The Power and the Glory

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Summary: Christians come through in the end.
Review: Graham Greene wrote a masterpiece in "The Power and the Glory." This book illustrated the corruption of the Catholic Church in Mexico and the governments persecution on all catholic priests. "The Power and the Glory" is a wonderful hero story, in that the wisky priest becomes a marytr in the end. He accepts his fate and dies like a good Christian. And like a good Christian he feels himself unworthy of God. He is extremely humble and yearns that he could have done more for God.

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Summary: I don't want to hear about some priest trying to run away.
Review: Idon't want to hear about some dumb priest trying to run away from the lutinant just because he disobeyed some rules.

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Summary: Entertaining adventure, compassionate vision...
Review: P&G is a small, stunning surprise - an entertaining adventure atop a deep, compassionate vision. As an agnostic, I found Greene conveyed an eloquent message of Christian values illuminating a path for human fellowship and personal redemption. His elevating portrait of Christianity is accentuated by an ironic attack on the corrupting influence of his adopted Catholic Church, an attack which earned the book a formal condemnation from the Vatican.

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Summary: Faith expressed through action offers redemption...
Review: Greene's tremendously moving and eloquent book, hewn from the bleak landscape of Mexico early in the century, explores the human face of a martyr, and challenges the reader to examine where we fall in the great divide between secularism and religion. Certainly not a peice of "Christian propoganda," Greene examines a faith that is truely equal to all others, with all the same doubts, blemishes, unanswered questions. And through the eyes of the whiskey priest, and those who view him, perhaps we glimpse something of a world where ordinary people believe (or not)as ordinary people do, and still find redemption.

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Summary: Powerfully edifying!
Review: Graham Greene, like Walker Percy, is one of Christ's secret agents in the culture. He draws pictures of imperfect Christians and/or seekers who manage to experience God's grace and redemption. You can't miss it in this tale of the bad priest who somehow soldiers on in spite of his failures as a human being and preserves hope in the faithful Catholic peasants who respect the authority of his position in spite of his obvious flaws.

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Summary: A masterpiece.
Review: While it is true that one need not be a Christian in order to appreciate this literary masterpiece, it certainly doen't hurt. Greene provides here, whether it is his intention or not, a neo-Augustinian meditation on fallen human nature and the redemptive power of the Church itself. Read it and be haunted by the beauty of the transforming power of sacrificial love upon the fallen, yet heroic, "whiskey priest."

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Summary: A thrilling, intensely moving, unforgettable novel
Review: As a fervent admirer of Graham Greene, I don't love this novel as I love his later The End of the Affair and The Honorary Consul,but I agree with the many critics and readers who see The Power and the Glory as a superb work - possibly Greene's finest. It's set in the ravaged Mexico of the thirties, a country torn apart by civil war, a country turned into a hellhole. Greene had just visited Mexico and the travel book he published before The Power and the Glory,under the title The Lawless Roads, is a fascinating account, full of anger and loathing. Because in Mexico he had seen burnt churches and he had heard countless stories of Catholic priests executed by the Communist authorities. The hero of his novel is a hunted priest; he is not a saint - far from it: he is a sinner - father of an illegitimate child and alcoholic. The peasants call him "the whisky priest". But he is the only priest left in the country, so he continues to do his duty, though he feels unworty of it. And such is Greene's skill in portraying him that we believe in his astonishing humility. The priest's painful awareness of his own unworthiness is totally convincing. There is no affectation there. The novel has an unique atmosphere of squalor and decay and some episodes - the priest drinking wine with his hunters, who do not suspect who he is; the priest spending a night in prison and feeling that he belongs there, in all that grime and suffering - have a beauty and a complexity comparable to anything written everywhere in this century - possibly in any century. The novel is no propaganda. It is not one-sided, it is never preachy, it doesn't gloat in its virtue. Greene tries to do justice to all his characters. He even does justice to the cold, unhappy lieutenant who chases and eventually kills the priest. That man, too, thinks he's right; he has his own truth. It is not necessary to be a Catholic ( I'm not) to like The Power and the Glory. It's not even necessary to believe in God. It is not a lesson in how to become a saint. It is a work of art meant to illuminate, to evoke pity and terror, to enlarge our understanding of human nature.

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Summary: AAAAAAAACCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHH
Review: I had to read this for school and I hated it! By the end I got so impatient with it that I could not read more than 5 or 10 pages at a time. Do NOT subject yourself to this Christian propaganda unless you have to!

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Summary: The whiskey priest's struggle for survival!
Review: **** The Power and the Glory receives four stars because of the emotion. Graham Greene writes in a way that makes you feel as though you are part of the action. The last priest is on the run. You feel for him and want him to be free. The action though, was a little slow at times. I couldn't believe half the concepts written in The Power and the Glory. It's about a Catholic priest struggling to survive in the 20th century when being a priest was banned in Mexico. Along his lifetime he has a child and becomes an alcoholic. Greene is extremely descriptive and compassionate. There is not one scene in this entire novel of which you cannot picture in your mind exactly what it looks like. Greene used wise vocabulary choices. The Power and the Glory was filled with quite a few words and phrases that I did not understand, though. Perhaps because he sometimes used a foreign language. Once I knew what they meant though, everything clicked right back into place. In concluding my reading of this novel, I cried a few times and maybe even laughed a little. I felt as though I was alongside the priest throughout his entire struggle of survival. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who will not be easily offended by language or the complete misconduct of this Catholic whiskey priest. The Power and the Glory is an intense as well as a suspenseful journey of one priest, the last priest, the whiskey priest's way to freedom. ****

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Summary: Nobel Prize material
Review: Greene should have received the Nobel Prize in literature for this book. It's that good...