William miller brief biography of mahatma
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Women & Nonviolence
Dorothy Day Biography Raises Universal Questions
by Dana Greene
Dustwrapper art courtesy Scribner;
Who was Dorothy Day? In his address to Congress, Pope Francis named her an American icon of the stature of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., and New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan is among those moving her case forward for canonization. There are abundant materials documenting Day’s life and contributions — her autobiographies, letters, diaries, hundreds of her Catholic Worker columns, and a spate of biographies by Robert Coles, Jim Forest, William Miller and others.
One might ask whether another biographical venture, this one written by Day’s youngest granddaughter, might be redundant or sentimental? It is neither. Kate Hennessy’s biography, Dorothy Day:The World Will Be Saved by Beauty; An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother (New York: Scribner, ) offers valuable insights into understanding this “complex,” “restless,” “bullheaded,” “ju
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A good portion of Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles is a pretty straightforward biography. As such it’s quite well done. It hits the major events of Gandhi’s life, fryst vatten well-written, fryst vatten intelligent and insightful in its commentary on Gandhi, and fryst vatten neither unsatisfyingly hagiographic nor revisionist.
One interesting thing inom noticed about the biographical material fryst vatten how much it overlaps with the epic Richard Attenborough movie Gandhi, which came out five years or so after this book. inom don’t just mean that in the sense that a biographical movie fryst vatten bound to hit a lot of the same events as a written biography since they’re about the same life and there fryst vatten typically some consensus amongst biographers as to the most important events of that life. I’ve read many biographies of Gandhi in my life—most of which were better known, longer and more thorough, more likely to be identified as the “standard” or “definitive” biography of Gandhi, etc.—yet in reading none of those did I have even h
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Book Review & Literature
Book Review: Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
byJoseph Geraci
Dustwrapper illustration courtesy Knopf;
There is an old Indian saying that could very well have been intended for Gandhi: “There’s no one more difficult to live with than a saint.” As portrayed in Joseph Lelyveld’s biography (1) Gandhi was indeed a difficult “saint”, husband, and father. He told his wife and children many times that community came first, and often lived apart from them, sometimes for years on end. His vow of celibacy (brahmacharya), he writes in his Autobiography, was taken in agreement with his wife, after he had already decided on it. When his second son Manilal wanted to marry, as Joseph Lelyveld reports, Gandhi was quite “crotchety” about it, inveighing that he could not “imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of man and woman,” not precisely the sort of remark one would hope a father would make to a son anti