Roman Catholicism, Women's Biography, Christian Biography, Church & Church Work, Women's Biography

Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography

Name: Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography
Author: Kathryn Spink
ISBN: 9780062515537

by Kathryn Spink

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Overview

During her lifetime, Mother Teresa resisted having her full biography written. Then, in 1991, realizing that accounts of her life and work could inspire others, she gave Kathryn Spink, who had long been intimately involved with the work of Mother Teresa and her order and co-workers around the world, permission to proceed with a complete biography on the understanding that it would not be finished until after her death.

Here, now, is the complete story of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a woman regarded by millions as a contemporary saint for her dedication to serving the poorest of the poor. From her childhood in Balkans as a member of a remarkably openhearted and religious family to her work in India, from attending the victims of war-torn Beirut to pleading with George Bush and Saddam Hussein to choose peace over war. Mother Teresa was driven by an absolute faith. She consistently claimed that she was simply responding to Christ's boundless love for her and for all of humanity. When People magazine interviewed Kathryn Spink for their cover story on Mother Teresa 's death, Spink told them: "What one has to understand about Mother Teresa is that she sees Christ in every person she encounters." Clad in her white peasant sari with blue edging, Mother Teresa brought to the world a great and living lesson in joyful and selfless love.

Synopsis

A novel on mental illness, narrated by a man whose twin brother, a schizophrenic, amputates his hand as atonement for his sins. The novel describes the family abuse that led to the illness and the narrator's efforts to obtain the brother's release from an asylum. Synopsis copyright Fiction Digest

Hartford Advocate

Contemporary fiction just doesn't get much better than this. . .It's the kind of book that makes you stop reading and shake your head, shocked by the insights you've encountered. In short, you'll be undone.

About the Author, Kathryn Spink

Kathryn Spink is the author of several book on the work of Mother Teresa and her coworkers, as well as other inspiring contemporary figures, including Brother Roger of Taize and Bede Griffiths.

Reviews

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Editorials

Associated Press

Every now and then a book comes along that sets new standards for writers and readers alike. Wally Lamb's latest novel is stunning — and even that might be an understatement....This is a masterpiece.

Christian Century

Spink's affectionate portrait of this remarkable woman shows us why so many call her a saint. The book beautifully serves Mother Teresa's memory.

Christian Century

Spink's affectionate portrait of this remarkable woman shows us why so many call her a saint. The book beautifully serves Mother Teresa's memory.

Denver Post

A can't-put-it-down novel.

Entertainment Weekly

Beguiling family drama...

Hartford Advocate

Oakland Press

The saga of the century. Best, most wonderful, most dramatic, most powerful. There are no superlatives impressive enough to describe this, another Lamb masterpiece.

People Magazine

Remarkable.

Tennessean

Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he's that gifted. . .This novel does what good fiction should do — it informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the 'simple' act of living a human life.

Time Magazine

A triumph of simple beauty.

USA Today

Impossible to forget.

Hartford Advocate

The Tennessean

Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he's that gifted. . .This novel does what good fiction should do -- it informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the 'simple' act of living a human life.

Kirkus Reviews

Both a moving character study and a gripping story of family conflict are hidden somewhere inside the daunting bulk of this annoyingly slick second novel by Lamb. The character (and narrator) is Dominick Birdsey, a 40-year-old housepainter whose subdued life in his hometown of Three Rivers, Connecticut, is disturbed in 1990 when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition is complicated by religious mania, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. The story is that of the embattled Birdseys, as recalled in Dominick's elaborate memory-flashbacks and in the 'autobiography' (juxtaposed against the primary narrative) of the twins' maternal grandfather, Italian immigrant (and tyrannical patriarch) Domenico Tempesta. But Lamb combines these promising materials with overattenuated accounts of Dominick's crippled past (the torments inflicted on him and Thomas by an abusive stepfather, a luckless marriage, the crib death of his infant daughter), and with a heavy emphasis on the long-concealed identity of the twins' real father—a mystery eventually solved, not, as Dominick and we expect, in Domenico's self-aggrandizing story, but by a most surprising confession. This novel is derivative (of both Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides and the film Dominick and Eugene), it pushes all the appropriate topical buttons (child abuse, AIDS, New Age psychobabble, Native American dignity, and others), and it works a little too hard at wringing tears. But it's by no means negligible. Lamb writes crisp, tender-tough dialogue, and his portrayal of the decent, conflicted Dominick (who is forced, and blessed, to acknowledge that 'We were all, in a way, each other')is convincing. The pathetic, destroyed figure of Thomas is, by virtue of its very opacity, both haunting and troubling.