Recovering the Icon: The Life and Works of Leonid Ouspensky

St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, March 2008. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. It's a tall, thin hardcover with a simple yet elegant cover and contents, and we could sum up the message concisely: iconography is a living act, a living Tradition passed through the vermilion hand and azure soul of the icon-writer. The whole Church, from its catacomb days in antiquity to its catacomb days in the modern era, has been thinking, praying and speaking in this language, this charismatic language of icons. Between the short, inspiring biography introducing the book and its elegant closing memoir, <i>Recovering the Icon</i> reproduces and explains 100 icons -- painted, carved or pressed in silver -- by the hand of a modern master. The focus is the master himself, Russian émigré in Paris, Leonid Ouspensky. We offer other books, such as <i> Icons and Saints</i> and Ouspensky's <i>Theology of the Icon</i>, which detail the history of icons and their place in the Christian Tradition. Here, the life and work of a single iconographer is presented to us by his wife Lydia, and by former student Patrick Doolan. The life verifies the work. 104 pp. oversize. Very Good copy, with light rubbing to covers near spine; jacket shows considerable rubbing wear but no edge tears or chips. Text pristine.