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A review by sde
Dorothy Day; The World Will Be Saved By Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of Dorothy Day by Kate Hennessy
3.0
The beginning of this book was slow and vague. I understand why the author wanted to include information about her grandmother's early life, but she was a couple of generations removed from it, and most of the information is already available elsewhere. Because there are no footnotes, we don't know where the author got the information and how accurate it it.
Once the story gets to the point where Tamar, the author's mother, is born, it gets a lot more interesting, probably because they author was able to supplement her research and reading with her mother's own memories.
Throughout the book, but especially at the end, there is discussion of how Day was able (or sometimes not) to weave her belief in supporting all of God's children and the difficulty of living with needy, mentally unstable and even dangerous people. This was very interesting, and the acknowledgement of the difficult made Day more real to me rather than a saintly figure. But if you do not like your heroes' faults exposed, do not read this book. It is not a "tell all" book - there is obviously a lot of love and respect between the author and her mother and grandmother. But there were also a lot of questionable decisions and mistakes in their lives. I would have loved to have read more about the lives of the other 8 children in Tamar's family, although that might have been crossing a privacy line with the author's siblings. It was such an interesting and non-conventional upbringing and obviously the kids had very different experiences depending on where they were in birth order. The author is the youngest of the nine, and thus her experiences were colored a certain way. Because she was the youngest, though, she likely knew more about her grandmother and mother than some of the others, if only because they had more time to spend with her.
Once the story gets to the point where Tamar, the author's mother, is born, it gets a lot more interesting, probably because they author was able to supplement her research and reading with her mother's own memories.
Throughout the book, but especially at the end, there is discussion of how Day was able (or sometimes not) to weave her belief in supporting all of God's children and the difficulty of living with needy, mentally unstable and even dangerous people. This was very interesting, and the acknowledgement of the difficult made Day more real to me rather than a saintly figure. But if you do not like your heroes' faults exposed, do not read this book. It is not a "tell all" book - there is obviously a lot of love and respect between the author and her mother and grandmother. But there were also a lot of questionable decisions and mistakes in their lives. I would have loved to have read more about the lives of the other 8 children in Tamar's family, although that might have been crossing a privacy line with the author's siblings. It was such an interesting and non-conventional upbringing and obviously the kids had very different experiences depending on where they were in birth order. The author is the youngest of the nine, and thus her experiences were colored a certain way. Because she was the youngest, though, she likely knew more about her grandmother and mother than some of the others, if only because they had more time to spend with her.