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Midnighters #3: Blue Noon (rpkg) (Midnighters)
Scott Westerfeld
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Midnighters #1: The Secret Hour (rpkg) (Midnighters)
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Peeps
ASIN: 0060519592
Release Date: 2007-02-06 |
Book Description
The five teenage Midnighters of Bixby, Oklahoma, thought they understood the secret midnight hour—until one morning when time freezes in the middle of the day.
The noise of school stops. Cheerleaders are frozen in midair. Everything is the haunted blue color of the midnight hour.
As the Midnighters scramble for answers, they discover that the walls between the secret hour and real time are crumbling. Soon the dark creatures will break through to feed at last . . . unless these five teenagers can find a way to stop them.
Customer Reviews:
Disappointment.......2007-08-11
Blue Noon was a total disgrace. I cannot believe why jessica did that. She won't be able to go to the daytime anymore. she's apart of midnight.it will be an eternity for her in that world. only living an hour a day. that's ludicrous.poor jonathon. and beth. how she had to find out. but it is a good thing that she's going to help future midnighters. i give her that. and also now she won't have to use gadgets to use her powers. she could just aim her hand at you and your dead.
Shocking ending left a bitter taste.......2007-06-07
I loved the first two, couldn't put them down. They cut into sleep, eating, ect, possibly best book series I had read all year... then I got to number three. Maybe I hadn't payed attention in the store, but I thought I saw a book six, or something... so I never realized how near I was to the end till I reached the end... and what an ending. It was... different for sure, but ten hours after finishing the book has still left me with a bitter taste, one that has cast a shadow over the entire series for me. The end of the story was so sudden, unexpected and just... harsh, that I no longer know what to say about the trilogy. It took me half of the epologue to even figure it all out that something bad had really happened, not just that the one character was in the hospital or something. I refused to believe it and ended up having to reread the ending.... maybe its just me, but I like my books to have their happy endings. It's why I read, and while everything up to the end was a great thrill ride, it felt like the Midnighters ride suddenly went flying off the tracks and crashed in a flaming explosion as the third book ended. I never judge books by their covers, or even their beginnings, but the endings... those can make all the difference, and that's only too true for the Midnighters.
WowoWowoWowoWow!!!!!!!!!!.......2007-04-22
Wow! Amazing us all once again, Mr.Westerfield's thid midnighters book was every bit as amazing as the first two......as I joined Jess, Jonathan, Dess, Rex and Melissa, the midnighters, in the last installment in this trilogy, I know for a fact that the whole time I, DIDN'T WANT IT TO END!!!... I cried at the end, just because it was over! If you don't buy this book, I will pity you till the end of eternity because IT WAS AMAZING!!!!
Westerfield Strikes Again!.......2007-03-31
If you liked the Uglies trilogy, you're will like the Midnighters too! Interesting fantasy with realistic characteristics.
Great until the end.......2006-11-08
this book was breathtaking until, well, the end. the end did an abrupt halt, although the end was a good end(good but blunt)i have to say it took the book down a whole star.
the rest of the story, however, was simple amazing. i was spellbound through the whole story. it displayed true emotions brillantly. the story pulsed with life.
Book Description
Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, this twentieth-century erotic classic takes the reader on a dark journey through the psyche of the pre-war French intelligentsia, torn between identification with the victims of history and the glamour of its victors. One of Bataille's overtly political works, it explores the ambiguity of sex as a subversive force, bringing violence, power and death together in a terrifying unity.
"Georges Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century"-Michel Foucault
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Also available:
My Mother Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man,
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Literature and Evil
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L'Abbe C
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Customer Reviews:
A review from the author of YEARS OF RAGE.......2005-03-06
According to Georges Bataille's autobiographical note, LE BLEU DU CIEL ("The Blue of the Sky") was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.
The descending night darkens these pages.
Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann ("Too-Much-Man") and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman's supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.
Their only desire is to besmirch whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.
By muddying whatever is "sacred," they maintain the force of "the sacred."
As a historical document, BLEU DU CIEL is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the "red nun" Simone Weil (as Lazare).
It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, although not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.
As the night materializes, the blue of the sky disappears.
Joseph Suglia, the author of YEARS OF RAGE
a severely underrated masterpiece.......2004-06-12
I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's [illegitimate] children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.
Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.
The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with [prostitutes] and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.
Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.
I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.
