Product Description

Hi Amazon UK!! Just wanted to let you know that the book arrived early and is now in stock and available. Thank you!!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #517335 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 700 pages

From the Publisher
Dorothy Day (1897-1980), co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has been called "the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism." For almost fifty years, through her tireless service of the poor and her courageous witness for peace, she offered an extraordinary example of the gospel in action. Now the publication of her diaries, previously sealed for twenty-five years after her death, offers a uniquely intimate portrait of her daily struggles and concerns.

About the Author
Robert Ellsberg is the publisher of Orbis Books. For five years (1975-80) he was part of the Catholic Worker community in New York City, serving for two years as managing editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper. He has edited Dorothy Day: Selected Writings and Fritz Eichenberg:Works of Mercy, and has also co-edited A Penny a Copy: Readings from the The Catholic Worker. His own books include All Saints, The Saints' Guide to Happiness, and Blessed Among All Women. He lives with his family in Ossining, New York.

Customer Reviews

Doing justice, loving mercy and getting arrested from time to time
Diaries can range from the self-serving to the self-revealing. Dorothy Day's diary falls firmly into the second category. Although towards the end of her life, she became aware that her private thoughts would eventually become public property, the fundamental purpose of this diary was to be written rather than to be read.

At first, the diary comes across as a bland and even repetitive record that makes no distinction between the dramatic and the mundane. Family worries, problems at a "house of hospitality" for New York's down and outs, anti-war protests and being sent to prison seemed to be all of a piece: the fabric of her life. Then I realised that this was the point. The warp of her life (of all our lives) was what she' d been given - family, faith, the place and time that she'd been born into: the weft was what she made of it.

As a young woman, Dorothy Day led a wild and unconventional life having, amongst other things, had an abortion and become, in the language of her generation, "an unwed mother" before becoming a Catholic in the 1920s. The real turning point, though, came five years later when she prayed that "some way would be opened up ... to work for the poor and oppressed". The result was a lifetime dedicated to pacifism (from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam), social justice and "works of mercy".

Counter-cultural before it became fashionable, Dorothy Day sought to live, speak and write according to Gospel values even when it brought her into conflict with state or church. Surprising, then, to learn that this feisty great-grandmother with a horror of the cult of the individual was put on the first rung of the official ladder to sainthood in 2000 when she was named by the Vatican as a "Servant of God".

At 600+ pages this diary is most likely to be of interest to people who are already familiar with Dorothy Day or the American Catholic Worker movement. To be honest, I'd never heard of either before reading a review of this book in a magazine. Of course it would have made more sense to start with a biography (there are several), but then I'd have missed being able to get to know this remarkable and challenging woman without any preconceptions.