Rating: 
Summary: For The Time Being
Review: I most heartily recommend to you Anne Dillard's book "For the Time Being." Here is her description of the book's warp and weave: "scenes from a paleontologist's explorations in the deserts of China, the thinking of the Hasidic Jews of Eastern Europe, a natural history of sand, individual clouds and their moments in time, human birth defects, information about our generation, narrative bits from modern Israel and China, and quizzical encounters with strangers." Sound good? It is! Some memorable moments: Commenting on photographs from a standard reference book on birth defects: "If you gave birth to two bird-headed dwarfs, as these children's mother did -- a boy and a girl -- you could carry them both everywhere, all their lives, in your arms or in a basket, and they would never leave you, not even to go to college." She asks questions: Can God really know and love everyone on earth? Is it possible for any of us know and love anyone besides the smallest handful of family and friends? She offers observations to illustrate her questions: "There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself -- in all your singularity, importance, complexity and love -- and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it." She refers us to Aquinas: "God has power to effect only what is in the nature of things. And to Buber: "It is given to men to lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned. Not merely to wait, not merely to look on! Man is able to work for the redemption of the world." A reviewer said she "scales down her cosmic questions to matters of individual human conduct," but her answers are, as the title says, just "For the Time Being."
Rating: 
Summary: The worth of a life
Review: This book is extremely deep and requires an introspective state of mind. The questions it raises about the worth of a single human life in the eternity of time are very worthwhile and universal questions. After you put it down it will haunt you for days.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant journey through both thought and writing
Review: I absolutely love Annie Dillard's ability to simultaneously transport the reader through a set of emotionally and logically charged arguements while showing us what it means to read. In almost every moment of reading this book, I felt as though Ms. Dillard and I were having a conversation of the most profound and meangingful category, those types of conversations where you find yourself actually experiencing the thoughts of the person beside you AS they are happening. In an age where ego and self-centeredness all too often take the place of the wonder that should be inherent in the philosophical practice, Ms. Dillard emerges to show us what it truly means to live as a human being. She consistently inspires me to become both a better writer and a better human being.I remember reading this book out loud to a friend of mine while inside a local grocery store. He argued quite adamantly against some of the arguements given by Dillard on the topic of God. Yes, they are not completely sound--but, the magic of reading these books comes not in the arguements they lay forth, but in the process Ms. Dillard (and I hope I can call her Annie) takes in considering the topics of the book she is writing. While I dissagree with some of the things she says, I can hear her also disagreeing at the same time! She is, by far, one of the most honest, beautiful, and human thinkers to grace contemporary thought.
Rating:
Summary: Teaching the Unteachable
Review: Annie Dillard's work has, it were, been passed down through my family, from my adored late grandmother to my mother and then to me. Even so, I had only read "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" before "For the Time Being" was released, and enjoyed the former so much that I snapped up the latter soon after publication. Expecting, as is natural, something in a similar vein. Which this book is, and isn't. The meditations on the natural world are certainly present, with an illuminating and enriching history of sand and meditations on clouds as transient signposts of the present moment. But there are also all the other subjects touched upon: the thoughts of the Hasidim, the tyranny of numbers, the immutability of God, and above all, the warm and looming presence of Teilhard de Chardin. From time to time a book will drop into your life at the precise moment when you need it most: that's just what happened for me with this book. A great teacher understands that one teaches best not by declaring The Answer but rather by pointing the way so that a student can find his or her own answer. We can only ever teach ourselves, ultimately. Thus, seeking answers in this book is altogether the wrong way to approach it; rather, the book functions best as a meditation, requiring silence and stillness and perfect concentration to be read properly, as the text expands through implication far beyond the word count on the printed page. Take it to a beach after the crowds are gone and feel the sand beneath you, watch the clouds soaring above; take it to an empty room and turn off the electric lights and allow yourself to open up; read deeply, and slowly, and allow your mind to go where it will. I doubt you'll be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: A fragmented wonder
Review: When I started this book, I felt a bit dubious about where it was going. But by the time I finished it, it didn't matter - I was caught in its spell. To be sure, it has its arkward moments. But it is full of marvels, and is another demonstration of Ms Dillard's ability to communicate a sense of wonder and awe at the very fact of the existence of this world. The fragments relating to Teilhard de Chardin are very sketchy as biogarphy, but certainly paint a picture of a remarkable individual. We need writers like Dillard to get to the true essence of things.
