Thursday, October 12, 2017

"Luther: Biography of a Reformer" by Frederick Nohl

I'm pretty sure I've read this before, back in middle school or high school.  But I enjoyed re-reading it nonetheless, and I'm thinking I'll have my son read it as part of his homeschool curriculum this fall.  It's definitely easy enough that someone with a middle-school-level reading ability should be able to understand and enjoy it.

This book isn't even 200 pages long, so it's not a very in-depth look at Luther and his theology.  Rather, it's a good overview of his life, with lots of information about the political and social aspects of the world he lived in.  Anyone who is interested in understanding how and why Luther tried to reform the Roman Catholic Church, the impact his actions had on the world as a whole, and why we're still talking about him 500 years later would probably get a lot from this book.

I was not 100% crazy about the writing style, to be honest.  The author wrote most of it as a straight history, which is what I wanted.  But once in a while, he would write out a scene as if it were fiction, putting dialog in people's mouths and so on.  And I guess I'd rather have one or the other -- either straight history or biographical fiction, not a mix of the two. That is a personal glitch, though, and not one that would cause me to tell people not to read this!

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG.  It's very clean, but there are some stressful parts where Luther's life is in danger and so on.  


Obviously, this is another post in my series about the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his 95 these to the Wittenburg church's door.  I've started posting more about this on my other blog too, if you're interested.


This is my tenth book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017.  Getting close to my goal of twelve!

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