The book, Saint Francis by Robert West is a quick and easy read. It is a high level view of the man’s life with moments where the reader dives in for a little detail and then back to the stratosphere again for a while. It is not a bad book. Unfortunately it is hard to call it a good book. Part of the Christian Encounters series being published by Thomas Nelson it is a low-cost paperback with fairly flimsy glue binding that threatened to come apart as I was reading it. What saves the book is the subject matter. With so much source material and additional biographical detail already written on Saint Francis it is hard to create a completely awful text.

 

The biggest failing in the book is the author’s tendancy to speculate and hypothesize about what "may have happened’ and what ‘could have occured’ etc. It is no exageration to suggest that nearly every page of the book has some form of ungrounded, unreferenced speculation. For a biography this is simply unacceptable and makes one feel that the book is partly fictional.

 

At the end of the day though it has some worthy gems that the reader will appreciate but it is not a great book. I suggest if you have read nothing about Saint Francis before the least this book will do for you is offer some bibliographic direction to some other, truly outstanding works already published and referenced by West as source material.

 

I was provided a copy of this book for review from Thomas Nelson. If you have a blog and like to read/review books check out their program at http://booksneeze.com.