Thérèse

A delightful book even for those who have read "everything" on Therese. Lot's of information in this book about Therese' home life, vocation, about significant persons in her life that I have not read elsewhere. A must read. I learned of this book while listening to the series about St. Therese by Fr. OConnor on EWTN in the Audio archives. [...]

Dorothy Day read the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux in 1928 as a thirty-year old convert to Catholicism. Fresh from the radical movements of the day, she found the story of the young saint from the world of the French bourgeoisic colorless, monotonous, and "too small" for her notice. She wondered what this saint who wrote like a schoolgirl had to offer a world in revolution, a world in need of immediate remedies for the hunger and injustice that abounded in it. Her answer came gradually, as over the years she continued to study St Therese and to reflect on the meaning of her life. The fruit of those years of reflection is Therese. Here is a personal appraisal of the saint that reveals her to us in a way that more ambitious works have failed to do. Therese herself is allowed to speak to us directly through generous quotations from her letters and writings. Perhaps the greatest advantage this life of St. Therese has is to be written by a woman deeply concerned to bring the message of the saint to those most in need of it today. The poor, the lonely, the oppressed, the hopeless - all the "little people" whose number is so great in these times when bigness and unifomity are burying the individual person - these are the ones that Dorothy Day is especially concerned to reach with her book. Dorothy Day is, as Time Magazine says, "the widely acclaimed spiritual herione who feeds the poor and campaigns feircely for a better world...The philosopher-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, she says that 'the best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.' " -- from book's back cover.