Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century

I am sure reading this wonderful book by a great author, David Aikman, made me a better person. The greatest gift any author can give.

The brilliance, charm and compassion of David Aikman shows clearly in his narratives of these bigger that life individuals who have left their mark on the world. The writing is compelling...the reader is drawn into the text as if he/she were present at the time. The moral is of course that the only thing that matter in this life is GOD.

very interesting biographies of wonderful people. i give this book as a high school graduation present in hopes that the recipient will become a great soul

It was truly wonderful to read David's biographies of these great souls. There is quite a warts-and-all documentary style to this, but I really felt that I got into the lives of the people. For instance, I felt like I got a better picture of Billy Graham from the one chapter on him here than I did from the whole of Graham's autobiography.Full disclosure: I know David a little, we go to church together. But it's STILL a great book. I hope you can still find it around.

I really want to thank Mr. Aikman for this book. It illustrates the way a pure soul can be used by God to accomplish things beyond anyone's expectations. The author masterfully weaves anecdotes, interviews and biographical information to connect us in a unique way to these great people. I came away inspired to try and carry away remnants of each of these wonderful people. Thank you for such a masterful work. It is profound in so many ways.

Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century is undoubtedly one of the best collections of biographies I have read in years. In an era where celebrities are designated "heroes" and fifty or so men in New Orleans are called "Saints", it is refreshing - no it's inspiring - to read about five men and a woman whose attitudes and actions had a profound and positive effect on this century. David Aikman, a talented foreign correspondent for Time Magazine turned writer, has done a superb job capturing, in a few pages, the extraordinary lives and accomplishments of Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel and Nelson Mandela. If you are looking for perfect people, you won't find them in Aikman's book. What you will find, however, are six individuals who again and again, rose above their times and circumstances to change, if only for a brief time, the course of human events. Aikman's astute observations into the worldly and spiritual lives of these great souls hold important lessons for all of us today. Mother Teresa's inexhaustible compassion for the poorest of the poor, Nelson Mandela's amazing capacity to forgive, Billy Graham's urgent quest for salvation for the human soul, Solzhenitsyn's implacable pursuit of the truth, Pope John Paul's passion for human dignity and Eli Wiesel's constant reminders of the profound wickedness that lurks in the hearts of men, these are some of the lessons in store for those who read this enjoyable and inspirational book. Perhaps the best chapter is the last. Here Aikman uses Eli Wiesel's compelling and tragic story to inquire into the nature of evil. Was Adolph Hitler a charismatic but misguided despot or Satan incarnate? Was the Holocaust "a mutation on a cosmic scale" or "merely the natural shoots watered by Europe's longtime subterranean lake of anti-Semitism"? As we move from this millennium to the next, hopefully the brilliant lights of these great souls will illuminate the answers to these questions and be a lamp unto the uncertain path that lies before [email protected]