The Everlasting Man: G. K. Chesterton's Masterpiece of Christian Apologetics Paperback – May 24, 2024

The book that helped C.S. Lewis rediscover his faith. Amazing scope of all history and even prehistory, and how it all leads to Christ. Chesterton's genius illuminates every page.

Why this book isn’t number one, flying off the shelves is beyond me.

Product was as promised and promptly delivered. Would buy again.

a very read, very informative and satisfying adventure

If all religious books were as entertainingly argumentative and downright fun as THE EVERLASTING MAN, the whole world would be crossing itself. How exhilarating it must have been when, like gentlemen, Chesterton and Shaw and Wells and Beerbohm were at each other’s throats. A gentleman era that ended with a cataclysm: The Great War. After that the best lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of - themselves. Why Amazon doesn’t keep this paperback in stock is beyond me. But it’s easily available for $14.95 at its 2011 publisher Ignatius Press for those who are interested.

(Cautionary Note: This book was first published in 1922 and while Gilbert Keith Chesterton (GKC) was in most ways a man far ahead of his time (and ours as well) he was still a English middle-class professional writer who sometimes slipped unconsciously into the conventions of his culture. In two places in this book, writing about universal human religiosity, GKC, when referring to indigenous Africans, drops the N-word. In the Father Brown story, "The God of the Gong" GKC used it a lot more, and even in the context of the story, most contemporary readers will cringe (at the very least). This admitted, I do not think you can call GKC a racist, or even from some other unfortunate written expressions, an anti-Semite. A good part why GKC successfully fought the Eugenics Movement in the UK (including forced sterilization laws of the "unfit") was GKC seeing and pointing out the undeniable racism in Eugenics. In his last book of essays, "The Well and the Shallows" GKC forthrightly placed himself in opposition to Nazism , even saying he was quite willing to place his body between the Nazis and any intended Jewish victims.)I believe it was GKC scholar Dale Alquist who related how he was told "Everything you are looking for in CS Lewis Chesterton did first and usually better.". "The Everlasting Man" actually was critical in then-atheist CS Lewis' return to the faith and in becoming the most famous Christian apologist of the 20th and into the 21st century.You really have to pay attention reading GKC, for while he is always readable, he's the undisputed "master of paradox". If you read casually or carelessly, you'll miss most of his points, and they are truly devastating to those he's aiming them at. While being charitable and hardly ever personal. GKC ALWAYS goes after the person's ideas and never the person. This is why he could remain friends with his philosophical opposites, HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, whereas another friend and fellow Catholic Hillare Belloc, alienated Wells and severely strained his relationship with Shaw."The Everlasting Man" was largely in response to HG Well's "Outline of History", a triumphalist-secularist tome first published before WWI (1912?) and Wells survived long enough to see two horrific world wars and the specter of atomic annihilation prove to him the flow of history was anything but inexorably optimistic. In "The Everlasting Man" GKC pointed out to the world that religious ideas, especially Christianity, (contra Wells) are anything but economically and politically determined, and because the faith is NOT of any particular age, ii is always critical for our survival as men and women in relation to Ultimate Reality, and not as an undifferentiated species merely existing until our sun goes out.

Disappointing

Chesterton's work is superb. But the print in this edition is so small (I believe its 10-point font) that it is quite a chore to read it.