If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.
a severely underrated masterpiece.......2004-06-12
I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's bastard children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.
Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.
The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with whores and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.
Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.
I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.
If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.
De Sade's nephew gets all sociopolitical........2002-12-19
"Blue of Noon" is the story of Henri, an amoral man living in Europe during the 1930s. He is supposedly married, but spends his time with similarly amoral women, lacking clothing, inhibition, shame, and even proper hygeine at times. He zips between London, Paris, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, and frankly, engages in nothing but immoral self-satisfying activities in every spot.
At various times, he agonizes over his relationships with his wife, his sexual partners, and his deceased mother. He becomes embroiled in a Communist revolutionary plot in Barcelona, with one of his sexual partners, a Jewish woman, involved in its planning and execution. He reveals his necrophilic obsession to two of his partners, further revealing the exact, even more sickening, subject of his obsession to one of them. He has sex, he gets sick, his women have sex, they get sick, everybody has sex, everybody gets sick. For the punchline, near the end of the novel, Bataille throws Nazis into the picture, showing us that all the depravity of fascism is comparable to the depravity he has shown us all along. Though published in 1957, the book was originally written in 1936.
This reviewer isn't buying it. Not a word of it. Not the story, not even the "1936" part. For one thing, the writing style is actually more mature than that of "L'Abbe C", published in 1950. Bataille is most probably trying to show off that he detected the evil inherent in the Nazis "way back when". I don't give him that much credit.
For another thing, I think he uses Nazis as an easy way to score "scary" points. One might intellectualize his choice by saying Bataille is trying to tell us that no matter how disgusting humans may act, at least we're not as bad as Nazis. Imagine a murderer begging leniency because he's not a Nazi. He's still a murderer. It seems Bataille is using Nazis to justify the pornography he just wrote, as if the world is such a horrible place that pornography is just another little bit of it, and tries to throw a philosophical wrench into the works, as if saying life is meaningless in the face of all the horrible things fascism is doing to us in Europe, but I suspect it was all done just for the hell of it. I frankly don't see any rhyme or reason to the thematic choices he makes.
I have nothing against the depravity or explicit nature of the book. "Been there, done that", right? It's not even all that explicit, there's probably less sex in this book than the average mainstream novel today, and he's certainly not advocating committing even the slightest harm to anyone. There are a few disturbing or distasteful ideas here and there, but one never gets the sense Bataille really means what he's writing. One gets the sense he's simply trying to come up with every juxtaposition of immoral behavior and social taboo he can, just to tweak the reader's moral compass a bit, trying to get a cheap rise out of his audience. Maybe this was an interesting exercise in 1957 (or "1936"), but given the state of depravity which existed in Germany during the 1920s, and the state of sexual liberation which swept Europe from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, I strongly doubt it.
Perhaps the target reader for this book will be the person interested in twisted versions of 19th-century literature (Bataille wrote like someone living 50 or 100 years before his time), or the works of De Sade (albeit in highly shortened format, this book being only 126 pages).
DEATH, SEX, AND REDEMPTION.......2001-07-17
I don't really know how to begin this review. There's not really a good angle to approach this remarkable and beautiful book. What do you do when the very things that attract you to a woman disgust you and yet they turn you on at the same time. In this novel Henri and his wife, whom he sometimes refers to by giving her the name "Dirty" are driving each other insane. They love each other but the very intensity of their personalities makes them fated to never be at peace. This is the root of their despair, that they both realize the futility of being with each other. Henri sinks into dissipation and having relationships with women he thoroughly despises. The first, a woman named Lazare, he refers to as a "raven of ill omen". She is so ugly and despicable but he loves her in a way simply because she reeks of death. He wants to surround himself with an environment that reflects his state of mind. Dirty is dying and you sense that in reality her spirit has already passed on and its simply her image dragging Henri into her own horrible hell. Most of the book takes place in Spain just as the Spanish Civil War is beginning and there are all kinds of portents of the coming World War which adds to the darkness of the characters. This book was brillantly done. The characters seemed so real because they did hurt each other, because they did have unhealthy obsessions which they revel in instead of hiding them within. They give full vent to their joys just as much as their miseries. This is the first book I have read by Bataille and I am curious to see what his other work is like.
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The Blue Noon
Robert Ryan
Manufacturer: Review
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0755301765 |
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Blue of Noon
Manufacturer: Urizen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000FS6UM4 |
Product Description
A classic work of French eroticism.
