Rating: 
Summary: A Flawed but Good Read
Review: Paul Elie's combined biographies of Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor has many virtues, which other reviewers have mentioned and elaborated upon. No doubt the convergence of the lives of these four gifted writers is a fascinating story, and Elie's footnotes in the back are very detailed and helpful. The main problem I have with this book is that Elie's Catholicism is so attenuated that it can hardly grasp much of what these writers were trying to do with their lives and with their work. On the last page of his book, Elie states plainly his position that "there is no one true faith", true for all people, all times. That's a proposition that I think his four subjects would take issue with, and sharply. As O'Connor famously said of the Blessed Sacrament, "If it's a symbol, well the hell with it." Elie also has a fairly superficial understanding of what a pilgrimage is in traditional Catholic culture and theology. He reduces it to a journey undertaken to see something with one's own eyes, something akin to a story lived out. Well, sure, but of the deeper sense of that word--one central certainly to Percy--Elie has no idea. The "homo viator" is essentially a pilgrim, a wayfarer, and is central to Percy's idea of the self, and thus to all his work. Alas, Elie's faith--at least as expressed in this book--is nothing like the faith of the writers he finds so fascinating. Merton, Day, Percy, and O'Connor knew their faith allowed them to assent to something that transcended their reason, that allowed them to partake of mysteries that are not "projected" by their desires, but are the source and goal of all natural human desires in the first place. Elie's interesting but flawed work shows that heterodox Catholicism is hardly up to the task of really appreciating these gifted writers. Unfortunately, that is the least of its problems.
Rating: 
Summary: A rare work
Review: The author sets a high bar and then glides over it.
In a word, one of the best books I've ever read.
Rating:
Summary: LITTLE LIVES - LARGE LESSONS
Review: THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN (an American Pilgrimage)
Peter Elie
This sounds merely like a book that mingles biographies of four Catholic writers. As the subtitle tells, it is an American Pilgrimage and lives like these could only be found in America. The book is a journey to the shrines of life and wisdom found in these four and through their writing. Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton: Four Americans, Three converts, Two Southerners, one Priest, all dedicated to the proposition that each of us is capable of Love. A cripple and a candidate for sainthood, an ascetic and an archetypal gentleman. A motlier crew would be hard to find. Yet the reward is ours. When you realize the pain and passion involved in their lives and writing, you can only ask - what have I done for love? The book is a spiritual history of America from the late 40's through the 70's based on little people whose lives become large enough to model real Faith. We need to remeet such writers.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Gem in Catholic Literary Scholarship
Review: The title of Paul Elie's book THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN is borrowed from a short story title of Flannery O'Connor, one of the four writers discussed in his book. The other three are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy. The focus of Elie's work is not as much biographical as it is literary. He looks at the two things that connect these four great people: faith and writing, and shows how both work together to produce the great literary output of each author. Elie sees these four people as being part of an informal "Catholic" school of writers. Elie looks at an analyzes many of the writings of each author, and presents it in a manner that will appeal to the scholar and lay reader as well. Though the book has biographical information, and is arranged in a chronological manner, biographical and historical details are only provided where absolutely necessary to discuss the literary works of Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy.There has been a temptation to see Merton and Day as larger than life, almost saintly figures, Percy and O'Connor as eccentric southerners who happen to be Catholic, and in the case of O'Connor, a Catholic writer trying to impose blatant symbols of faith in all of her writings. Elie certainly admires all four, but shows them from a human point of view. In doing so, he debunks many of the myths surrounding these four figures. From a spiritual point of view, they are just as human as we are, and it is because of their very human struggles that their literary output is possible. Elie breaks important ground by looking at these four great Catholic figures as writers, and his work will undoubtedly set the stage for further study of the literary connections of Merton, Day, O'Connor, and Percy. His book includes copious endnotes that will enable a person to easily find works by and about these four authors. In most chapters Elie discusses each of the four, but he uses breaks after sections about each author which makes reading easier. Elie himself is a book editor and he uses his skills as an editor to write a concise work. The length of the book demonstrates this alone. The text without endnotes is approximately 475 pages. There are certainly individual works about Merton, O'Connor, and Day equal or greater in length than Elie's work, but hardly say as much. I cannot say for certain about Percy since I am not familiar with scholarly or biographical works about him. This book will more than likely be of interest to Catholic readers, but anyone who wishes to study the role of faith in Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy, will find this book a great read an a valuable resource.
Rating: 
Summary: it is what they were, though not, perhaps, what they thought
Review: This book is a good book. Paul Elie is a very fine writer, particularly fine at plot, which is ironical and rather odd since he is writing a sort of quadruple literary biography in which the life stages of his protagonists do not align chronologically (e.g., Dorothy Day, 1897-1980; Flannery O'Connor, 1925-64). But he plots the book so that we are reading about four independent authors in relation to each other. Their pilgrimages have similar stages, scattered throughout the years, even as they deal with the same world issues simultaneously: World War II, the Cold War, race relations, etc. We have a sense of four different stories deeply akin, which seems to be the story Paul Elie wanted to tell. Elie is also good at stylistic analysis. Sometimes he will quote from a letter or an essay and, in a few impressionistic words, identify how form and content perfectly fuse. This moved me at several points in the book.
