I have long been fascinated by Martin Luther. Everyone talks about Martin Luther King and maybe ten years ago I recalled the little monk who that man was named for and I thought 'I didn't learn much about him in school... who was HE'. And I found that he was a very complicated, conflicted, yet brave individual. He wasn't perfect (who is?) but he impacted our world in a larger way than few before him. He made us ASK instead of follow. This is a very good biography of that man, showing his humanity instead of dwelling too much on his theology.

his is not a book for the casual reader or one who is not familiar with the Reformation or Germanic history.

The author does a very good job of presenting Luther in a neutral light. His ability to attract a following and argue his theology are presented along side his intolerance of alternative opinions and beliefs. The inner turmoil that drove his struggling faith is clearly described,and his angst to be precise and accurate in belief and teaching is also palpable. These are the strong points of this book.

For the lay person, the emphasis on theology is a bit challenging. I struggled to maintain interest in the background of the hierarchy and the constant battleground that was the state of things at the time of the Reformation. The characters, including Luther, were often portrayed as almost petty in their inability to listen to and attempt to relate to the interpretations of each other. I found myself incapable of caring about some of the intricate historic and theological details.

The author did significant research and is quite complete in painting a picture of the life and times of Luther and his contemporaries. I found it almost too exhaustive for my personal interest, but would certainly recommend this book to serious students of both the historic and theological era of the Reformation.

I thank the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.

Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet was a book ten years in the making. Historian Lyndal Roper has produced a 576 page very well researched and documented biography of this pivotal figure. I am a Protestant--albeit of the Methodist and not the Lutheran tradition--so I knew some rudimentary facts about Luther and knew that he had written many wonderful hymns that I have enjoyed singing, but that was about it. So, I welcomed the chance to review an advance reader's copy of a biography about his life that would be aimed at the popular as well as the theological market, and thank Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity. I learned a lot of history from this book which was written more from a historical psychological angle rather than purely religious one. Parts of it were very interesting and parts of it were slow going and contained almost too much information for me ( but perhaps not for someone who likes lots of meticulous details.). I have to be honest, the book contained so much information that I would not have read every word or finished it unless I had agreed to review it. Luther was someone who changed the way a lot of the world worships God, but he was also a very human person with very human qualities and the author speaks of him as such. His adherence to the Bible as the definitive guide on how to worship God, his translating portions of the Bible into German so that more could read it, and his encouraging all to sing hymns in worship was admirable in my eyes. He also, however, had less than admirable qualities like antisemitism and pettyness and a rather coarse way of expressing himself sometimes. The author writes: " Luther’s extraordinary openness, his honest willingness to put everything on the line, and his capacity to accept God’s grace as a gift he did not merit are his most attractive characteristics. Luther is a difficult hero, nonetheless. His writings can be full of hatred, and his predilection for scatological rhetoric and humor is not to modern taste. He could be authoritarian, bullying, overconfident; his domineering ways overshadowed his children’s lives and alienated many of his followers. His intransigent capacity to demonize his opponents was more than a psychological flaw because it meant that Protestantism split very early, weakening it permanently and leading to centuries of war. His anti-Semitism was more visceral than that of many of his contemporaries, and it was also intrinsic to his religiosity and his understanding of the relation between the Old and the New Testament. It cannot just be excused as the prejudice of his day. His greatest intellectual gift was his ability to simplify, to cut to the heart of an issue—but this also made it difficult for him to compromise or see nuance. And yet only someone with an utter inability to see anyone else’s point of view could have had the courage to take on the papacy, to act like a “blinkered horse” looking neither to right nor left, but treading relentlessly onward regardless of the consequences. And only someone with a sense of humor, a stubborn realism, and a remarkable ability to engage the deepest loyalties of others could have avoided the martyrdom that threatened..". I learned a lot from this book, and applaud all of the efforts that went into its research and writing, but only recommend it for those who want a very in-depth biography of Luther.

Anniversaries attract histories and biographies like, uh, cold pizzas attract cockroaches, hm, note to self, practice generating more appealing similes.

Anyway, Luther might have glued (or nailed, which seems more dramatic somehow) his Theses to the church door in October 1517, so I guess we can anticipate self-styled opinion makers speculating in a few short months on what it all means, even if they (the opinion makers) haven't attended a house of worship in earnest since before they got their second teeth.

I certainly don't know what it all means, which is why I took this opportunity to get to know more about Luther. But this is not a book for people who have achieved adulthood mostly in ignorance of the life of Luther, as I have. I don't feel tremendously at fault: if the Catholic weekend-school teachers had their way, our classes would have been complete uncontaminated by ideas of any type, and of course US public schools gave religion a great big letting-alone, too, because they already had their hands full with all the other stuff we were supposed to learn.

In any event, this book requires a lot of background knowledge that I didn't have. Maybe if I had been an American of German Lutheran descent, I would have had more of the knowledge necessary to enjoy this book. As it was, I scratched my head some over the crazy quilt of princes, electors, landgraves, margraves, bishops, and other aristos that somehow miraculously coalesced into modern-day Germany. Furthermore, even though the author struggled heroically to explain them all, I had trouble keeping the competing philosophies that did battle in this period, which include:

Fuggers (Kindle location 638), nominalists (l. 903), Ockhamists (l. 913), followers of Duns Scotus (l. 1594), antinomians (l. 2380), Aristotelians and anti-Aristotelians (l. 2830), scholastists (l. 3701), Thomists (l. 3743), humanists (l. 3746), followers of the Free Spirit heresy (l. 4212), Anabaptists (l. 4425), sacramentarians (l. 4840), irenicists (l. 5747), practitioners of the Nestorian heresy (l. 5948), conciliarism (l. 6093), Sabbatarians (l. 6530), and Pietists (l. 6848)

If you can explain to yourself what most of these are, you are ready for this book. As for me, O.K., I know Ockham's Razor, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas are, and can take an educated guess what the important points of contention were for Anabaptists and Sabbatarians, but sometimes the exact nature of the squabbles among these groups were difficult to follow.

Again, this is not the author's fault – this is just not the right book for the uninformed general reader. There's some compelling bits where the nature of Luther's achievements (e.g., his translation of the New Testament into vernacular German) are stated clearly and memorably. But <i>a lot</i> of this book chronicles Luther's unending quarrels with his peers. I understand that this took up a lot of his time, but I wasn't really convinced that the quarrels were so important. This book could have used a little more compassion for the ignorant.

To summarize, if you know something about Luther or learned about him in your youth, this may be a good long serious book to refresh your knowledge of this complex revolutionary. But if you are coming at this from a state of fairly comprehensive ignorance, as I was, it may be a little hard sledding.

I received an free unfinished galley of the ebook for review. Thank you to <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/">Netgalley</a> and <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/236142/martin-luther-by-lyndal-roper/9780812996197/">Penguin Random House</a> for their generosity.

An interesting book. Although there is not a lot that is new, it was still informative and interesting. If you want to know more about Martin Luther this is a good one to learn from. Highly recommend this book.

I grew up Lutheran and always heard about Martin Luther but never really knew a lot about Luther the man. This exhaustingly researched and well-written biography must tell everything there is to know about the man, his thoughts, and ideas. It's a long and detailed book but not boring. Excellent biography.

(Lengthened review to come shortly... Stay tuned...)