| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Marvin R. O'Connell. Edward Sorin. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2001. Pp. x, 737. $49.95.

Edward Sorin (1814–1893), founder of the University of Notre Dame, was a French priest with the heart of an American pioneer. Whether or not he is legitimately compared to Jesus (p. 73), St. Paul (pp. 587–93), Abraham (p. 667), Pollyanna (p. 182), and D'Artagnan (p. 667), his life is clearly worthy of this massive and erudite biography. Marvin R. O'Connell is so comfortable in the ecclesiastical world of the nineteenth century that he can draw the reader into the priestly subculture that Sorin occupied. The book, written in the shadow of the famous "Golden Dome" and dedicated to Theodore M. Hesburgh, "Second Founder of Notre Dame," has the advantages (and some of the liabilities) of an insider's perspective. Occasionally the author allows his own prejudices to overwhelm the narrative (for example, when a discussion of Sorin's piety becomes an occasion for O'Connell to chide contemporary Catholics who have abandoned private devotions [p. 620]). And when O'Connell speculates (p. 424) that Sorin might have taken pleasure in the fact that one of his enemies would "spend the last thirty-three years of his life . . . in an insane asylum," I wondered whose soul I was looking into. . . .

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