All this is interesting, but I find myself more interested in my dissatisfactions with the book, which other readers may actually see as positive characteristics, so I'll record them and you can be the judge.
1) This book does not seem to me to be a Catholic or Christian book. It is a profoundly religious book, though. Elie in his prologue suggests that he will be reading his four subjects through the critical lens of Harold Bloom-the four creatively misread medieval European Catholicism into their new context. He also introduces them against the historical background of William James and Henry Adams rather than a Catholic background. As I understand Bloom, Bloom insists that misreading is inevitable; at any case, I wonder if reading Catholic works through Bloom's lens, or any lens other than Catholicism, might sentence biography or criticism of these authors to misreading from the beginning. What I fear is that at least some of these four writers might find Elie's conclusion reductive: "They saw religious experience out before them. They read their way toward it. They believed it. They lived it. They made it their own. With us in mind, they put it in writing." It is simply a case of putting "religious experience" (and Bloom's misprision, and William James's naturalism, and postmodern skeptical self-finding) as the transcendent element in the story, instead of the Catholic church in whatever manifestation these authors encountered it. I think Elie is leaving these trails for people who are not Catholics to enter his work anyway, and that's admirable to a point, but, as Flannery O'Connor would say, Catholicism is either true or it isn't, and there is a fundamental inaccessibility within these works which I think Elie might be sacrificing. In short, the trails Elie leaves don't lead to Catholicism, but to religious experience.
2) The book is as fiercely individualistic as any book about Catholics can ever be. The title says so: The Life You Save May Be Your Own. The dominant motif, according the preface, is pilgrimage, chiefly and most fundamentally individual. As such, with the exception of correspondence, the book gives us very little idea about how these authors related to other people and existed within the context of community. Only cursory attention is given to family and extra-literary friends during each author's productive period. This is alright, especially for the Trappist monk of the bunch, but I am sitting on my loveseat trying to apply these ideas and practices to my life and thinking, "But I'm married." And I'm a son, a brother, a co-worker, etc. These four people were rather solitary people, and created themselves through literature (theirs and others---one of Elie's main points), so perhaps we who live deeply in community might just want to find other examples to misread creatively.
3) The book is about pilgrimage, which sounds either teleological or "the joy's in the journey." You either go on pilgrimage because you want to get somewhere or because you like the company and the situation of the trip itself. But the way the book is written (form vs. content, in this case) clashes with the pilgrimage motif. The book is a series of little sections (less than a page, one page, several pages), each being a little unity, a little vignette to itself. And Elie often closes these vignettes with a pungent quote from the author in question, the sort of burst of insight that you might find at the end of something. Rather than feeling as if I was going somewhere, or that I was on a meandering but pleasant journey, I as a reader felt as if I was perpetually arriving. Generally, each little vignette was a crisis that ended with at least a provisional resolution. I actually liked this sensation (each moment in your life is the end of one story), but it did render the book's pilgrimage to Elie's conclusion rather anticlimactic.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Book is Hard to Find
Review: This book is very well written and inspiring. If you come from a Catholic background, you will be particularly moved by the strong faith exemplified in the writings and lives of these four authors. Much insight is gained into the works of these authors. I would highly recommend this book to anyone on a spiritual journey.
Rating:
Summary: superb
Review: This is a highly entertaining and edifying book. Elie lets the four beautiful lives (O'Connor, Day, Merton, and Percy) shine and dazzle without getting in their way--in other words, the writing is excellent. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: This might be called a "quadruple" biography of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy, though it studies their writings to such an extent that it is naot classified as a biography. I thought the work extremely well-done and found it absorbing reading. One cannot help but be inspired by the lives of these four people, and this book is an excellent introduction to their works. One of the best books I have read of its kind ever.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: This might be called a "quadruple" biography of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy, though it studies their writings to such an extent that it is naot classified as a biography. I thought the work extremely well-done and found it absorbing reading. One cannot help but be inspired by the lives of these four people, and this book is an excellent introduction to their works. One of the best books I have read of its kind ever.
Rating:
Summary: 4 distinct life stories that add up to something larger
Review: While the common theme of this book is on how four very distinct writers: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor, expressed their faith through their literary lives, the real beauty of the book is in seeing how the four authors dealt with issues of their faith in their own lives. At times it seems like a story contrasting Doris Day's fiery activism to Thomas Merton's move into monastic life, both in response to the passions of their own lives and the events of the world. Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor seem like much more of a middle ground between the two extremes, living much more in the world of literature than Day and Merton. Each life makes for a fascinating reading on its own. The beaty of Paul Elie's book is that he allows each life to stand on its own, while combining them into a larger book on how to live as a religious thinker in the secular world.
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