Average customer rating:
- Crazy Dorene............
- This woman can spin a yarn
- DEFINATELY GET THIS BOOK
- This is the most mysterious, intriging book ever!
- Spell-binding, the most captivating story this year!
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Midnight Blue Noon
Dorene M. Lorenz
Manufacturer: PublishAmerica
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1413793789
Release Date: 2006-04-17 |
Customer Reviews:
Crazy Dorene...................2007-09-21
Great read. Loved every second of it. Read it the first time as a manuscript on an flight from Anchorage to Seattle and shared pages with the guy sitting next to me. We laughed, we cried, we got to Seattle...and wished the flight had been delayed so we could finish the book.
A must read for anyone who has lived in Alaska. The mixture of real Alaskans with fictional stories, and real stories with fictional people is masterful.
For anyone who has visited Alaska, a great reminder of your stay in Alaska.
For anyone planning a trip to Alaska, a primer on life in the Last Frontier.
Just remember, only half the lies are true.
This woman can spin a yarn.......2006-06-06
Full of thrills, sex, romance, and adventure, Lorenz doesn't miss in this wild and wooly tale of love and murder in the remote state of Alaska. The characters in Midnight Blue Noon come alive on the pages. If you have time for one good read this summer, make it this book. It is a well written engaging mix of suspense, romance and wit with intriguing characters and a tantalizing plot.
Lorenz beautifully captures the rugged splendor of Alaska, and her cast of endearing secondary characters and just the right rouch of quirky humor to her splendidly entertaining story. You want to throw a dinner party just so you can invite Uncle Gus and Flicka Red!
I am hooked, when it the next one coming out?
DEFINATELY GET THIS BOOK.......2006-05-16
I loved this book! I reads a true story, but knowing that it's not true makes it even better. Highly original and completely engrossing, this is one of the most interesting books I've ever read and I highly recommend it.
This is the most mysterious, intriging book ever!.......2006-05-13
I couldn't stop reading this book, I didn't put it down for a second. I enjoyed it so much, especially the stories about the mischief the wolf would get into. I think that having a pet wolf would be really cool if you lived in a place like Alaska. It was completely different from all the other books I have read.
Spell-binding, the most captivating story this year!.......2006-05-12
This story was amazing. I couldn't put the book down until I finished it. I guess it would have to do with most of it being set in Alaska, I am all about Alaska. I just really loved it. Everyone should read it!
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Blue Noon Export
Robert Ryan
Manufacturer: Headline Book Publishing, Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K6UI0Q |
Book Description
In Tanya Huff's delightful new follow-up to her acclaimed Locus bestsellers, Summon the Keeper and The Second Summoning, a force from the Otherside threatens to break through to our world and destroy the balance between Light and Darkness. Unless, of course, the Keepers Claire and Diana-two sisters who are able to reweave the possibilities of time and space-can prevent a permanent rift between worlds...at the local shopping mall.
Customer Reviews:
The Last Hurrah in the series.......2007-02-08
I love this series (As you may have read if you checked out reviews for the first two books) but the last installment is the weakest. I miss Austin and Sam is just not as good at being a cat (albeit he does have less experience). This books focuses more on the younger keeper, Diana, which is okay but the first two book were mostly about Claire and she doesn't get enough time in this one. If the series was more than three books (and I really wish it was) then this installment would be fine, but it's the last so I wanted what I fell in love with- Claire, Austin, and Dean.
That being said this book lacks nothing in the humor and sarcastic wit of the first two. These book make me crack up again and again and I have read the series at least 4 times now. I definately reccommend if you would like a fun, hilarious trip with those who keep the rest of us from knowing just how often our world almost ends. Make sure to read the first two beofre this one!!!
Long Hot Summoning: Keeper Chronicles #3.......2005-10-05
This book definitely lived up to the reputation of the first two books. It's quirky, zany and just down right funny. WARNING! Some of the gags can hit a bit later which can cause snickering at inopportune times and places! And for anyone who's wondered just what the cat's thinking behind that inscrutable stare...maybe it's best not to know. This is a must read along with the first two books.
Pass the Basilisk.......2005-04-11
I was rather pleased when I discovered that there had been a third volume in Tanya Huff's summoner series. While the previous volumes where fairly lightweight fare, they were a nice turn on the witch/godmother genre, updated with a lot of pleasant silliness that made the whole thing fun to read and accessible to a wide range of audience.
