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A Review of ‘Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II’
A mammoth book about a giant of the 20th century
It’s been a while since I did a book review here, something I did regularly a year ago when I was still reading as much as I was writing. It’s definitely time to get back to doing it more often, and the first week of a new month seems as good a time as any. I have been reading more history and biography than anything else lately, and today’s book is a bit of both.
No matter what your religious persuasion (or total lack thereof) may be, if you study culture, politics, and history you cannot deny the impact Pope John Paul II had on the world in the 20th century. In his massive biography Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, author George Weigel covers all of those things and more. And it truly is a massive tome; my copy runs exactly 1,016 pages.
However, those 1,000-plus pages fly by at a speed you normally don’t find in a biography or history book. Weigel has an engaging style that holds your attention even in the initial section on John Paul’s childhood years in Poland, the part of a life story that is often the most tedious to read about. He expertly covers the key formative years John Paul spent as quarry worker and clandestine seminary student under the Nazi occupation of Poland and…
