Customer Reviews

Faces of Holiness II: Modern Saints in Photos and Words (v. 2)

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Ms. Ball has written a great work detailing real life stories of people who gave their minds, bodies, and souls to a cause. This is a work that will inspire all people, Catholic and otherwise, who dedicate their lives to an ideal. I was especially pleased that she reserved a chapter for the inspirational life of Rogelio Gonzalez Corzo, code-named "Francisco," a young leader of the anti-Communist/anti-Castro underground in Cuba. This deeply religious man, an agricultural engineer only in his late twenties, a Catholic school graduate, and a leader of the Agupacion Catolica Universitaria, bravely took on the puppets of the Soviet Empire in his country. He never doubted his actions, and in his famous letter to his family just before hsi execution, he wrote, "Death is already knocking at my door, but as all my companions I have great peace of mind, because cost what it may it will show me the way to heaven and eternal happiness."
Ms. Ball is to be highly commended for her work. The others featured in the book, from a wide range of backgrounds and nations, were extrememly well selected. Not only does her choice of modern saints make the book attractive and inclusive, but truly speak to the transnational connection of Roman Cathilics around the world. A great book.

It doest look as if Amazon has made an error in combining reviews from Ann Ball's first volume, and this more recent second volume.

Faces of Holiness II is another of Ball's gripping books of modern saints. Like the first, it introduces the reader to many largely unknown saints through both words and numerous photographs.

A respected hagiographer, Ball has assembled a unparalleled collection of modern blesseds, venerables, and saints.

This work, like her first, is thoroughly inspiring. It introduces the reader not to saints that lived long ago, but to more modern individuals that had lives just like those of our friends, family, and neighbors. The stories are very accessible.

The book includes more than 100 biographies of the saints, a complete biography, and an index.

The biographies include those of Satoko Kitahara from Japan, Knights of Columbus founder Michael Joseph McGivney, Spanish teen Alexia Gonzalez-Barros, and the Visitandine Martyrs of Spain.

The photographs alone are worth the price of this book.

This would be a wonderful book to read to your children.

The saints are human beings just like us, but formerly hagiographers tended to make them unreal. Ann Ball has shown a marvelous talent to bring them within our reach. They had problems and difficulties like the rest of us, but with God's help they revealed a true heroism that inspires us toward goodness.