Rating: 
Summary: The Passion For Joan of Arc.
Review: This is an excellent book in an excellent series.The Penguin Lives series offers well-written short biographies on some of history's most facinating people. What is amazing is how much information are contained in these small books--and how well matched the authors are to their subjects. Who better to write about Joan of Arc than Mary Gordon? She gives Joan a thorough treatment--exploring religous, historical & feminist ideas about Joan. This would be a good book to begin learning about Joan of Arc, but it also would be of interest to someone who is an expert on the subject...Gordon's ideas about Joan are worth taking a literary look at. I have also read the books on Mozart & Andy Warhol in this series...again, this is one of the best. If you love biographies, look no further.
Rating: 
Summary: Getting to Know Joan
Review: With my memory of Joan of Arc quite dimmed, I thought Ms. Gordon's book would be at least a suitable introduction to/reacquainting with a fascinating subject, and it was. Never did I take the book as a "serious" biography. Rather, I saw it -as others have and as I have viewed other books in the Penguin Lives series - as a meditation, an essay or a study which, in past Lives, indeed has led me to read some of the fuller biographical sources upon which the author drew. Ms. Gordon immediately oriented me on her work about Joan by noting in the first sentence of her Acknowledgement that there are more than 20,000 books about Joan in the Bibliotheque Nationale alone. How could any reader expect her or any other writer to thoroughly or fairly distill the treasure of information on Joan for the Lives series? Yet, she seemed to address the wondrous and vexing aspects of a timelessly complicated character adequately. Her bias was transparent but understandable so as not to bother me; in fact, it made for good reflection on and dialog with the book. Thank you, Ms. Gordon, for a worthy addition to the body of work on Joan, for contributing to the Lives series (which, in my opinion, has been good for biography) and for the information on the treatments of Joan in mediums other than print. PS - I'm just a reader, not an agent for Gordon, Penguin, Joan or anything else, in this instance.
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