A solid exploration into the fine line between the faithful and the fraudulent in 20th-century Catholicism.
Biography of Padre Pio, a 20th-century Italian friar who claimed religious miracles, including stigmata.
Luzzatto (Modern History/Univ. of Turin, Italy; The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, 2005) recounts the little-known tale of the modest Capuchin monk who experienced a religious epiphany in September 1918 that spurred controversy and divided Catholics for decades. “I look at my hands, feet, and side and see they are wounded and blood is pouring out,” he reported. Padre Pio claimed his injuries were actually the mark of the stigmata, agitating not only his small mountain town, but the head of the church in Rome as well. Set against the backdrop of war-torn Italy, Luzzatto offers a rich story of faith versus science, in which Padre Pio’s claims of miraculous wonder were believed by the people but discounted by the pope. By 1945, Padre Pio received 45,000 letters per year, though his popularity made him a target. The Catholic Church was uncertain how to deal with the holy man, though “[b]etween 1918 and 1968, every pontiff tried, directly or indirectly, to put his stamp on Padre Pio.” On the church’s authority, Padre Pio underwent a battery of psychological tests, leading his examiner to conclude his subject of “infirm mind” and a “psychiatric hospital mystic.” Yet soon after, another examination concluded differently, offering a “vote of confidence for Padre Pio.” The mystery remained unresolved, though doubt began rising once more when it was discovered that Padre Pio often retained small amounts of carbolic acid in his cell—a chemical fully capable of burning the marks he claimed were God-given. The world watched as Rome struggled to decide whether they were debunking a myth or disregarding a miracle. Luzzatto hones in on the central question: “could a good Christian ever accept the existence of an alter Christus, a living Christ figure?” Padre Pio’s experiences would suggest not, at least in the view of the papacy.
A solid exploration into the fine line between the faithful and the fraudulent in 20th-century Catholicism.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8905-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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