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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Speechwriter and columnist Noonan is better at flashing insight and anecdote than at sustained argument and narrative. Her memoir of the late pontiff is, then, scrappy, though lyrical passages about John Paul's exceptionally didactic charisma and her own growth in faith predominate. Specifically motivating the book is the fact that, when elected in 1978, John Paul arrived to "speak" to Noonan with conversionary power precisely at the time she returned to church and began immersing herself in orthodoxy. Hence her keen appreciation of his mission to embody Christianity throughout the world, culminating in his unusually public dying, which reminded Christians and testified to non-Christians that the "highest" Christian must suffer, too--that, indeed, God so suffered in Christ, only to rise again as all Christians, whether confessing on Earth or not, shall rise. Noonan expands further on another aspect of John Paul's theology of the body that is often misrepresented in the West: his insistence that soul and body are absolutely inseparable, and to abuse the body through sexual incontinence, in particular, is to wound the soul. Surprisingly, or not, she then proceeds to score John Paul for insufficiently responding to the sexual scandals among the American priesthood. From that point to the end, many may feel Noonan focuses too much on her own doings, though she rallies for one good chapter on the beatification of Mother Teresa and another on John Paul's funeral. Uneven though it is, this is an absorbing personal tribute to a remarkable figure. ---Ray Olson

Book Description

As the leader of the Catholic Church, the oldest continuing institution in the Western world, Pope John Paul II was a giant in every sphere he touched-personal, theological, political, ecumenical. In an age rich with heroes, Pope John Paul II was truly the great man of the past century-a man who personally confronted its tragedies, from Nazism to communism. A paradoxical figure, Pope John Paul II was an intellectual animated by confidence and joy, a poet and playwright, a supporter of freedom who decried its abuse, a tough political gamesman, and a mystic convinced that the bullet that nearly killed him in Rome was directed away from his heart by the hand of the Mother of God.

Here, bestselling author Peggy Noonan brings her sharp observations, acute sensibility, warmth, and wit to the life of the pope and shows the personal effect his journey had upon her and millions of others throughout the world. Written with heart and depth, this book is at once a moving elegy and a brilliant celebration of a man whose life taught us the greatest lesson of all: how to live.