Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage

A new study of this brilliant, perplexing and ""unnerving'' French thinker and moral heroine, who died in 1943 at age 34, is certainly called for, and this perceptive one does her justice. Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Children of Crisis, examines Weil's radical sociopolitical views, astringent moral philosophy and mystical Christianity, as revealed with penetrating lucidity in such posthumous collections of her writings as The Need for Roots and Gravity and Grace. He covers the facts of Weil's brief life (her death from TB was precipitated by her refusal of food) and ponders her strange ambivalence toward Judaism and Catholicism. Also included are interesting discussions on Weil that took place between the author and Anna Freud. (June 25)