The series of episodes recorded by the author gives a fascinating picture of the Africa where Dr. Schweitzer worked, and into the mind of the great humanitarian at the age of 86. I have seldom read anything as interesting and as elevating as this book.

I used this to do a report about Yasir Arafat. It was a great book! Good photos and information. Also, it was easy to read. I learned that Yasir means "easy going." Pretty cool. I can't wait to read more books by Colleen Madonna Flood Williams. Her name is long, but it's still a nice name.

This small volume exposes a compassionate, caring and thoughtful man. At the time Schweitzer was living, speaking out for animals - and all living things - wasn't a popular thing to do. He wasn't shy about voicing his feelings, though, and he spoke about animals and their value with great eloquence. This book contains many wonderful quotations, gives a brief but interesting introduction to Schweitzer's life. I've had this book for many years and still find myself enjoying it, learning from it, and valuing it.

There are many books about Albert Schweitzer, and I have a lot of them. If the reader is specifically interested in the "Reverence for Life" aspect of Dr. Schweitzer's life, definitely check out this book. He was such a multi-faceted man but this book is specifically about how his "Reverence for Life" philosophy related to the animal world, indeed all the natural world. In small written tidbits this book takes the reader on the whole journey from his questions about animal life as a child through to his philosophy of respect for animal life as an adult. I would still encourage any Schweitzer afficianado (sp?) to check out biography-type books of his life to get the whole picture but for those interested specifically in his views on animals and "Reverence for Life", this is the book for you!

Albert Schweitzer (along with Joseph Campbell) should be required reading for all. No one says it better than Schweitzer and there are so many gems in this book. It is a small book which you can open to any page and read a paragraph or two. It is broken into small segments with wonderful pictures. Schweitzer lived his message. "We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe" - Albert Schweitzer. Buy ten and pass them on!

Syracuse University Press is publishing a revised edition of this book in the Fall of 2000. The new edition will be greatly expanded, making use of newly discovered correspondence covering the ten-year secret relationship between Albert Schweitzer and Helene Bresslau, the woman he was to marry. To Helene alone he revealed every corner of his mind, and heart, spilling the thoughts and feelings that he kept carefully hidden from everyone else who knew him. Here are the struggles of a genius in the making - and also an intensely passionate and quite extraordinary relationship, in which Helene emerges as a rare woman and a worthy partner.

These "love letters" (long thought to be lost but found in an old suitcase by Schweitzer's daughter) have been translated by Antje Lemke, Symposium Advisory Board member and Schweitzer scholar, and will be published in a complete book by Syracuse University Press. Brabazon said, "I have had the privilege of reading these letters and can assure you that they make fascinating reading."

Also new to the general public Brabazon's new edition will give the amazing account of the deep suspicion of the U.S. State Department towards Schweitzer, due to his strong opposition to the hydrogen bomb tests and his refusal to be silenced about the genetic hazards of nuclear explosions.

Lawrence Wittner, State University of New York, and Symposium Advisory Board Member, wrote an article, "Blacklisting Schweitzer," in the May-June,1995, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he told for the first time, thanks to the then-recent declassification of key government documents, the dimensions of a bitter conflict between Dr. Schweitzer and the U.S. Government. As Professor Wittner wrote, "To millions, Albert Schweitzer was a saint. But to the Eisenhower crew, he was a dangerous nuisance."

Brabazon will be a guest speaker and sign books on Friday, October 13, at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee.

Albert Schweitzer was at first ignored, then recognized and finally lionized by the world at large, though he preferred to remain at his clinic, or as he put it, "a prisoner of Lambarene." Those of us who have followed his life in serious fashion have often wondered about the exact role of his wife and soul mate, Helene, and now, thanks to James Brabazon, we know. This revised and newly edited biography is at once spell binding and searching as it delves into their relationship as well as Albert's battle with church doctrine and the powers that be. As a former seminarian, now preparing to take a one man AV show about Albert on the road ("Scenes from A Life,") I can assure prospective readers that the book will not disappoint them. If you want to meet the real Schweitzer, warts and all, this is the place to have such an encounter. It will both stun and shock, delight and dismay, but it casts a bright light upon the life of this remarkable man, arguably the quintessential heroic figure of the 20th century. Enjoy!

