"a brilliantly detailed portrait"

Our book for August is Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Authority, by Robert Peel. This is the third in his respected trilogy on the life of this remarkable religious leader, who remains largely misunderstood.

The dust jacket on my copy - published in 1977 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NY - reads:

This is the third and concluding volume in Robert Peel's monumental biography of the founder of Christian Science. Like the first two volumes (Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial), it does not assume the reader's prior familiarity with the subject, but allows him to become acquainted with this remarkable woman at a significant stage of her career as though he were coming upon her for the first time.

The last years of Mary Baker Eddy's life (1892-1910) witnessed the triumph of Christian Science over some of the harshest criticism and severest crises that the new religious movement had yet encountered. In those years Mrs. Eddy formed The Mother Church in Boston, saw her movement spread to Europe and around the world, wrestled with the problem of spiritual authority in an increasingly secular society [emphasis added], and in her eighty-eighth year founded The Christian Science Monitor. During the same period, she faced lawsuits, personal attacks and assorted onslaughts by disaffected followers, the press, hostile biographers, and that spokesman for the age, Mark Twain [emphasis added]. But even Twain's mordant cynicism could not entirely nullify the incongruous admiration that flashed out in the midst of his strictures and led him to describe her as "the most interesting woman that had ever lived, and the most extraordinary."

The closing years of Mrs. Eddy's life are fascinating in themselves and round out Robert Peel's brilliantly detailed portrait of a great religious leader. In addition, this volume examines in new perspective the nature of Christian authority in an age of science [emphasis added]. 

Robert Peel has had a varied career as a college professor, literary critic, newspaperman, editorial consultant to the Church of Christ, Scientist, and writer on ecumenical topics. Besides his three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy, he is the author of Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture, of which the historian Perry Miller wrote: "No student of the religious culture of America can afford to neglect this book."

We hope you enjoy dropping anchor and taking the time to explore this vast and deeply informative volume.

Julie Swannell