Rating: 
Summary: A prism lense
Review: "The Life You Save" turns out to be a challenging and powerful read. A prism lense for introspection--something greater than the sum of its parts. A tapestry artfully created from the strands of the lives of four contemporary "saints"--using that term in sense of those set apart for a special task. It is moving; it challenges preconceptions; it inspires, even as it is honest in appraisal. What a portrait, finally, of four pilgirms traveling the Way together, seeking to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling in order to help the rest of us fearful and trembing pilgrims along the Way! Fine, also, in its depiction of an age of transition--moving out of modern into postmodern. The last page of the book is worth the price of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: "Not all who wander are lost..."
Review: A walk through the wilderness of 20th century America with four of its most interesting Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton. Both a biography of these postmodern pilgrims and a meditation on their work and how they were all able to be part of the same communion while each of them found God through different paths: contemplation, art, philosophy, andcharity, respectively.
I had read "The Seven Story Mountain" years ago and found the young Merton, like any recent convert, to be a bit too smug and assured that he had all the answers. This book puts the arrogant young Merton into the fuller context of a life that had its share of doubts, disappointments, and struggles.
Flannery O'Connor was young, smart and talented (and knew it) and looked forward to the promise of an elite cosmopolitan life. That promise was lost when she contracted Lupus and was consigned to spend the rest of her short life living on her mother's farm with a little company other than her mother, a few pen pals, and a flock of peacocks. She turned this curse into a blessing by using her isolation to go deep within herself and to explore the mysteries of faith through unforgettable, fantastic stories and eccentric characters.
Dorothy Day spent her life serving the poor of New York City and fighting against militarism and violence through popular and unpopular wars. Whether or not all of her decisions were wise, she never faltered in her determination to live according to the teachings of Christ.
Walker Percy was a physician and pathologist who used his pungent imagination and his firm grasp of philosophical literature to attempt to diagnose the spiritual alienation that has infected the modern world.
Of course, reading this book is only the beginning. Once you have become acquainted with these four, you can get even more insight by going back and reading through their own books.
Rating: 
Summary: Why was this book written?
Review: I don't believe I have ever read a book in which the author worked so hard to distance himself from his subject matter. Based on his writing, I picture Mr. Elie as exactly the sort of secularized "Big Intellectual" that all four of the people he writes about would have regarded with pity. Why would someone so convinced that Catholic orthodoxy is dead, and that no modern person takes the teachings of the Baltimore Catechism seriously, write about these four people, of ALL the people in the world to write about? I never cease to marvel at how crabbed and parochial the world of the east coast writer really is. Was there no one involved in the editorial process who might have pointed out to Mr. Elie that the Baltimore Catechism is alive and well, and that the Catholic faith remains as credible for millions today as it was to Merton, O'Connor et al.? All I can figure is that Elie is trying to exorcize the ghost of a parochial school education. In that case, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.
Rating:
Summary: Why was this book written?
Review: I don't believe I have ever read a book in which the author worked so hard to distance himself from his subject matter. Based on his writing, I picture Mr. Elie as exactly the sort of secularized "Big Intellectual" that all four of the people he writes about would have regarded with pity. Why would someone so convinced that Catholic orthodoxy is dead, and that no modern person takes the teachings of the Baltimore Catechism seriously, write about these four people, of ALL the people in the world to write about? I never cease to marvel at how crabbed and parochial the world of the east coast writer really is. Was there no one involved in the editorial process who might have pointed out to Mr. Elie that the Baltimore Catechism is alive and well, and that the Catholic faith remains as credible for millions today as it was to Merton, O'Connor et al.? All I can figure is that Elie is trying to exorcize the ghost of a parochial school education. In that case, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.
