Never Ask The End (Only Original Book) Isabel Paterson [Very Good] [Hardcover]

Description

First Edition (SD, NAP). Once listed, this will be the Only original first edition for sale on the Internet. Actually it's the only William Morrow & Co. edition, first or otherwise. The only other copies are a few mail order book club Literary Guild editions. All the more remarkable for a book that was so very highly regarded. Here are excerpts of reviews from well-known writers of the time: Ellen Glasgow-- 'The whole modern approach to life, with its eagerness, its lightness, its disenchantment, its feeling for the moment as it passes and because it passes, its joy but not too much joy, its pain but not too much pain, its courage in the face of time, its secret loyalties of the heart, and yet, somehow, somewhere, its lack of the state or quality of mind Spinoza called 'blessedness'--all this is woven here into a pattern that seems as real as the hour in which we are living. Never Ask the End is a book of delicacy, charm, and truth, interfused with the something different that is personality.' James Branch Cabell, Saturday Review: 'Mrs. Paterson has made, in Never Ask the End, a book which any tolerably civilized American must regard, throughout, with a sort of charmed squirming. Of those of us Americans, reasonably cultured, who have today reached responsible middle life, here is an honest portrait, all the honest will admit perforce.' And 'Never Ask the End, a book written in the wake of Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, and other early stream of consciousness novels, is a meditation on relationships, and has an extraordinary richness.' Paterson is, of course, best known now as, in the words of her biographer Stephen Cox, the 'earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today.' 'Historian Jim Powell has called Paterson one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism, along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson. Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy, with Rand writing that 'it is a document that could literally save the world, doing for capitalism what Das Kapital did for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity.' Never Ask The End is a different sort of book. 'Now and then one can glimpse a bit of this aspect of Paterson's thinking but I would caution anyone against reading it in hopes of pulling out some juicy bits of libertarian insight-- just as I would warn non-Randians against shying away from it because of what others have made of Paterson and her political views since her rediscovery. In Never Ask the End, three intelligent and world-wise middle-aged people share a few days and a few thoughts with each other (and with us), and while it will probably not change anyone's world view, you will certainly feel the more fortunate for having read it.' Despite its age, this book is in quite nice condition. As you can see, the covers are very clean, just...