Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography [Paperback]

Kathryn Spink (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 1998

During her lifetime, Mother Teresa resisted having her full biography written. Then, in 1991, realizing that accounts of her life and work could inspire others, she gave Kathryn Spink, who had long been intimately involved with the work of Mother Teresa and her order and co-workers around the world, permission to proceed with a complete biography on the understanding that it would not be finished until after her death.

Here, now, is the complete story of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, founder of the Missionaries of Charity and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a woman regarded by millions as a contemporary saint for her dedication to serving the poorest of the poor. From her childhood in Balkans as a member of a remarkably openhearted and religious family to her work in India, from attending the victims of war-torn Beirut to pleading with George Bush and Saddam Hussein to choose peace over war. Mother Teresa was driven by an absolute faith. She consistently claimed that she was simply responding to Christ's boundless love for her and for all of humanity. When People magazine interviewed Kathryn Spink for their cover story on Mother Teresa 's death, Spink told them: "What one has to understand about Mother Teresa is that she sees Christ in every person she encounters." Clad in her white peasant sari with blue edging, Mother Teresa brought to the world a great and living lesson in joyful and selfless love.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For years Mother Teresa has appeared at the top of every list of the world's most influential women, in company with Diana, Princess of Wales, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Different in almost every respect from those famous women, she did share one important quality: she was a star. In Mother Teresa, biographer Kathryn Spink goes beyond her subject's public persona to examine the life of a modern-day saint. In the course of tracing Mother Teresa's life--from her birth in Albania to her years in Ireland and then India with the Loreto Sisters to the founding of her own order, the Missionaries of Charity--Spink explores the ramifications of her subject's life and work on the lives of those she labored for and with.

Mother Teresa's frail appearance belied the steely will and public-relations savvy she brought to the task of loosening potential donor's purse strings and attracting attention to her cause. Was Mother Teresa a kind of spiritual colonialist, as critics have charged, more interested in helping the poor die in a state of grace than in changing the conditions in which they lived? Spink discusses this and other thorny questions with grace and honesty, at the same time emphasizing her subject's admirable achievements. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Simply the best biography of Mother Teresa around. Thoroughly researched, sensitively written and unfailingly inspiring, Kathryn Spink’s book should be, after Mother Teresa’s own writings, your first resource for understanding one of the greatest saints in Christian history.” (James Martin, SJ, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything and My Life with the Saints )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne (August 25, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062515535
• ISBN-13: 978-0062515537
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #265,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Congregations & Orders

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Life Worthy of Art, June 29, 2004

By 

M. Swinney "Marc My Words" (Flower Mound, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography (Paperback)

A life such as Mother Teresa's is deserving of an insightful vibrant and skillfully told biography. I found Kathryn Spink's "Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography" left wanting. It did not live up to the magnitude of Mother Teresa's life of service and giving throughout the world but especially in India's Calcutta in the formation and running of the Sisters of Charity.

Spink's "Mother Teresa," reads, at times, like a laundry list of events with no coherent effort made to illuminate the person behind the events. The best biographies I have found don't rely so much on the cold hard history to build a story around, but rather insight as to who the person is and how they interacted with the world. I think of skillfully told biographies in which I walked away from the reading of them with insight, motivation, and the feeling that I knew the subject and was engaged in their life. Benson's "John Steinbeck: Writer," and Morris "Theodore Rex," come to mind as examples. Spink's "Mother Teresa," does not do the same.

I credit the writer for tackling some tough issues in the last two chapters. She addresses criticisms of Mother Teresa and the Sister's of Charity co-workers and does so without sidestepping difficult points of contention. Some social work critics fault the work of Mother Teresa for not wielding her influence to address the root causes of poverty and only tackling the end-product of suffering in a simplistic manner. In addition, Mother Teresa was loyal to the Catholic Church and stood staunch in support of difficult traditional stances espoused by that organization to include pro-life in all cases. Spink's does a good job of pitting Mother Teresa's perspective of service and belief to explain why she did what she did and why she believed as she did. However, this isn't until the last two chapters of the book and this illuminating approach could have been begun on page 1.

All in all, I would only recommend this book if you are attempting to delve deeply into the life and times of Mother Teresa and have read other books on that subject. If you want a good read and are just scratching the surface finding out what Mother Teresa's life was all about, look elsewhere dear reader.
--MMW

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is one of the most touching books that I've ever read, June 25, 2002

By 

Sheeba Arnold (Yonkers, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography (Paperback)

This book is one of a kind. It is very very inspiring. Mother Teresa has conveyed the ideas of service and brotherhood through her life. Such devotion and love could come only from an ever-shining and divine spirit. I have re-read quite a few chapters of the book and I can say enthusiastically that this book has helped me a lot in spiritual growth and transformation.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A subject greater than her biography, August 13, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography (Hardcover)

Mother Teresa authorized this biography, but there are other books and videos that have captured her essence better. There's not much in the way of interviews with her contemporaries and her opponents in order to paint a picture of the subject. Instead, it's a very adoring and very superficial account of her life. (For instance, Eileen Egan is mentioned twice and apparently was never interviewed. Mother Teresa's niece is absent from the narrative. The Christopher Hitchens charges are alluded to, but not mentioned or addressed.) You can actually learn more about Mother Teresa and her deep, abiding love for God in other biographies or in the Petrie documentary. I read this while going back and forth into my other Mother Teresa books of prayers and found this one lacking in the one thing that Mother Teresa would have wanted: a sense of the reason why she became who she was.