Lamy of Santa Fe

Rating:
Summary: A classic biography from the American West
Review: Apart from Paul Horgan fans, probably most people coming to this book will be doing so to learn more about the real life archbishop who inspired Willa Cather's great novel DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. And just as Cather's novel concerns the friendship and work of two major characters--Archbishop Jean Latour and his vicar Father Joseph Vaillant--so Horgan's biography necessarily tells the story not only of Juan Bautista Lamy but also Joseph Machebeuf.

Horgan's biography succeeds magnificently in two ways. First, for those who will be coming to the book from reading Cather, one will find vastly greater depth and detail than was possible in that novel. So, the book is a boon for Cather fans. Second, even if one has not read Cather, the book tells a magnificent story of a truly heroic man and his closest friend. Their story is also the story of the West as a whole, and Santa Fe in particular.

There are biographies that record the rote facts about an individual, and unfortunately most fall into this category. And the there are biographies that almost manage to bring you into contact and introduce you to someone you have never met. Lamy emerges almost as someone you know, instead of someone you merely know things about.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in either history of the American West or in Willa Cather's great novel. Although I am not myself Roman Catholic, it would probably also be enjoyed by those whose main interest is in Church History. It is a tragedy that this book is not currently in print. With so many much weaker and less interesting biographies available, it is unfortunate that many of the truly excellent ones are not.

Rating:
Summary: A Fullsome Biography of Dedication and Accomplishment
Review: If there is proof that religion is cultural Paul Horgan demonstrates it in this work which is more than a single biography, but two. Lamy's initial dilemma, besides getting to his Santa Fe assignment, was to overcome the politics of Mexican Catholicism, and bend its will to his own. It was not the good Church defeating evil so much as it was Lamy's determination to arrange things in their proper order while at the same time creating an infrastructure to benefit his parishioners. His monument is the cathedral at Santa Fe in front of which is a stature to his memory as a man beloved by all. Still, Lamy shows a natural reluctance to relinquish habitual authority after retirement. The Archbishop was a man, after all, but a man with a calling he was determined to fulfill. Incidentally, when a character from one book shows up in another unrelated work (Lamy's eventual successor, in Tucson), 'On the Border With Crook,' it lends co-incident authenticity to both.

Rating:
Summary: An absolutely tremendous book
Review: It would be difficult if not impossible to overpraise this book. As a narrative of what the southwestern United States was like during the nineteenth century, as a triumph of research into a multitude of different sources spread out all over the United States and western Europe, and as a biography of an undeniably great man (the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Santa Fe, whose life this book tells from his departure from France around 1839 to serve as a missionary to the United States to his death in New Mexico the late 1880s), this book succeeds wonderfully. It's one of the best books I have ever read.