by Willa Cather
DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP - Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy envisions a yellow stone church on the Santa Fe plaza. The book follows his life and the construction of the Cathedral Basilica. In Willa Cather’s ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop’, she gracefully describes the haunted beauty of New Mexico. T...
This review was originally posted on amazon on April 1, 2005. This book remains one of my favorite books of all time. I read this slender volume on the plane ride home from a trip to Disneyland. It was a perfect antidote to the crowded modernity and garish consumerism of a theme park. I read an ar...
A beautiful and quiet little book. Father Latour is a missionary priest in the relatively unsettled Southwest. Nothing much happens -- he travel around administering rites, meeting with rogue priests, generally tending their flock -- but interspersed are evocative descriptions of the landscape, inte...
I had to re-read this so I could give it back to Michael. I also promised him I'd do penance by giving him a copy of RLP's Turtles All the Way Down. I have a couple extra copies of that.This book is in essence a series of short stories built around the life of a French Catholic missionary bishop who...
Uggg. I shelved this one. I couldn't drag myself to read one more line. I was painful and boring.
Beautiful, scenic - my fave bits were the descriptions of the SW landscape and the hints that Cather gives us of how hard that life was for the two RC missionaries who head out to save the souls there. But what it didn't give me - which is what I like in my priestly books - is an intimate view of e...
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a beautiful story, beautifully told. Suffused with the color of the desert Southwest, unusually (or surprisingly) respectful of the indigenous populations of New Mexico in the 1800s (both Native American and Mexican), and very Roman Catholic in its sympathies. In sp...
Willa Cather is my favorite author of all time. This is not my favorite book by her yet one that other WC fans have listed as their favorite, so I read it. I liked it, but still know that it isn't my favorite.
I have to disclaim - I am an unabashed Cather fan. That said, this book is amazing. I could see how some readers wouldn't be able to drag themselves through this book, because there is, basically, no story line or plot. But, OH how this woman can paint word pictures! I live near the area of whic...
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