Derek Brewer, one of Lewis' onetime pupils, records that a Cambridge professor once said that Lewis was "a very good man to whom goodness did not come easily." This biography seconds that opinion: it presents Lewis as having a troubled life, but one that was continuously offered up to the Lord as a sacrifice. In the appendix, written a decade after its intial publication, Sayer addresses several alternate biographies that had appeared of Lewis since: he says that the very real ugliness of much of Lewis' younger life was, for all practical purposes, exterminated from his later life by, as he quotes Lewis as saying, "prayer and fasting." After reading this, I have even more admiration for Lewis; having heard his story from someone less reticent about his virtues and more objective about his sins (can one be objective about anybody's sins?), he seems even more like an Augustine or a Paul to me: a powerful mind pulled from sin and self-centeredness to champion Christ.