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Summary: A true Life of St. Thomas More
Review: Peter Ackroyd has written a superb biography of this great figure Renaissance England, and Catholic history. His depiction of the sheer geogprahy of More's London world is so real that it served as guide for this reviewer on a visit to London who could trace More's steps, copy in hand. Ackroyd puts the humanist scholar, statesman, and saint in his own context and avoids the all too common trap of trying to "read" More against our own post-Christian secular world, where heresy is a "virtue", rather than a threat to the stability of an entire social and spiritual order. The only complaint this reviewer has is that Ackroyd has chosen to quote More's English works in their original spelling and grammar. This at times approximates reading a foreign language. It is this reviewer's opinion that he would have done better to use a more modern English, as his translations of More's Latin works are clear and eminently readable. All in all, however, a superb book !
Rating:
Summary: The best contempory text on the life of St. Thomas More!
Review: Peter Ackroyd is a master of drawing the reader into the experience of Thomas More. He provides a well researched and eloquent work that justly portrays the man and saint. Even though Sir Thomas More was emersed in the difficulties of state politics, economics, and law, Peter Ackroyd never loses sight of More's deep Catholic faith: "[The Mass] was the single most important aspect of his life, and the source from which much of his earnestness and his irony, his gravity and his playfulness, springs" (112).
Rating:
Summary: The best contempory text on the life of St. Thomas More!
Review: Peter Ackroyd is a master of drawing the reader into the experience of Thomas More. He provides a well researched and eloquent work that justly portrays the man and saint. Even though Sir Thomas More was emersed in the difficulties of state politics, economics, and law, Peter Ackroyd never loses sight of More's deep Catholic faith: "[The Mass] was the single most important aspect of his life, and the source from which much of his earnestness and his irony, his gravity and his playfulness, springs" (112).
Rating:
Summary: One of the most elegant biographies I've ever read!
Review: Peter Ackroyd's love of London and its stories shines through in this wonderful book. The life of Thomas More is one of the great stories of London. Ackroyd is unmatched in his ability to give just the right historical context to make his telling of his subject's story vivid and alive. The author loves his subject enough to give More an honest and complex portrait. The writing is wonderful, but there is also no white washing or simplifying for the kiddies. Yet More's greatness and honesty are clear and impressive. His humanity and what we would judge as failings (often mistakenly, I believe) serve, in my mind, to accentuate what he was able to become out of the lump of imperfect clay we all are. His work and faith and integrity stand as a monument to his name for all time. There are some wonderful pictures and discussions of the portraits in the context of More's life. This is very good stuff and I am grateful to the author for this brilliant book.
Rating:
Summary: A vivid telling of a magnificent and complex life
Review: Peter Ackroyd's love of London and its stories shines through in this wonderful book. The life of Thomas More is one of the great stories of London. Ackroyd is unmatched in his ability to give just the right historical context to make his telling of his subject's story vivid and alive. The author loves his subject enough to give More an honest and complex portrait. The writing is wonderful, but there is also no white washing or simplifying for the kiddies. Yet More's greatness and honesty are clear and impressive. His humanity and what we would judge as failings (often mistakenly, I believe) serve, in my mind, to accentuate what he was able to become out of the lump of imperfect clay we all are. His work and faith and integrity stand as a monument to his name for all time. There are some wonderful pictures and discussions of the portraits in the context of More's life. This is very good stuff and I am grateful to the author for this brilliant book.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing life = quite a good book
Review: Sir Thomas More gave the author a whole lot of life to work with and the book delivers wonderfully. More was one of the world's great lawyers, theologians, diplomats, and thinkers. When a biographer has material like this to work with, it is hard to go wrong.
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Summary: An Excellent Portrait of the Man and his Age...
Review: Sir Thomas More was described by brother-in-Humanism, Erasmus as "virum omninium horarum"(p. 52). Robert Bolt's play translates this illustrious sobriquet,"a man for all seasons." In his erudite, fascinatingly descriptive LIFE of THOMAS MORE, Peter Ackroyd has employed manifest powers of scholarship and love of subject to write a biography that will no doubt earn regard among THE definitive. Some readers may find the immense zeit-geist(era)detail;and description of More's education...along with characterization of mentors and spiritual/intellectual influences...distracting, even tedious. On the contrary, the excellence of Ackroyd's effort is to CONSTRUCT before an attentive reader: TIME(incipient Reformation); PLACE(London, as a Center of Western Christendom);and the MAN( as he was; not as Post-Modernist Deconstructionist/revisionists say he was, or should have been). The award winning author of LONDON crafts a "living" city. Within this ambience,he delineates More's demanding legal education regimen in a time where LAW defined class and art/craft of POWER. Secular and Ecclesiastical Law--literally--vied for men's souls as well as ordinary compliance within the polity. Chapter VI: DUTY is the LOVE of the LAW is crucial to understanding Thomas More as being practical and singularly A MAN of his TIME...as well as "man for all seasons" whom Winston Churchill is said to aver "the greatest Englishman these isles have ever produced." More's conflict--absolute preeminence of spiritual/Ecclesiatical law over against a growing body of utilitarian, civil law--IS the essence of his story. Well known, it ends in reluctant defiance of the King's "Dieu et Mon Droit"(when human "Droit" is declared precedent to God's Law); martyrdom; and eventual Sainthood. A materialist,secular culture as ours might,indeed, find More's defiance "disproportionate obstinacy" rather than heroic. But as Ackroyd's information and impact of More's "gravitas" become "overwhelming", one's convictions are tested like More's( or any "educated" Englishman)in the days following LUTHER's Reformation and HENRY VIII's peremptory Edicts on royal SUCCESSION and--for More--far more importantly,SUPREMACY over Christians and Christ's Church. Deconstructionists(Harvard's Richard Marius, for example)place great weight on their own interpretation of what More "must have thought" or "should have acted". Ackroyd tries to characterize. He quotes "olde" English from oral and written records. He cites words and actions which publically ( More's Chancellorship); relgiously (attendance at daily Mass and observance of "hair shirt"penance); and intellectually(renowned authorship of tracts, letters and political satire,UTOPIA); reveal him. For example, that More was vigorous prosecutor of heretics is neither denied nor concealed. In that TIME, heretics--as enemies of the Universal(Catholic)Church--were both enemies of God and The State (more properly The Commonwealth of Christendom; of which all European Kingdoms were precedentially and intrinsically part). The book itself is well-appointed with classic portraits of More; Erasmus; Henry VIII; Cromwell; Luther: Henry's Wives and numerous other players. The bibliography is formidable and by-the-chapter SOURCE notes very helpful. This is a great book. It is excellent portrait of a good man of great talent,"not to the manner born, but trained" to be counselor to the King.His fate is well known. The book, to this reader, marks well emerging tragedy in integrity and heroism which The Roman Catholic Church still regards worthy of declared SAINTHOOD. In a time like ours the exploration of INTEGRITY alone makes The Life of THOMAS MORE well worth considered reading...(10 stars)
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Summary: Interesting & well documented not religious propaganda.