For those that have never read one of these tales, summoners are a class of magic worker whose purpose is to preserve the balance between the forces of light and darkness. They come in all ages and sizes, and Huff has chosen to tell the story of one family that includes summoners, friends, and cats (cats are important). Diana and Claire are the two summoners in question here, in particular Diana, who has just graduated from high school and has received her first 'summoning.'
The powers of darkness are attempting to create a doorway to our world by building a 'parallel' mall on the Otherside. Once it is brought into synch with the real mall, all hell will break loose. The task facing Clare and Diana is to deal with homeless teens turned elves, clumsy demons, Arthurian archetypes, soul sucking mummies, midget basketball players and about a hundred other equally exotic and peculiar characters. All in the effort to save the world and turn shopping back into a normal activity.
Two things disappointed in this effort. First, is the writing. Huff decided that everyone should have a story line and all the jumping between characters as the novel reaches a climax is more than a little distracting. I found that It was hard to feel involved in the story while trying to get my bearings between fragments of episodes. And the central story itself dissolves into a backdrop for a great deal of cuteness and slapstick. The problems the characters face appear, rapidly expand into insurmountable crisis and then are suddenly resolved ex machina.
My other issue has to do with making sexual orientation a plot device and then handling it so tentatively that the whole issue becomes gratuitous. Huff is so anxious to be light hearted that she turns all the relations in the book into comic stereotypes. It a book is going to work relationships have to be more than excuses for catastrophic decisions and crises that are going to dematerialize anyway. This book would have been twice as good if Diana had shown just the natural maturity of her age.
disappointing.......2004-08-20
if there were the option, I'd probably rate this 2 and a half... Huff is an enjoyable writer, and she could have done better. There was nothing new -- including the novel's resolution -- brought out for this third Keeper go-round. At this point, I'd rather she saved her energies for her less lackluster series.
if you REALLY liked the first two.......2004-07-04
otherwise a whole lot less. I thought that SUMMON THE KEEPER was one of the funniest, most original books I had ever read, I enjoyed the sequel, THE SECOND SUMMONING, although, like many sequels, it was not quite as good as the first. This third entry into the series has much of the off-the-wall humor of the first two but just isn't as good as the earlier books.
The action picks up a few weeks after THE SECOND SUMMONING, Claire and Dean (and Austin) are back at the Elysian Fields Guest House while younger sister Diana is finishing her last few hours of high school. Her first summoning arrives immediately after the last bell rings and takes her to a mall. It sems as though the mundane and magical worlds are overlapping here and need to be separated. Claire also arrives at the mall, the two set out to sort out the mess, meeting King Arthur along the way. Meanwhile back at the guest house Dean and Austin are dealing with their own problems.
The action is split among the two sisters and Dean which gives the book a lot of plot to deal with, maybe too much. At times it is difficult to keep the various threads straight, particularly between Claire and Diana.
If there is another in the series I hope that it returns to the standards of the first book. It is possible that this is the end of the series, and if so it was fun while it lasted. In any case, if you have read and enjoyed the first books by all means read this one. If the series sounds interesting to you start with SUMMON THE KEEPER. I will be looking for additional books by this author either in this series or one of her others.
Average customer rating:
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No Doors, No Windows
Harlan Ellison
Manufacturer: Ace Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Ellison, Harlan
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ASIN: 0441583288 |
Customer Reviews:
A masterpiece.......2000-04-03
This book contains 16 wonderful stories of triumph over alienation and despair. Stories that challenge us to find wonder in the common place and to seek out hope in a world that sometimes seems coldly indifferent to our struggles. Harlan Ellison is a wonderful writer and it is a shame to see such a great book go out of print.
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No Doors, No Windows (9)
Manufacturer: Pyramid Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000F7IDE8 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Winnipeg Free Press, published by Thomson Gale on August 30, 2007. The length of the article is 747 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: No slump for home product firms; Local makers of windows and cabinets thrive despite U.S downturn.(Business)
Author: Gale Reference Team
Publication:
Winnipeg Free Press (Magazine/Journal)
Date: August 30, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Page: b5
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Amazon.com
Witness To Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II by George Weigel is as comprehensive a biography of its subject as can be hoped for while the Pope still lives. Weigel, a journalist who came to the Pope's attention after the publication of his book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, wrote Witness To Hope with his subject's encouragement and assistance. Weigel had unprecedented access to the Pope's correspondence (with, among others, world leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev). He reports lengthy conversations with many members of the Pope's inner circle, and he occasionally reveals vivid details of the Pope's daily life (for example, at the beginning of each day, the Pope's adviser's hear moans and groaning from John Paul's solitary prayers in his private chapel).
