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Saint Augustine, by Garry Wills

Peter Brown is credited with discovering Augustine the old man. Gary Wills should be recognized for discovering Augustine the young man. Though Wills devotes only 40 percent of his book to the first 45 of Augustine's 76 years, that scale is disproportionately large in terms of the comparatively meager documentation available for the first part of Augustine's life. A contribution to the Penguin Lives series, Wills's book is a departure both from his usual focus on American political figures and from the Penguin series' frequent focus on the modern period.

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