Customer Reviews

Children of Disobedience: The Love Story of Martin Luther and Katharina of Bora

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Skip the book. I borrowed it from the library, and I'm returning it back to the library as soon as possible. This book reminds me too much of an extremely unhappy liberal woman living in the 1990's. You're better off reading an actual, researched biography with an extensive bibliography listed at the end of the book.

This book is a nice read, but can get annoy sometimes. Katharina is sometimes portrayed as a whiny, selfish, jealous woman who uses manipulation to get what she wants. I believe the author should done more research on the marriage and family life of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora. If she wanted to take fictional liberties with this book, at she could have made Martin Luther and Katie more true to the actual characters.

I've almost all of Luther's letters and his contemporaries' descriptions of him, and he in no way is the uncaring husband and father that the author portrays him as. As for Katharina, Luther, in his letters, often said that she was a "good, pious, and obedient wife..." The Katharina is this book is a nightmare!

The author claims to have done long, in depth research into the life and times of Katharina Von Bora, from which she weaves a very personal and also controversial tale. So, where are any of the citations of any of these in depth resources? I give her two stars for fiction and a question mark for historical bio.

I bought this book out of research interest in Luther's life, but ended up not being able to release it before I was finished. Having done extensive research on Martin Luther, with special emphasis on his music, I can say that facts about which I have background check with those Asta Scheib presents. She points out in her forward that she spent many years researching the relationship between Martin and his redoubtable Kati. The difficulties in addressing rare private details of this very public man were no doubt formidable more than 450 years later. Sure she takes risks, but sometimes responsible writers of "enhanced" biographies or biography-based fiction can get "closer to the edge" of knowledge than historians who know more than they feel they can tell with professional standards. Her main thesis is that this gutsy ex-nun, Katharina, took bold initiatives with ex-monk Martin Luther and converted a workaholic, male chauvinist scholar and revolutionary into (eventually) a happily married man. After a rocky start, Luther - probably accurately - deferred to her in all things domestic, and even some things beyond.

This was a good book. I enjoyed learning the minutia of life in the 1500s and learning about Luther from Katarina's perspective. I'm not Lutheran, so knew little about his history. I was curious about the sexual innuendos about Katie and Ave...seemed a little gratuitous to me - and may be offensive to Lutherans, but I would certainly recommend this book to others.