According to Weigel, the Pope told him that other biographies "try to understand me from outside. But I can only be understood from inside." Unfortunately, Weigel's method for understanding the Pope "from inside" depends on psychological conjecture ("It may help to begin by thinking of Karol Wojtyla as a man who grew up very fast") and is weakened by his extreme eagerness to praise his subject ("the man with arguably the most coherent and comprehensive vision of the human possibility in the world ahead"). More troubling, Weigel does not ask some of the really difficult questions about this Pope--regarding his involvement with sects such as Opus Dei, for example, or the relationship between his innovative "theology of the body" and his conservative stance on homosexuality, or even the vicissitudes of prayer life. Witness To Hope is a valuable book because it reports many facts that others have not reported. But for incisive analysis of this Pope's theological and political significance, or for insight into his spiritual life, readers will have to wait until the principals in his life story are free to speak more frankly with some future biographer. --Michael Joseph Gross
Book Description
Witness to Hope is the authoritative biography of one of the singular figures –– some might argue the singular figure –– of our time. With unprecedented cooperation from John Paul II and the people who knew and worked with him throughout his life, George Weigel offers a groundbreaking portrait of the Pope as a man, a thinker, and a leader whose religious convictions defined a new approach to world politics –– and changed the course of history. As even his critics concede, John Paul II occupied a unique place on the world stage and put down intellectual markers that no one could ignore or avoid as humanity entered a new millennium fraught with possibility and danger.
The Pope was a man of prodigious energy who played a crucial yet insufficiently explored role in some of the most momentous events of our time, including the collapse of European communism, the quest for peace in the Middle East, and the democratic transformation of Latin America. This updated edition of Witness to Hope explains how this "man from a far country" did all of that, and much more –– and what both his accomplishments and the unfinished business of his pontificate mean for the future of the Church and the world.
Download Description
"
The Definitive Biography of Pope John Paul II
Witness to Hope is the authoritative biography of one of the singular figures -- some might argue the singular figure -- of our time. With unprecedented cooperation from John Paul II and the people who knew and worked with him throughout his life, George Weigel offers a groundbreaking portrait of the Pope as a man, a thinker, and a leader whose religious convictions defined a new approach to world politics -- and changed the course of history. As even his critics concede, John Paul II occupied a unique place on the world stage and put down intellectual markers that no one could ignore or avoid as humanity entered a new millennium fraught with possibility and danger.
The Pope was a man of prodigious energy who played a crucial yet insufficiently explored role in some of the most momentous events of our time, including the collapse of European communism, the quest for peace in the Middle East, and the democratic transformation of Latin America. This updated edition of Witness to Hope explains how this ""man from a far country"" did all of that, and much more -- and what both his accomplishments and the unfinished business of his pontificate mean for the future of the Church and the world.
"
Customer Reviews:
Jan Tyranowski.......2007-04-12
There is a fiery, mystical core to the young Wojtyla's faith. It is the deepest, darkest layer of the soil which has nourished him throughout his life. All his early heroes are passionate visionaries: the strange, otherworldly Jan Tyranowski; the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the stigmatic faith healer, Padre Pio. Their emotional, poetic view of the world has sustained him throughout his life. This is a man for whom the great religious truths are viscerally experienced. Christ is alive and walks the earth; the Virgin is a real woman; the Devil is a person not an abstraction. Good and evil are powerful autonomous forces battling each other--the powers of darkness and light. As Pope, he has attended exorcisms, and even officiated at one.
Arguably the most important of all his spiritual mentors was Jan Tyranowski. He met Tyranowski on a cold Saturday afternoon in February 1940, at a weekly discussion group in the parish church; it was a crucial moment in Wojtyla's life. Tyranowski was a strange man--a forty year-old tailor with white-blond hair, a high-pitched laugh and piercing eyes. Neighbors spoke to us about his oddness and his intensity. He was a bachelor who lived with his mother in a small apartment across the street from the Wojtylas. Tyranowski's small rooms were filled with stacks of religious books, sewing machines and several cats. He would stop young men on the street and try to interest them in joining his "Living Rosary," a praying circle and theology discussion group for young people. He recruited youngsters so aggressively that one of them, Mieczyslaw Malinski, the future priest and seminarian friend of Wojtyla, remembers being alarmed by his intrusive personal questions and worried that he might be a Gestapo agent. Father Malinski told us that it took him a long while to warm up to "this bizarre character who talked in a high-pitched affected voice."