Review: The book is first a work of history and secondly an historical story. No license is taken in creating events without historical records to back up the author's interpretation. The book is well written and interesting though some of the subject matter (such as legalities of 16th centrury England) a bit dry. I liked best that the book in no way presented the historical character of Thomas More in supernatural or propagandistic terms but showed his life, not as a "saint", but as a man struggling with issues of conscience versus political expediency under the tyranny of Henry VIII. He stayed true to his conscience without showing at any time even the slightest disloyalty to the king yet was executed for treason anyway. Erasmus said that More should have left theology to the theologians and signed the oath of succession and thus saved his life. No matter what anyone else might have done in similar circumstances, Sir Thomas More was a man of honor and his life is interesting to read about. If you like history and fact-based biography, you'll love this book.
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Summary: An Amazing Tour of Another World
Review: The world that Thomas More lived in, the ideas that motivated him, and the reasons he did the things that he did, are so different from the world we live in today that it may be hard for people living today to really understand them. Peter Ackroyd, however, does a superb job of placing us in that world, and inside More's head, thus giving us a portrait of a great man living on the cusp of a world-changing transformation, as the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment. After reading Ackroyd's portrait, however, I find myself of two minds about Thomas More. I admire his devotion to the truth, and his refusal to bow to the demands of Henry VIII. As a Catholic, I admire his devotion to the Church and honor him as the martyr and saint that he is. At the same time, and as Ackroyd shows in this unvarnished biography, this is the same man who sent "heretics" to the stake, or to be beheaded, thus seeming to give sanction to the very methods that, in the hands of others, led to his own death. Read the book for yourself, though, and make up your own mind.
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Summary: A Penetrating and Artful Book
Review: This is a first-rate biography of the sainted Thomas More. Ackroyd's goals in this biography are to present a non-anachronistic depiction of More, and through his portrait of More, to give readers a sense of the late Medieval world destroyed by the Reformation and the emergence of nation-states. Ackroyd presents More as a man exemplifying the late Medieval ethos. Deeply religous, highly intelligent, and well educated, More existed with a profound sense of human fallibility and saw all aspects of his world as manifestations of a divine order. The world as the body of Christ, a metaphor to which Ackroyd returns repeatedly, is a recurring theme. The temporal world is transient and a necessary preparation for the eternal and in a crucial sense, less real than the eternal world of Christian teachings. This world is bound by custom and inherited legal and religous traditions, hierarchial and paternalistic in its structure of authority, and deeply enmeshed in rituals that mirror the structure of divine authority. More was not, however, a reactionary except when the radicalism of the Lutherans pushed him to stringent and violent acts needed to defend the integrity of his perception of the Christian world. A prominent member of the Northern European Humanist movement, More was dedicated to the recovery of a renovated faith based on a new reading of the Patristic fathers, attention to classical, particularly Greek neoplatonic authors, and disdain for complex scholastic theology. He and his fellow Humanists hoped for reformation of the Church without abandoning the unity of Christendom, the apparatus of ritual and hierarchy that defined so much of their lives, and the primacy of papal authority. Ackroyd's efforts to present More and the late medieval ethos are very successful. Readers will be introduced to a foreign world, but one which is an ancestor of our contemporary society. Ackroyd's efforts at depicting the lost of world of More include not only the content but the structure of the book. Some prior reviewers commented adversely on Ackroyd's use of unmodified quotations from More's English writings. While interpreting these lines requires a little effort, that effort helps to appreciate More's style. As Ackroyd points out, for More and his contemporaries, style was not simply a matter of presentation but had a significant moral dimension. While chronologically arranged, this biography is not strictly a narrative of More's life. Each chapter is presented as an almost self contained vignette or episode from More's life. I believe this is a deliberate effort on Ackroyd's part to mimic aspects of medieval ritual and theater. This is another and I think successful effort on the part of Ackroyd to present the late Medieval world. Ackroyd argues that not only that More was dedicated to the importance of ritual and theater but that it formed a very important part of More's character and perhaps self-image. Ackroyd's construction of this book is then a doubly artful device to mirror both the world of late medieval England and More himself.
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