This book is an account in the first person of Mr. Cousins' visits to Dr. Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Lambarene, Africa. The book does an excellent job of letting the reader understand Dr. Schweitzer, and of portraying his daily life from the perspective of an aclaimed journalist. This view of Schweitzer's life is presented while Mr. Cousins has an agenda to save the doctor's handwritten manuscripts and convince the doctor to speak out against nuclear testing, among other things. Overall the book left me with a warm and enlightened knowledge of Dr. Schweitzer. Definitely worth reading for anybody who is interested in Schweitzer, or has any interest in humanity itself.

This book will have most of its appeal to those with interest in medicine, missionary work, or anthropology. It consists of Schweitzer's medical case histories, travels, hospital administrative chores, reflections on African and European culture, and general overview of his first decade and a half in Gabon on the west coast of Africa. Schweitzer's candid comments about the Africans and the harsh conditions under which he worked help make this book better than the average account of third world philanthropic endeavors. Schweitzer shows true insight and compassion for those he came to help and I found the book highly engaging.

I found this to be excruciatingly boring. The material is at best obsolete and of little value. A waste of time and money and not appropriate to one searching for a history of Jesus.

I hold this book high and dear, despite a few disagreements. Anyone doing Jesus research should have this tome in their library. While I do feel this book is outdated (being it was written at the end of the First Quest and we are now in the Third) I do feel that better scholarship has been done out there that is more reliable and less blasphemous (such as John Meier, N.T Wright, Ben Witherington) and basically, while Schweitzer really did have a VERY good overview of the entire spectrum of historical Jesus studies, this book can be considered somewhat "outdated". The Jesus Seminar, as well as such scholars as Robert Funk, J.D. Crossan and Marcus Borg in both collaborated and singular efforts have claimed to not only carry on the legacy of David Freidrich Strauss, the supposed pioneer of what came to be the First Quest for Jesus, but they claim to take it further. While I heavily disagree with the Jesus Seminar and many of these "scholars" out there, I agree that they do take it further than any work in this book.

Scweitzer, however, outlines the book MASSIVELY well. He does not skimp on details and progress of the studies for each scholar he mentions and being a Theology professor himself, I do tip my hat to his studies. He does them well. He states more the studies of other scholars and does not go so much into what he has discovered. But I do feel that since this was written, there is much evidence against claims made in the book and, if you agree with the progress of the Historical Jesus studies, much better work out there, even by the Jesus Seminar.

This book is a great read, I recommend that if what I wrote interests you, buy it. However, you will definitely need much supplementary materials from both liberal and conservative scholars to revise your frame of thought.

Albert Schweitzer wrote this great classical study in 1906, back when historical criticism was predominantly a German enterprise. "The Quest of the Historical Jesus" eulogizes the quest of 1778-1901, indicting every scholar of this period for making Jesus over in his liberal self-image, for replacing the original Jewish apocalyptic prophet with a moral and ethical teacher suited to the Protestant temperament. As the reviewers below have observed, Schweitzer demonstrated that everyone had been peering into the well of the Gospels only to see themselves at the bottom. It's now become a cliche in historical-Jesus studies to speak of the painting telling you more about the painter than the subject being painted.

So who was the historical Jesus? For Schweitzer, he was an heroic, albeit deluded, messianic prophet dominated by the conviction that he was God's chosen instrument to announce the imminent end of history -- burning with apocalyptic zeal, marching to Jerusalem, confident that he could compel the Kingdom's arrival on earth through a voluntary death. But the anticipated divine intervention failed to occur, and Jesus was crushed by the system he defied, the entire drama ending on the cross. No resurrection.