Wojtyla, however, was immediately gripped by Tyranowski's personality and the power of his ideas. Tyranowski and Wojjtyla spent an increasing amount of time together discussing the Scriptures and mystical philosophers such as St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. Malinski tried to argue with Karol about this strange man and even brought up rumors that he had been in a mental institution. Father Malinski wrote about Karol's response in his own biography of the Pope: "Tyranowski has gone through a major life-changing conversion. Look at what is inside him, not his outward experience. Yes, he speaks in a slightly odd, affected manner, but look beyond that. He is a man who lives truly close to God." For Karol, Tyranowski was aflame with God--and this closeness to the flame was an irresistible quality for the young Karol and would remain so for the rest of his life.
Ultimately, Father Malinski grew attached to Jan Tyranowski and entered the rigorous world of The Living Rosary: "When Karol and I committed ourselves to this prayer group, it was all-encompassing. Every moment of the day was organized around activity and relaxation. We were asked to keep detailed records of our prayers and thoughts. Tyranowski took us through each stage very calmly and methodically until we reached the central core of his teaching--what he called the plenitude of inner life. His influence on Lolek was gigantic. I can safely say that were it not for him, neither Wojtyla nor I would have become priests."
Wojtyla later wrote about this defining experience: "What Tyranowski wanted to do was work on our souls--to bring out the resources he knew existed within us." Karol was particularly struck by the quiet, mystical core of his teaching and he remembered vividly the day and hour when his teachings sank into him: "Once in July when the day was slowly extinguishing itself, the word of Jan Tyranowski became more and more lonely in the falling darkness, penetrating us deeper and deeper, releasing in us the hidden depths of evangelical possibilities which until then we had tremblingly avoided...Tyranowski was truly one of those unknown saints, hidden among others like a marvelous light at the bottom of life at a depth where night usually reigns. He disclosed to me the riches of his inner life, of his mystical life. In his words, in his spirituality, and in the example of a life given to God alone, he represented a new world that I did not yet know. I saw the beauty of a soul opened up by grace. "
One of the Pope's most insightful biographers (and our consultant), Tad Szulc, believes that the influence of Tyranowski on the young Wojtyla flowed from their shared attraction to the mystical quality of spiritual life: "Tyranowski gave a wholly new dimension and understanding to Karol's instinctive mysticism and, as much as any profound experience of his young years, it set him on a course towards the priesthood...his mystical legacy to Karol Wojtyla was the 16th century poet and mystic, St. John of the Cross and the desire for the contemplative life." (In fact, after he became a priest, Wojtyla, on two separate occasions, requested permission from his superiors to enter a Carmelite monastery; each time they refused, believing his gifts lay elsewhere.)
On February 18, 1941, exactly one year after he met Tyranowski, Karol suffered possibly his greatest loss--the death of his father. Unlike his calm demeanor and stoic submission to God's will following the deaths of his mother and brother, the loss of his father provoked a torrent of tears and visible pain. He lamented bitterly that he had not been present when his father died. His friend, Maria Kydrynska, was with Karol when they returned home to discover that Karol Wojtyla Sr. had died of a heart attack in bed. She described the scene vividly to Tad Szulc before she died a few years ago: "Karol, weeping, embraced me. He said through his tears, 'I was not present when my mother died, nor when my brother died.'" The apartment was too painful to stay in alone, so he moved in with the Kydrynskas. Years later, John Paul II told the writer Andre Frossard: "I never felt so alone." His friend Father Malinski observed him going to the cemetery every day to pray at his father's grave and said to us, "Karol was so distraught that I was truly worried about him."
From that point onwards, Karol spent a great deal of time with his mentor, Jan Tyranowski, but it would take a year and a half for his vocation to take final shape. Years later the Pope would reflect on the mystery of his vocation in his memoir: "At 20 I had already lost all the people I loved. God was, in a way, preparing me for what would happen....After my father's death I became aware of my true path. I was working at a plant and devoting myself, as far as the terrors of the occupation allowed, to my taste in literature and drama. My priestly vocation took place in the midst of all that--I knew that I was called with absolute clarity."
