C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands: The Story of His Life with Joy Davidman [Paperback]

Brian Sibley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1999

Two divergent lives remarkably intertwined in the love between Christian scholar C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, a Jewish-American divorce and former Communist Party member. This perceptive portrait reveals their life together and Lewiss bereavement.

Published in trade paperback in 1994, this book is now available in mass-market paperback.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Revell (July 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080078670X
• ISBN-13: 978-0800786700
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,793,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Myth that Really Happened, January 19, 2004

By 

Lisa Ann Forte (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands: The Story of His Life with Joy Davidman (Paperback)

This is the most heartrendingly true, real, unfettered love story ever lived or written about. Brian Sibley has masterfully set the achingly beautiful love story between Jack Lewis and Joy Gresham within the masterfully researched and delightfully detailed context of the greater love story which God the Master storyteller was writing through their lives. This is the definitive work proving the maxim that the book is always better than the movie.

Filled with wonderful quotes not only from the extensive works of Lewis, both before and after the entrance of Joy into his world, this work also excerpts from Joy's writings and the writings of the many literary and philosophical geniuses of their world. Journal entries from Jack's brother Warnie bring special intimacy to the daily life and passages toward death of both characters, and Douglas Gresham's experience as son and step-son told through conversations and remembrances are invaluable close-up additions to the tale.

Altogether surprising are the two seemingly disparate threads of Jack and Joy's continents-apart lives and paths to faith. (These journeys to awakening are surprising in themselves.) The seeming coincidences that bring them together as pen-mates and ultimately marriage partners bring the reader to the unmistakable conclusion that "the fair Silent Thou" was at work all along in the quiet, relentless weaving of their lives.

The reader familiar with the works of C.S. Lewis will see by story's end that this miraculously joyful, simultaneously tragic love story is in reality True Myth shining through into our shadowlands anew. As Lewis was convinced, and has convinced me, myth is the vehicle through which God speaks to man, and the story of the happily-ever-after love, even through death and grief, is the greatest story ever told, as well as the most Real. For this reason it breaks our hearts while transporting us into the joyful longing to be a part of it.

Brian Sibley gently proves the need for this particular myth to become true in Jack's battened-down bachelor soul. In the friendliest and most respectful of ways Sibley shows the necessary journey that the life and death of Joy Gresham, the most unlikely of angels, set our hero upon, and what adventures he had therein, and how it ended happily ever after.

15 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good read, March 22, 2000

By 

TSO "danieloconnaughton" (Columbus, Oh USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: C.S. Lewis Through the Shadowlands: The Story of His Life with Joy Davidman (Paperback)

A very readable and well-done book which highlights the fascinating relationship between two people who would seem to have little in common. Even better than the movie!