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Also by Carlos Eire:

Waiting for Snow in Havana, January 2011
Hardcover
Learning to Die in Miami, November 2010
Hardcover
A Very Brief History of Eternity, November 2009
Hardcover
War against the Idols, February 1989
Hardcover

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF ETERNITY
By: Carlos Eire

Princeton University Press
November 2009
On Sale: November 1, 2009
286 pages
ISBN: 0691133573
EAN: 9780691133577
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History

What is eternity? Is it anything other than a purely abstract concept, totally unrelated to our lives? A mere hope? A frightfully uncertain horizon? Or is it a certainty, shared by priest and scientist alike, and an essential element in all human relations?

In A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire, the historian and National Book Award-winning author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, has written a brilliant history of eternity in Western culture. Tracing the idea from ancient times to the present, Eire examines the rise and fall of five different conceptions of eternity, exploring how they developed and how they have helped shape individual and collective self-understanding.

A book about lived beliefs and their relationship to social and political realities, A Very Brief History of Eternity is also about unbelief, and the tangled and often rancorous relation between faith and reason. Its subject is the largest subject of all, one that has taxed minds great and small for centuries, and will forever be of human interest, intellectually, spiritually, and viscerally.

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Weekend Edition Saturday - December 26, 2009