Books in Brief - 2. - Review - book review

John Paul II: A Personal Portrait of the Pope and the Man, by Raymond Flynn, with Robin Moore and James Vrabel (St. Martin's, 224 pp., $22.95)

Flynn, the charming former mayor of Boston and ex-ambassador to the Vatican, tells us very candidly what his book is not: It is not a biography, or an analysis, or a polemic about the current Pope's place in history. Flynn views it, rather, as a profile based on his own experiences with Pope John Paul II, dating back to a 1969 visit to Boston of then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla.

Traditionally, the writer of a profile must at least affect a certain distance from his subject; there is none of that here. What Flynn has produced instead is a love letter. He dwells on particular acts and gestures of the Pope in a manner that cannot fail to impress upon the reader the complete sincerity of Flynn's love for John Paul II. The Pope consoles a Boston woman whose son has recently died in a car crash; offers to help pay for medical care for Flynn's own son; pleads with the governor of Missouri for the life of a convicted murderer.

What comes through especially clearly is the Pope's sense of humor. Flynn says the Pope has the timing of a nightclub comic and a winsome habit of laughing at his own jokes. The glimpses Flynn offers make his book a good addition to the growing shelf of literature on John Paul II.

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