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Title: Markings by Dag Hammarskjold ISBN: 0-345-32741-1 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 (19 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Powerfully Reflective
Comment: As a single man, Hammarskjold's legacy was in his work, including the recorded ideas he left. This autobiographical glimpse of the man allows the reader to empathize with the loneliness of growing old without a mate. Although his life ended on less than desirable terms, there are some positives in his story as well. Hammarskjold made the most of the hand he was dealt in life. One can see an evolution of his thoughts over time. The book starts somewhat chaotic, but to the patient reader, the growth that emerges is worth the struggle of reaching the climax.
Various other thinkers are quoted in his "markings." Sometimes it's a stream of consciousness type reflection that is recorded.
Consider this "marking" from 1956, "We act in faith--and miracles occur...Faith is, faith creates, faith carries."
Here's another jewel from the following year: "We have to acquire a peace and balance of mind such that we give every word of criticism its due weight, and humble ourselves before every word of praise."
And another excerpt: "In any human situation, it is cheating not to be, at every moment, one's best."
To conclude this review here are some final thoughts that show the power of his concluding reflections:
"...He (God) is wholly in all you meet...
...each of your acts is an act of creation...
...everything, therefore, has a meaning. So live, then, that you may use what has been put into your hand..."
Rating: 4
Summary: Meditations for the modern world
Comment: I bought my first copy of Dag Hammarskjold's book of meditations, Markings, shortly after its release in the early 1960's. It was a strange and haunting book and left me deeply affected. Hammarskjold, for many years the Secretary General of the United Nations - at a time when there was still high hope for the U.N. to eliminate war and improve human welfare around the globe - wrote this journal of spiritual search and dispair in apparent recognition of his failure to achieve the high goals he aspired to. I forget who I gave that first book to, but I have since purchased and given away many copies of this book. There is much that all of us modern, media drugged folks can learn from the insights he penned in his dark moments. It is both uplifting to realize the depth of soul that can exist behind public action and at the same time depressing to recognize that no amount of fame or power will necessarily bring happiness or overcome one's sense of isolation in the universe.
This is not a book one can just sit down and read. It is, as the title suggests, a journal of isolated notes or 'Markings' that Hammarskjold made over a long period of time. Many similar ideas and themes are repeated in different words throughout the book and the reader really has to pause frequently to think about what he has read. This is not an uplifting book but ultimately it is a very moving one, and to the extent that it encourages similar meditations from the reader, potentially a very valuable one as well. I highly recommend this book for those hours when a reader wants to turn inward and shine a light on what is really meaningful in life.
Rating: 3
Summary: Occassionally Thought Provoking
Comment: The excessive sentence fragments, the unending infinitives, and the haphazard structure make this work at times kind of annoying. (His ego-centric contemptible "editor" W. H. Auden doesn't help matters in this respect. One often wonders who's to blame. There desperately needs to be an Auden-less edition. Hence the three stars.) But Hammarskjold isn't read today because he is a gifted writer. Markings is a fascinating book because of who wrote it. The words have life because of the identity of the author. This is what fascinates us: to get inside the head of a brilliant Swedish politician who to the rest of the world is just a successful public figure but to the reader reveals a real human being with angst, fear, doubt, loneliness, piety, faith, and struggles. We get to peek under the curtain, so to speak, and see an inner life that with any luck succeeds in reminding us of our humanity. This aspect of the work deserves five stars for sure. Breath on oh living soul and be for us a marking along a way that takes us to where you ultimately found your rest.
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Title: Hammarskjold (Harper colophon books) by Brian Urquhart ISBN: 0060911867 Publisher: Harper & Row Pub. Date: 1984 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jean-Pierre De Caussade ISBN: 0060618116 Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco Pub. Date: 01 May, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, M.D. Herter Norton ISBN: 0393310396 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 2004 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution) by Elise Boulding ISBN: 0815628323 Publisher: Syracuse University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Credo by William Sloane Coffin, James Carroll ISBN: 0664227074 Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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