The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton
While many biographies and studies of the writer and monk Thomas Merton have been published over the years,The Seven Mountains of Thomas Mertonremains the official biography sanctioned by the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust. Mott was given access to all of the private journals that, according to Merton's legacy, were not to be made public for 25 years after his death. (These have now been released; see for exampleThe Intimate Merton, which contains a selection of these journal entries.) Mott's goal in this work was to approach the writer in a balanced manner--to correct the record where Merton himself may have had the facts wrong (early childhood material, for example), and to offer a different interpretation at times from the one Merton himself comes to in his own autobiographical writings. Above all Mott is not writing hagiography: this is no life of a saint, at least not in the stereotyped sense. But it is clearly the life of a real 20th-century man who, along with the expected dead ends and blind alleys, did find himself listening to a real call and following it as deeply and as passionately as his life would allow. And who knows? Perhaps that's a good definition of saint.--Doug Thorpe