The Life of David by Robert Pinsky

An interesting read by an interesting author. Robert Pinsky was the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. While there are many books about David, this one makes an especially interesting read due who is writing it. Below is some more information on the book. I am looking forward to our discussion! - Poet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David's life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing on the biblical chronicle of David's life as well as on the later commentaries and the Psalms—traditionally considered to be David's own words—Pinsky teases apart the many strands of David's story and reweaves them into a glorious narrative. Under the clarifying and captivating light of Pinsky's erudition and imagination, and his mastery of image and expression, King David—both the man and the idea of the man—is brought brilliantly to life. "Pinsky's language and insights are gorgeous, as we have come to expect from his poetry and his prose about poetry, and one finishes "The Life of David" with a sense of King David as a Shakespearean figure — the Bard himself, along with Hamlet, King Lear and Henry IV, all wrapped into one." —Daniel Schifrin, San Francisco Chronicle