Personal Recollections Joan ARC (Thrift Editions)

Mark Twain's personal favourite was his fictional biography of Joan of Arc, "the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the ages have produced" in his own words. Inspirational book.

A fantastic book! Easily the best book I have read this year; full of adventure, heroism, virtue, love and sacrifice. I am recommending it to everyone. I was surprised to find it because I thought I had read everything by Mark Twain. Interesting to note that he thinks it is the best of his books.

Mark Twain is enthusiastic about Joan of Arc and he succeeds with conveying his enthusiasm to his readers. The book also includes a short essay by Twain about Joan of Arc which makes the point very well of why she is so special. I highly recommend it.

great

I love it......................!

It would be easy to dismiss Joan of Arc as another medieval legend along the lines of Robin Hood or King Arthur were her life not so well-documented. Whatever the Inquisition's failings as a court of justice, they elevated court reporting to an art form, making their records essential sources on medieval history. Most of what we know about Joan of Arc comes from two trials--the one that condemned her in 1431. and the one that vindicated her in 1456. One does not expect to find Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), an inveterate agnostic, writing a novel about a Roman Catholic saint (though in fact Joan would not be officially canonized until 1924). Published in 1895 when Twain was sixty, it exhibits none of his characteristic cynicism or the disdain for medieval culture on display in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," and is free of the existential nihilism found in much of his later work (notably "The Mysterious Stranger.") Joan of Arc had been his hero since boyhood, and the book took twelve years to write. Twain considered "The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" his finest work, and the one whose writing provided him with the most pleasure. As proof of how dear the subject was to him, he dedicated the book to his wife Olivia. One gets the feeling that the aging Twain was casting about desperately for someone or something to believe in, something that would rescue his writing from the increasingly cynical tone already evident as early as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Twain saw Joan as "the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable child the ages have ever produced." His characterization would seem saccharine in its sentimentality if it did not stick so close to what can be found in the historical record. Certainly it is vastly superior to the scurrilous libels of Shakespeare's "Henry VI Part One" or the revisionist sophistries of Shaw's "Saint Joan." It is a beautifully written book, full of rich detail and lifelike characters, seamlessly weaving fact and fiction. Only the somewhat labored attempts at humor mar its simplicity. Twain used the fashionable nineteenth century device of "fake documentation," writing in the first person as Joan's private secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte, whose initials correspond to Samuel Langhorne Clemens. One could almost believe Twain was a practicing Catholic, so effectively does he conceal his own authorial voice. While not one of Mark Twain's more famous works, this wonderful book is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when it was published, offering a needed respite from the cynical age we live in.