Biography of a Radical Rebel is the Masterpiece She Deserves
By: Charles Kaiser, The Guardian
In the kind of literary alchemy most authors can only dream of, John Loughery and Blythe Randolph have blended all of these elements to produce this masterful biography of Dorothy Day, “a great anomaly in American life: an orthodox Catholic and a political radical, a rebel who courted controversy” whose life ran from the Spanish-American War to the election of Ronald Reagan.
At a moment when a pandemic is bringing all the failures of unbridled capitalism into stark relief, nothing could be more timely than the biography of a convert to Catholicism who preached that the New Testament “called on all believers to fight racism, war and poverty or it meant nothing at all” and for whom “faith was less about solace than a call to action and disruption. Piety and conformity to social norms had little to do with each other.”
John Loughery and Blythe Randolph achieve wonders ... With this collaboration, both have done the finest work of their lifetimes.
