This book was unlike every other book I have ever read, which was perhaps why I enjoyed it. It follows the life of four authors: Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy.
I wasn't expecting their lives to run into each others, and I wasn't expecting it to intrigue me into reading more of their writing now that I know so much about them.
Paul Elie writes like that of an esteemed professor, while I feel like a pupil of his sitting in his class every other day, and briskly keeping notes while he talked of a subject that one would normally consider boring but because of his teaching style, all of his students enjoyed his classes.
Dorothy Day's life as a passionate Catholic pacifist, O'Conner's blunt and truthful short stories that provoked anger, thought and change, Merton's wisdom living as monk and sometimes hermit, and Percy's Doctor gone novelist lifestyle, come together to display people (even famous ones) who used their skills to make change. They read each other's writings and also that of Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne, and others. They sought peace. and love. and to imitate Christ.
More than anything else this book is about their transformations in life as seen in their writings, and the pilgrimage that everyone must make spiritually.

There have been few books that I would write to the author in gratitude of his work. This is one.