His reticence--or detachment--is exemplified in his friendship with the theater director, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk. Biographer Tad Szulc has described him as "Karol's intellectual, cultural and thespian mentor, the most important person in Karol's life after his father and Tyranowski." For an entire year during the Nazi occupation when all travel was restricted, Karol and Kotlarczyk wrote letters to each other that Halina Krolikiewicz, an actress in the Rhapsodic Theater, would smuggle back and forth from Krakow to Wadowice. Karol's letters were unusually revealing--up to a point. "I surround myself with Books. I put up fortifications of Art and Learning. I work. Will you believe me when I tell you that I am almost running out of time. I read, write, learn, pray and fight within myself. Sometimes I feel horrible pressures, sadness, depression, evil." What is striking about this letter is that Karol could not share, or would not share, his great inner conflict. His friend Lorenzo Albacete described Karol's unusual detachment: "He lived in the most intense solitude, a burning loneliness, and to some extent it was self-imposed...it all goes back to St. John of the Cross, to his exhortation of emptying yourself, stripping away ordinary human supports..."
The classic bio of one of our greatest modern leaders.......2007-03-28
This book is simply superb. It is very long, but the length is justified by the importance of the material and the quality of its handling. Wiegel gives you a long, slow build which describes in great detail every aspect of John Paul II's life. He balances the different aspects of his material extremely well; he will jump from a description of personal events, for example, to a detailed discussion of a philosophic or theological point, but he does so in a way that is easy to read and easy to follow.
This book assumes very little knowledge on the part of the reader, but it conveys a tremendous amount of knowledge. This is a great service, because most of us know very little, for example, about early 20th century Polish culture, yet it is critical to understand this to understand John Paul II. In the same way, there are many subjects which you have to understand to understand John Paul II and Wiegel does a great job of explaining the basics of each, from 20th century philosophy to Eastern European communist politics, and from the political and theological leanings of the Amercan Church to the cult of Mary.
Too much of the time we get bios by writers who know nothing about their subject's areas of activitiy. We get, for example, bios of Napoleon by writers who know nothing about military affairs. We get bios of Plato by people with little understanding of philosophy.
This is not one of those books. Wiegel has made himself the master of all of the subjects needed to understand this amazing man. This book will take you a long time to read, but it is all time well spent.
Superior in every way.......2007-01-29
Its not often that one reads a truly great book, a book that is well-written,informative,moving, and inspiring. This book is such a book. While to some this book might be dauntingly long, it well worth the time and is really not a difficult read. I learned a lot about the papacy and pre-papacy life of John Paul the Great. The author does an outstanding job of capturing the spirit and spirituality of this great man. At the same time, this is not a book that paints an unrealistic portrait of history. It is so gratifying to read a book by an author that is obviously extremely well informed about his subject matter and passionate about it as well. I recommend this book to everyone, Catholic or no. I especially recommend this book to anyone interested in the historical truth about secularism/Nazism/Communism.
The Hope of Changing the Culture.......2007-01-08
A few years ago, I had the pleasure to meet George Weigel. During a Q & A with his audience, I asked about the oft quoted description in Witness to Hope of John Paul II's Theology of the Body (i.e., a "theological time-bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences...perhaps in the twenty-first century."). Of the hundreds of thousands of words in his book, Weigel playfully wondered what it is about that "munitions" wording that leads to such inquiries. Simply put, George, it is a wonderful line!
From what I observe, Catholics do seem to be waking up to the Theology of the Body. Much, much credit is owed to Christopher West, Jason Evert, and others for making the Theology of the Body more accessible. As John Paul II helped do for Poland in the years before the collapse of Communism, we are seeing some first glimpses of leadership for cultural change.
To a world ravaged by Naziism & then Communism, John Paul II was an incredible Witness to Hope. Weigel's work is magnificent and inspiring.
excellent read.......2006-06-22
great insight into the struggles and life of this amazing man! you will walk away with a profound respect for him, even if you didn't like him to begin with.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on November 1, 1999. The length of the article is 3857 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: WITNESS TO HOPE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF POPE JOHN PAUL II.(Review) (book reviews)
Author: Avery Dulles
Publication:
First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: November 1, 1999
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Page: 49
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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