A MAN FOR NOW: The Life of Damien de Veuster, Friend of Lepers

From time to time (at about ten year intervals) Father Damien appears in both books and novels -- this hard-working, extroverted, also priggish and tactless, man who at 33 went to Molokai to become a ""leper among lepers."" Beevers' well-meaning if rather flat biography does best in refusing to sanctify Damien (who, we infer, may shortly be canonized) and presenting him as a man who went about his daily business -- baptizing, bandaging and burying the ostracized and medically ignored victims of the disease which he contracted almost at the start (careless in his contact with them) and spending nine of the next sixteen years alone on the island without any non-natives to talk to. A last chapter rather dully and preachily underlines the ""relevant"" in this man for now. For a much fuller, richer biography see Gavan Daws' Holy Man (p. 663.)