Even if Schweitzer's portrait of Jesus is a bit extreme, he at least got the basics right -- that is, Jesus as an eschatological prophet -- and he rightly sounded the death knell for the liberal quest of the historical Jesus. And Schweitzer was a true prophet, for there has been a resurgence of the liberal quest, particularly in the work of the notorious Jesus Seminar. Just as the quest of 1778-1901 made Jesus into a liberal German Protestant, so now the Jesus Seminar has made him into a liberal North American humanist, fitting this mold in the guise of a non-eshatological cynic-sage divorced from Judaism. This Jesus is, as Schweitzer could have easily predicted, made over in the image of the Jesus Seminarians.

For more up-to-date works which follow Schweitzer in depicting Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, see E.P. Sanders' "The Historical Figure of Jesus", Paula Fredriksen's "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews", and Dale Allison's "Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet". Allison's book, in particular, is worth its weight in gold.

This was my introduction to Albert Schweitzer's work, and I wasn't much impressed. The book contains 15 very, very short sermons that he preached to his congregation at his church in Africa, where he was a missionary. As sermons go these are pretty good -- there is a minumum of dogmatism and a great deal of ethics, as might be expected based upn Schweitzer's life, but although they did seem very genuine, they also seemd dull and not particularly original. In general, sermons have never impressed me very much, as I have always favoured vital religious experience and action to empty words, but Schweitzer -- to his credit -- was one of the few who actually lived what he preached, which is a welcome contrast to this day of Swaggart's and Graham's who spend their time waggling their fingers at us without lifting a finger to help their fellow human beings. Like most Christians, Schweitzer has an absurd notion that Christianity is superior to all other religions and thus he has no problems in trying to convert others without looking to find the beauty or truth in the native religions, but due to the nature of his faith, that is perhaps unavoidable even if it is deplorable. The sermons are very low-brow, leading one to think that he was inclined to try to reach the "common man" than to push his theology. He steers clear of superstition, which is also a welcome plus, but this collection still left me cold. Might be good for devotional reading, but there is little of lasting intellectual value here.

In a marvellously inspiring way, Albert Schweizer's sermons address issues such as how to deal with suffering in the world, how to treat animals, and how to treat the people around you.

This book is a cornerstone in my collection on Christianity and ethics.

To Schweitzer, primitive people care only for their blood relations. More spiritually evolved people feel responsible for all human beings. He offers examples (Jesus, Paul, Lao-tzu, Isaiah, etc).

He compares various faiths under the lens of humanitarianism, dividing religions into those which negate the world and those which affirm the world, examining the implications of each approach on the degree of worldly activity it entails. This may sound abstract -- to clarify, I'll mention one example: from this vantage, he rejects the great Indian traditions (Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism) as a basis for ethical action. This is by definition -- they cannot serve as a basis for ethical action, since they culminate in inaction.

In a very brief outline of the development of ethics, he sweeps through the Greco-Romans, Hebrews, early Christians, Erasmus, Bentham, Hume, Kant.

He concludes that ethics cannot be rigorously supported by a philosophical framework. Any attempt to justify altruism is logically flawed. It is entirely subjective. Science leads us to understand more of the physical universe, but in such a way as to strip its human meaning. Ethics is irreconcilable with observations of a predatory phenomenal world. [Note: Schweitzer's invocation of survival of the fittest here does not gibe with Darwin's original concept, and our modern understanding, of the workings of ecosystems, predicated on survival of the fittest _within a fitting ecological niche_. That is, there is great inter-individual competition but ultimately an elegant inter-species cooperation, the spirit of which might be close to what Schweitzer is attempting to articulate.]

Schweitzer claims that the culmination of the search for a rigorous underpinning to ethics results in a faith-like observation that "Goodness is: preserve life, promote life, help life achieve its highest destiny. The essence of Evil is: Destroy life, harm life, hamper the development of life." Hence, the title of the book. So, the point seems to be that, in his opinion, soul-searching for the core of altruism will lead one to revere life for its own sake, including non-human life. This reverence should permeate all our actions.

I found the arguments to be loose and unconvincing, simply a discursive description of the author's compassionate frame of mind. Still, it is impressive to hear a profoundly good person describe the nature of his compassion. Reading beyond the somewhat rambling message to the man himself, I found myself musing on recent small compromises and personal pettiness, by contrast with Schweitzer's will and heart.

