Book Rec of the Day 2/21/2007

“On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.”

Merton’s autobiography is one of the most extraordinary accounts of faith ever written. Its quality and its influence places it in a class with Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Merton, who in his twenties converted to Catholicism and became a Trappist monk, was a philosopher, writer, and activist. He wrote many books, but this spiritual memoir may be his very best.

THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, by Thomas Merton (1949; Harcourt, 1999)