"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Blind, broken by the death of his wife and bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, Milton dictated his sweeping biblical epic Paradise Lost to a series of helpers. While the struggle between God and Satan rages across the cosmos, the human tragedy of Adam and Eve the temptation and fall is movingly depicted in language unsurpassed in its musicality and beauty. A staggering and audacious undertaking...

Stephen Greenblatt explores the enduring story of humanity's first parents. 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. "Bolder, even, than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt...

Provides answers to such children's questions as "Did bumblebees have stingers before Adam and Eve sinned?" and "Why do evolutionists trust their beliefs and not Christ?"