PanThe New York Times Book ReviewGreenblatt never seems to consider why the myth might have felt so true to those who found their religious and humanist values affirmed by it — and their own deepest intuitions, which science has partly borne out ... Greenblatt respects his subject, and still he assumes that the rationalist reading offers up the true meaning of the story ... An awareness of the religious movement that Milton identified with and championed would have also helped Greenblatt in his parsing of the poet’s views on marriage. The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is an ambitious attempt at an important cultural history. It is cursory, and, to the degree that its treatment of these influential texts and movements is uninformed, it is not a help in understanding them.