Rating:
Summary: Literature as Spiritual Direction
Review: I had read a lot of Flannery O'Connor, but didn't know as much about Merton, Dorothy Day, or Walker Percy. Elie's assessment of O'Connor's writing is not only accurate, but insightful. He is a very gifted theologian, literary critic, and biographer. In reading him, I gained several new insights into O'Connor's stories and how her life and Catholicism influenced them. Some of his images (for instance, describing Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation" as a "hillbilly Thomist") were absolutely delightful and right on target. Through Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor, he also paints a wonderful picture of the strange and wonderful world of Southern Catholics. What is most impressive about this book, however, is how he weaves the lives, writing and faith journeys of four very different persons together, showing that indeed, grace perfects nature, even when the "nature" is quite different from one personality to another. They were all clearly influenced by the same threads of Catholic theology and spirituality, but reflected it back to us in very different ways. This book was interesting to me because of its literary and theological themes. But even more, it was spiritual reading. Again and again I stoped reading and compared their spiritual journeys to my own. Reading Elie's book has deepened my faith and given me hope that despite my own doubts and the "bumps in the road" on my spiritual journey, I might still one day hope to achieve some measure of holiness. What's more, I highlighted many passages which will surely be fodder for some future preaching! Fr. Charles Bouchard, OP
Rating:
Summary: Illuminating
Review: I stumbled upon an advance reader's copy of this work in a used bookshop--I had never heard of the book's author, an editor at FSG, but I was curious to find out how he would weave together the stories of his four subjects: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy. At first glance, they seemed to have little in common apart from their religion. As Elie shows in this entertaining and informative book, these writers were all highly aware of each other, and would meet on their separate "pilgrimages" toward authentic spirituality in increasingly secular times. "The School of the Holy Ghost" (as this quartet was once called) was not a school at all, as the Imagists or the Beats were; however, Elie shows, they felt a profound kinship, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the book is Elie's depiction of how they reached out to each other, through fan letters, postcards, reviews, publishing each other's work, and not-always-successful meetings (Merton and Percy had little to say to one another as they sipped bourbon on the porch of Merton's hermitage in Kentucky.) Above all, what brought these Catholic believers together was a love of literature, and Elie's book happily overflows with this same virtue. Whether discussing Day and Merton's dispute over Vietnam draft card burning, or the racism of O'Connor's letters, Elie writes elegant and opinionated prose. He shows how hard these people had to struggle to find a path for themselves, and how they came to see struggle as an inherent quality of faith. His readings of O'Connor and Percy's fiction are astute, and he productively contrasts Day's activism with Merton's withdrawal into solitude. Elie's use of letters--especially O'Connor's--brings out the voices of the principals, and at the end of the book, you feel that you know them personally. I would recommend this superb synthesis to anyone interested in the intersection of faith and literature.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book
Review: If you are interested in any one of the four authors represented here (Day, Merton, O'Connor, Percy) you will find the context and comparisons that Elie makes extremely illuminating. It is a challenging task to interweave four biographies in a way that is interesting and mutually enriching. Elie does it. He writes well and his comparisons of these four along with other important influences are always clear and helpful. Very well done piece of work.
Rating:
Summary: Mind Moving
Review: In The Life You Save May Be Your Own : An American Pilgrimage, Paul Elie skillfully integrates the lives and works of Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Percy Walker. The spiritual and artistic struggles of each author are unforgetable. A read that can alter one's life.
Rating:
Summary: The Book You Read May Be Your Pilgrimage
Review: Paul Elie ably portrays the lives of four American saints in The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Elie follows the lives of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, Southern outcast Flannery O'Connor, literary gentleman Walker Percy, and Christian radical Dorothy Day. Rather than strict biography, Elie follows each writer's life as a pilgrimage, seeing the progression of the country's history and American Catholicism along the details of their lives.
For a book weighing in at 560 hefty pages, Elie provides a surprisingly quick read. He has an excellent ability to feel with each of his subject's quite different personalities. Elie also examines the strength and limitations of Catholics in America, the heart of a writer, and different ways to express one's faith in art and in life. Not only a read for critics or for Catholics, this is a wonderful bedtime book for anyone who wants to combine their love for God, for literature, and for the poor and outcasts of our world today.
Rating:
Summary: Moving Examination of Religious Belief in American Writing
Review: Paul Elie's book is a sort of multiple biography of four well-known American writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day), as well as a social and intellectual history of 20th century American Catholicism. This is a very ambitious book, but Elie pulls it off with great style. The strongest parts of the book are about O'Connor and Percy; maybe this is because they were the more accomplished writers. Elie makes O'Connor come alive again; we see the maidenishly lovable and strong-willed young author as she is struck down by illness and condemned to a confinement in her rural backwater. Instead of giving into despair she turns to her faith and casts a compassionate but unblinking eye to the human "grotesques" of the South: they come to unforgettable life in "Wise Blood" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find". She becomes interested in the powerful, consoling theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who taught that "everything that rises must converge." She dies of lupus at age 39. Walker Percy also had to battle with despair. Both his father and grandfather committed suicide. The Percys were an aristocratic Southern family with a strong tradition of stoicism; that is, the nobility of suffering as the sole consolation. Percy eventually came to see that wasn't enough. In his first novel, "The Moviegoer", he examined "the greatest despair: that it does not know that it is despair." And in his best novel (in my opinion) "The Thanatos Syndrome" he explores the death wish of western civilization and the necessary faith-based cure. Elie's accounts of the lives of Merton and Day are also very interesting, but those authors are perhaps not quite as prominent as they used to be. Day is better known for her many good works than her prosaic writing. And the monasticism of Merton seems to be a little esoteric and removed from quotidian, everyday life as it is lived by most of us. But they are still worthwhile as studies of what it means to take religion seriously in your life; to try to see the ultimate, luminous transcendental reality above and beyond the immediately visible one. This is a very moving, soul-satisfying book.
|
