Universal Father: A Life of Pope John Paul II [Hardcover]

Garry O'Connor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 2005

Pope John Paul II will go down in history not only as the third longest serving pope, but possibly the most politically influential of all 305 popes and antipopes since St. Peter.

Born in Poland in 1920, Karol Wojtyla’s early life was filled with intense love and intense loss: he was eight when his mother died, twelve when his older brother died of scarlet fever, and twenty when his severe but loving father died during the Nazi occupation. An avid soccer player and skier, a gifted poet, playwright and actor, by 1944, after a near fatal accident, Wojtyla was studying for the priesthood in secret.

Garry O’Connor, an accomplished biographer of the likes of Sir Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and William Shakespeare has spent the last five years writing and researching this book. Unlike the competition, this book details not only Wojtyla’s life before he became pope, his friendships with men and with women, his nationalism, his early years as a priest in rural Poland and his travels to Rome, but it also explores the pope’s own poems, plays, and philosophical works to find clues to what makes him tick.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If God is in the details, He’s surely present here. Layer by rich layer, author and prolific English biographer Garry O’Connor chronologically tells the story of the extraordinary life of the late Pope John Paul II. O’Connor shows that to understand the man is first to understand Poland and its history. He introduces us to young Karol Wojtyla’s family members and their numerous tragedies, and shows how his friendships and education shaped Wojtyla for his future role.

We come to know the colorful, multi-faceted future pope through his correspondence, his plays, and his poetry. By turns, Pope John Paul II is shown to be actor, philosopher, athlete, musician, comic book hero, mystic. Wojtyla’s call to the priesthood is compelling, when juxtaposed against the horrors of war and deprivation. As Wojtyla sweats in a quarry or shovels out old prison latrines, it lends context for his future knack of identifying with the common laborer. After Wojtyla assumes the papacy, O’Connor provides a window into the Holy Father’s daily life, his travels, his admirers and his detractors. He also examines the Pope’s controversial battles against women’s ordination, contraception, abortion, and materialism. The chronology concludes right before John Paul II’s death in 2005.

If the loss of one of the greatest leaders in religion of the twentieth century inspires readers to take a deeper look at Pope John Paul II’s life, this book will offer a satisfying, comprehensive tour of the outer events and inner life of a complex and beloved man.--Cindy Crosby

From Booklist

Slated to be published on the late pope's eighty-fifth birthday, May 18, 2005, O'Connor's biography shows signs of hasting to meet that date, despite five years in the making. Although never unintelligible or boring--O'Connor is too literate for the former, and Karol Wojtyla's life was too eventful for the latter--the book shows many signs of needing more work, principally to lighten overpacked sentences and add more explanatory notes. As is, it's a bumpy read but more immediately absorbing and humanizing than either Jonathan Kwitny's encomiastic Man of the Century (1997) or George Weigel's stately Witness to Hope (1999). Moreover, O'Connor adds something new and distinctive. All of O'Connor's previous nonfiction has been concerned with the theater: biographies of playwrights and performers, surveys of French theater, and two plays. He homes in on Wojtyla's lifelong theatricality, considering his early acting and theatrical activism before and during the Nazi occupation of Poland (when staging plays was strictly illegal), analyzing his several plays (the last completed during his first bishopric in the late 1950s), and noting the careful planning of his appearances throughout the world during his pontificate. O'Connor attends to Wojtyla's physical presence--how he looked, spoke, moved, and dressed (very casually; he habitually gave away new things, and his housekeepers learned to discard worn underwear on the sly)--as he would an actor's. If this sounds superficial, O'Connor's attention to what Wojtyla expressed through his presence--the love that, embracing suffering and sacrifice, passes understanding and is the mystery at the heart of Christianity--assures that it is deeply consequential. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 450 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First U.S. Edition edition (April 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596910968
• ISBN-13: 978-1596910966
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,516,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars best bio, June 19, 2005

By 

pjs (normal, illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Universal Father: A Life of Pope John Paul II (Hardcover)

This particular book was well researched. The author spent a great deal of time speaking to colleagues and family acquaintainces. The historical and personal accounts made this book a fast and very enjoyable read. I would recommend this book to everyone. This book is spiritually uplifting and provides the reader an insight to Poland.

10 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We're missing your equanimity., September 27, 2006

By 

Mr Bassil A MARDELLI "Antoun" (Riad El-SOLH , Beirut Lebanon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Universal Father: A Life of Pope John Paul II (Hardcover)

If you asked me "why are you writing this in the context of `Book Review" about the late Pope, I wouldn't be able to answer you, because I don't know. I simply felt here is an extraordinary account of blessed faith on the one hand and plagued by questions over political acrimonies blended together to clone a `man's world of power', on the other.

Perhaps the latest comments made by his successor about `Islam' prompted me to write this review.

Such comments could have far reaching consequences if not handled with equanimity and self-restraint.

Pope John Paul II: we are missing your equanimity and self-restraint.

Unfortunately our planet is already full of mental and emotional instabilities from groups living in different and dissimilar countries that many will not accept, by their own interpretations, the statements recently made by Pope Benedict XVI after a speech about the concept of holy war.

For instance, how will the `large' Muslim communities in France, England, Germany and Holland (even in Italy) react to the Pope's statements? Notably by those too many who, after the second or third generations, could not mix.

Nor could they have any sense of connection (speaking the language is not enough) with the local common tradition and usage so long established and became the force of practices followed by the `real-ethnic-group' French, English, Germans, Dutch and Italians.

In fact, on face value, I cannot see much of a rationale in the Pope's remarks.

Why should it have come from the Holy See at all?

By reasons intrinsic in their faith-and-glory filled history, coupled with feelings of disparity and local inequities, many Muslims in Europe and America are much given to ritual customs.

On the basis of personal experience and perception, and for its very natural importance, this episode tends to be one of those moments in history for which no record, written journals or even first-person reportage should reasonably be able to describe the actual events that would soon be unfolding.

The word `soon' in history does not necessarily mean `promptly or quickly'.

`Without hesitation' is, perhaps, more appropriate.

This book about the late John Paul II may be the end of an era. No book has so far been written about the beginning of another.