Harper Collins. 2001. 

Before deciding on the priesthood Karol Wojtyla's heart seemed to be set on acting, yet the drama of his own life far outstrips the most fanciful of stage storylines. The main facts seem more at home in a Hollywood blockbuster than in the real world: the early death of his parents, Nazi occupation, hairs-breath escapes, the shadow of the Holocaust, a glittering academic career, resistance to the Communist regime, election as the first non-Italian pope in centuries, an assassination attempt, a pivotal role in the fall of Communism and so on.  Yet the real drama of Wojtyla's life is not located in these events. Facts, statistics and chronologies cannot reveal the truth about Karol Wojtlya the person. In the pontiff's own words, to truly understand any human being is to understand them "from inside"*. This is the task which George Weigel sets himself in the opening chapter of "Witness to Hope" and one of which he does not loose sight throughout the entire work. 

It is this emphasis on knowing John Paul "from inside" which binds the colossal narrative together and prevents the biography from buckling under the sheer weight of personal, social and political incident. My paperback edition of "Witness to Hope" runs to 1016 pages and weighs about a quarter of a stone. It has a thirty-one page index, about eighty pages of notes and cites several hundred works in is bibliography. "Witness to Hope" is the closest we will ever get to a comprehensive biography of the late great pontiff in single volume format. Yet it still seems short. The eventfulness, importance and complexity of John Paul's life are such that the reader is frequently left thirsting for more. Weigel makes a virtue of this, offering the reader a springboard from which to launch further explorations.     

Weigel has a rare talent for treating the most complex ideas and events briefly yet profoundly. Nowhere is this more evident than in his exposition of John Paul's "Theology of the Body". His nine page summary of the general audience addresses is a theological tour de force. It takes an impressive intellect to grapple with the theological complexities of John Paul's teachings, but the ability to restate these intricacies in layman's terms is even more remarkable. Weigel is the ideal popular theologian: accessible, readable and entertaining without ever resorting to oversimplification.        

"Witness to Hope" will undoubtedly remain the standard biography of John Paul II for many years to come. It is a work undertaken very much in the spirit of the late pope. It is an inquiring, challenging, sympathetic and intelligent book which never looses sight of the human person who is at its heart. So many biographers have stressed how multi-faceted John Paul's personality was. We have had Karol Wojtyla the conservative, the progressive, the liberator, the politician, the poet, the actor and the philosopher. Where Weigel's biography is exceptional and most truthful is in laying its primary stress on Karol Wojtyla the lover of God.