Anyone inclined toward the environmental and animal welfare movements will find a champion in Schweitzer, who stressed the interdependence and unity of all life. However, his autobiography, "Out of My Life and Thought", would probably be a better introduction to him and his philosophy.

While trained in philosophy and theology, Schweitzer had better things to do. Yet as a man of action, Schweitzer also understood that all action must be based upon ethical and intellectual commmitments. There are other works in which he expounds upon the details. It is in this work that one can survey the broad strokes of what Schweitzer is trying to accomplish. For those of us without the time or the interest to invest in his later "Philosophy of Civilization," the "Reverence for Life" is a very inspiring compilation. Indeed, it is simply unfair to read Schweitzer and expect a great classic of ethical thought. Schweitzer's primary preoccupation in this work seems to be to communicate to others simple insights that motivated his daily activities, and he does that with ample effectiveness.

Some works of literature wear well with time, and some do not.

Understandably, The Deputy was quite a red-hot item 40 years ago, when there was a certain frisson in criticizing a recently-deceased Pope, and not a great deal of historical work had been done to analyze the opposition of the Catholic Church against Hitlerism.

But now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, a wealth of actual documentary evidence can take the place of the fictitious imaginings, sceptical conjectures, and whole-cloth fabrications which make up the basis of this play.

At the time of its writing, it must havce seemed daring and challenging in a disturbing but healthy sense. Now it looks more like, at best, sophomoric propaganda, and at worst, like a new and deeply unattractive variation on Blood Libel.

I first read The Deputy in 1963 and saw a truncated version of the play in Los Angeles. I have subsequently read the play several times and I believe that the reviewers who think that this is an anti-Catholic polemic miss Hochhuth's purpose in writing the book.

In The Deputy, the Catholic Church is not blamed for the holocaust; the reader understands that the Germans were perpetrators (by the way, Hochhuth is Swiss, not German). And he does not excuse Protestants and others for their refusal to act during this terrible time. Students of the Holocaust know that there was more than enough blame to go around in terms of those who did not speak.

What Hochhuth does is to state historical truth regarding Pope Pius XII's refusal to speak. Pius XII was the Deputy of Christ from 1939 to 1958. Between 1939 and 1945, though the Pope was completely aware of what the Germans were doing (mass murders), he never once spoke to criticize the Germans or ask them to stop the murders. This is uncontrovertible fact.

Riccardo Fontana, the fictitious priest (and hero) in The Deputy, represents the finest qualities in man. He is that rarest of creatures, a truly good man. His passion for truth and justice leads to his numerous efforts to persuade Pius XII to action. That he is unable to reach the Pope makes his efforts heart-breakingly tragic.

Riccardo is a Catholic who cannot understand why the Pope (whom he knows personally) does not speak out against one of the worst horrors in the history of mankind. For Riccardo, speaking out is not enough. He demonstrates through action (he is willing to die and actually does) that words of condemnation alone are not enough. That is why Pius XII's unwillingness to speak (much less to act) is seen as such a devastating moral lapse.

I suggest that the reviewers who feel that The Deputy is blatantly anti-Catholic read the play again, in its entirety!

"The Deputy" is stunning and still relevant, despite the acidic reviews you might find here contesting the pertinence of this play. It's more than probable the negative ratings in regards to this piece belong to the pious who, instead of looking at the objective facts, hide behind their own grandiose illusions regarding the dogmas into which they have been indoctrinated.

Afterall, is there any historical doubt that Pope Pius XII did not publicly condemn the wholesale slaughter of Jews by the Nazi regime? I haven't seen any document stating otherwise. Sure, he made blanket condemnations pronounced in the garb of generalities, but that's not what Hochhuth's play addresses. It's a simple question we must ask: should, as some consider, the highest moral authority on the planet straddle the fence in an attempt not to offend anyone, or should we expect a public condemnation of evil on such a grand scale? This, in my view, and in sum, is the dilemma the play poses to each reader.