Universal Father: A Life Of Pope John Paul Ii

"At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved... I was not old enough to make my first communion when I lost my mother. My brother Edmund died from scarlet fever in a virulent epidemic at the hospital where he was starting as a doctor. After my father's death, which occurred in February 1941, I gradually became aware of my true path."
--POPE JOHN PAUL II


Pope John Paul II will go down in history not only as the third longest serving pope, but possibly the most politically influential of all 305 popes and antipopes since St. Peter.
Born in Poland in 1920, Karol Wojtyla's early life was filled with intense love and intense loss: he was eight when his mother died, twelve when his older brother died of scarlet fever, and twenty when his severe but loving father died during the Nazi occupation. An avid soccer player and skier, a gifted poet, playwright and actor, by 1944, after a near fatal accident, Wojtyla was studying for the priesthood in secret. Garry O'Connor, an accomplished biographer of the likes of Sir Alec Guinness, Ralph Richardson and William Shakespeare has spent the last five years writing and researching this book. Unlike the competition, this book details not only Wojtyla's life before he became pope, his friendships with men and with women, his nationalism, his early years as a priest in rural Poland and his travels to Rome, but it also explores the pope's own poems, plays, and philosophical works to find clues to what makes him tick.