Rating:
Summary: This is a Book for Thinkers
Review: Annie Dillard has a style unique to herself. She is able to change direction of her book's subjects drastically but continue to hold the readers attention with odd, unconventional listing of thoughts and facts. Dillard takes the subjects Birth, Sand, China, Clouds, Numbers, Isreal, Encounters, Thinker, Evil, and Now; and embarks on a spiritual journey into the questions of God's omnipotance, the importance of the individual, and the innevitablility of death. The book seems to circle after a while, like having a converstation with 10 different people who each have a wealth of knowledge and statistics about their own subject. But this is a power of Dillard's style: being able to pull seperate unrelated factors all together, like a mosaic, only comprehesible as a whole work of art from a distance. I liked this book from the beginning of Dillard's description of a few children's deformation from birth. Her knowledge is impressive, expecially that of French paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who battles with questions of God in midst of finding ancient human remains. Dillard incorporates quotes from near and far to weave this quilt of human question and answers that remain to be enshrouded in clouds of mystery, shifting with each generation. She uses a countless number of successive statistics that will drive any reader into a deep tunnel of thought. The end will challenge anyone to continue on their own encounter with the meaning of existance.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the Effort
Review: Annie Dillard always assumes adept readers, that we have intelligence, curiosity and depth, and a courage that will let us face with her life's deepest and most perplexing matters. In For the Time Being, she also assumes a degree of patience I lack naturally and had to summon. The book collects paragraph-long anecdotes-"quizzical encounters" she calls them-which need some time and effort, both on her part and on the reader's, to tie together. When I did my part, when I paid attention and followed her wandering, I was rewarded with a startlingly simple image which will forever define for me a complex philosophical problem that has mystified me for decades. Understand; the image doesn't solve the problem. The problem is one of those that does not admit of solution, but it has now, for my purposes, been perfectly stated. No small achievement, that, and worth some effort. Possibly if I had more stamina I could glean similar reward from her other themes: the existence of evil, the folly of vanity, the arithmetic of suffering, "The individual's place" as she puts it in the Author's Note, "in the buried generations of humans and in eternity."
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: I usually enjoy Annie Dillard's work, but found this book a shallow hodgepodge, poorly imagined and in need of a good editor. Dillard tosses together sections about birth abnormalities, Teilhard de Chardin, clouds, numbers of deaths during natural disasters, and quotations from Hasidic rabbis. Nothing is ever developed or even convincingly linked. She does not apply her own intelligence to the interpretation. In fact, does not interpret at all, but drops in news factoids for dramatic effect (how many people died in a monsoon, etc.). I, and I'm sure other readers, had come to expect more. She really shines in her early work, such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her observations of nature were stunning. Now she is like a tired magician pulling worn rabbits out of an old hat. The quiet observer method is a disingenuous and lazy way to present theological points, some of which are complex. Others are simply silly remnants of superstitious times. Yet she jumbles them all together with a vapid solemnity which makes the reader doubt her intelligence, but unfortunately not her self-regard. The book consists of separate brief sections, some only paragraphs long. One consists of the following line: "Do you think I don't know cigarettes are fatal?" I wasn't particularly wondering that, and no writer who isn't sadly self-absorbed would have written it and given it such a prominent place. It drags the reader's attention sharply back to the author, which seems to be where she wants it. It's too bad that she finds her own thoughts so fascinating as to need no further work -- there are interesting bits here that could have been developed, but the trick of dropping in the occasional intersting quote doesn't make for an interesting book. This book was a waste of my time and money.
Rating:
Summary: The finest in romance novel philosophy?
Review: For those who have never explored the great (or even not so great) thinkers, and perhaps are astounded by the simple things in life (for instance, how their remote control is so deftly able to alter the picture on their television screen), this may be just the book.....for what, I'm not sure (nor, apparently, was the author).
Rating:
Summary: For the Time Being
Review: This book, for me, has articulated my own circular thoughts about life, and love, and God, and my questions about my own raison d'etre. It folds back on itself so well, bumps up against itself at every turn, and yet moves forward, connecting us not only to our own immediate, intimate pasts, but the vast history that is us. Dillard questions the existence of God, and validates it; questions the little things that often seem to mean nothing, and validates them; questions the strange and the unknown and the unbelievable and the unacceptable, and validates them; draws to our attention the things that we ignore, or deny, or don't notice, and asks what they mean, if anything. She draws out the universal and, at the same time, the individual questions, and leaves the reader knowing that there are no universal answers. And, most often no answers at all. At least none that will satisfy the individual, incomplete, searching human being. She validates the essential nature of each part of humanity, both in the context of the universe and in the context of the individual, while at the same time questions the validity, the preconceived, socially-propogated meaning of the whole, within the context of the human soul. A friend recommended this book (and lent it to me), I read it backwards and forwards, I am going to buy it, and I will highly recommend it to friends who are struggling with the simple, complex questions of life.
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