SIMONE WEIL

This fine new addition to the Penguin line of brief lives is convincingly researched and gracefully written. But it is a lfe, not a "life and works," and the brilliant French intellectual Simone Weil was such an intractable neurotic that, while Gray admirably traces the intellectual and personal influences that shaped her strange, short, intense life, the reader who does not bring foreknowledge of her writings and her place in twentieth-century thought may wonder why she was worth putting up with. Given that limitation, Gray's portrait is fascinating, and Donada Peters's reading is, as usual, perfection. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/ JAN 02]