Books in Brief: Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day: A Biography, by William Miller (Harper & Row, 527 pp., $18.95).

From Butler to the Bollandists, hagiography has had a double purpose. One is to tell it as it was (more or less); the other is to make the reader a better person. Professor Miller succeeds admirably on both planes of effort. Personal acquaintance with his subject and access to previously unresearched material has provided a moving portrait, warts and all, of an authentic latter-day saint who called her own life The Long Loneliness and her daily perceptions On Pilgrimage: on the second count, he has afforded a testimonial that grace can work its will in the most unlikely milieux from the secular materialism of Bohemia to the infantile, if well-meaning, leftism of the Catholic Worker movement. Best of all, he has given us an exemplary life embodying what Anne Fremantle has called the greatest line outside the Gospels: virtus est ordo amoris.

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Gerald T. Dunne

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Dorothy Day: A Biography, by William Miller (Harper & Row, 527 pp., $18.95).

From Butler to the Bollandists, hagiography has had a double purpose. One is to tell it as it was (more or less); the other is to make the reader a better person. Professor Miller succeeds admirably on both planes of effort. Personal acquaintance with his subject and access to previously unresearched material has provided a moving portrait, warts and all, of an authentic latter-day saint who called her own life The Long Loneliness and her daily perceptions On Pilgrimage: on the second count, he has afforded a testimonial that grace can work its will in the most unlikely milieux from the secular materialism of Bohemia to the infantile, if well-meaning, leftism of the Catholic Worker movement. Best of all, he has given us an exemplary life embodying what Anne Fremantle has called the greatest line outside the Gospels: virtus est ordo amoris.