A solid exploration into the fine line between the faithful and the fraudulent in 20th-century Catholicism.
Biography of Padre Pio, a 20th-century Italian friar who claimed religious miracles, including stigmata.
Luzzatto (Modern History/Univ. of Turin, Italy; The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, 2005) recounts the little-known tale of the modest Capuchin monk who experienced a religious epiphany in September 1918 that spurred controversy and divided Catholics for decades. “I look at my hands, feet, and side and see they are wounded and blood is pouring out,” he reported. Padre Pio claimed his injuries were actually the mark of the stigmata, agitating not only his small mountain town, but the head of the church in Rome as well. Set against the backdrop of war-torn Italy, Luzzatto offers a rich story of faith versus science, in which Padre Pio’s claims of miraculous wonder were believed by the people but discounted by the pope. By 1945, Padre Pio received 45,000 letters per year, though his popularity made him a target. The Catholic Church was uncertain how to deal with the holy man, though “[b]etween 1918 and 1968, every pontiff tried, directly or indirectly, to put his stamp on Padre Pio.” On the church’s authority, Padre Pio underwent a battery of psychological tests, leading his examiner to conclude his subject of “infirm mind” and a “psychiatric hospital mystic.” Yet soon after, another examination concluded differently, offering a “vote of confidence for Padre Pio.” The mystery remained unresolved, though doubt began rising once more when it was discovered that Padre Pio often retained small amounts of carbolic acid in his cell—a chemical fully capable of burning the marks he claimed were God-given. The world watched as Rome struggled to decide whether they were debunking a myth or disregarding a miracle. Luzzatto hones in on the central question: “could a good Christian ever accept the existence of an alter Christus, a living Christ figure?” Padre Pio’s experiences would suggest not, at least in the view of the papacy.
A solid exploration into the fine line between the faithful and the fraudulent in 20th-century Catholicism.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8905-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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