Hers is a vague fuzzy spirituality that doesn't really accept or reject anything. That's not quite true; she repeatedly blasts Christianity and in particular Catholicism. Her treatment of the major religions is unbalanced to say the least. Christianity is responsible for the crusades (her historical perspective on the crusades is inaccurate and incomplete), numerous atrocities through history, including the WWII Holocaust (?!!) and endless examples of misogyny. She even finds a way to put the blame for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 at the feet of Christianity and "western culture". She derides Christianity as lacking historicity, citing the fact that the gospels were written after, and possibly inspired by, St. Paul's writing. The fact that the earliest extant Christian writing dates to a few decades after the death of Jesus makes them too far removed to the events they describe to be reliable. Somehow the Koran, written some two centuries after the death of Mohammed and based on a dream, is valid, however. She practically drools over the beauty of the Koran and the peaceful tenants of Islam. No Islamic fundamentalists or terrorists apparently inhabit Ms. Armstrong's world. Likewise Islam has apparently never treated women with anything less than complete respect.
The author has made a business of writing about religion. Business is certainly the word; it really comes out in the tale of her career. From a business standpoint her second, more honest (?) autobiography is brilliant. It has all that a NY Times or NPR reviewer would love: repeated slams against Christianity, a bright young woman battered by the misogynist attitudes of western culture, vague mushy spirituality with fawning treatment of Islam, Buddhism, and even the pantheism of various primitive societies. And it's all tied together with the thread of a struggling (sort of) victim.
The title, The Spiral Staircase, evokes Thomas Merton's, Seven Story Mountain, from a marketing standpoint undeniably a good choice, from the standpoint of accuracy and honesty not at all. Sadly, that's the principal problem with the whole book.
BROWSE BY SUBJECT
- Audiobooks
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Health, Mind & Body
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel