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Title: The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Narrator: Stephen Hoye
Format: Unabridged
Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-12-17
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 47 votes
Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Publisher's Summary:
Stephen Greenblatt - Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award- winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World - investigates the life of one of humankind's greatest stories.
Bolder even than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity's first parents. Comprising only a few ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness.
Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and, finally, so very "real" to millions of people even in the present. With the uncanny brilliance he previously brought to his depictions of William Shakespeare and Poggio Bracciolini (the humanist monk who is the protagonist of The Swerve), Greenblatt explores the intensely personal engagement of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in this mammoth project of collective creation while he also limns the diversity of the story's offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature.
The biblical origin story, Greenblatt argues, is a model for what the humanities still have to offer: not the scientific nature of things but rather a deep encounter with problems that have gripped our species for as long as we can recall and that continue to fascinate and trouble us today.

Members Reviews:
Dissappointing, yet interesting
Two of the major sets of commentary are given short shrift. While there is mention of Jewish and Islamic traditions they are mostly set aside as contrasts against the more influential Christian traditions, because this book is really about how the story influenced Western Civilization.
Even when they were mentioned it was too frequently without proper chronological context. Islamic traditions of the story came hundreds of years after Augustin, and the comparison of his work, that of Muslims, and that of Jews seems out of place in the chapters that relate to his establishment of a literal tradition among Catholics. More appropriate it would have been to examine the departures of Islam from Augustine, not the reverse.