Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa, the subject of this book, is eventually identified in it as Agnes Bojaxhiu, born in 1910 in Skopje, Albania, to a staunchly Catholic family. The author discovers that young Agnes had a happy childhood and did not wish to become a nun until the age of eighteen, when she entered a convent. Typically of Mother Teresa, this early information, and most information about her later life, is very sketchy. Christopher Hitchens writes that she is close-mouthed about herself, giving only the barest details even to her most trusted admirers in the media. In a fragmentary biography of Mother Teresa written by a devotee, Hitchens learns and relates to the reader that the young novitiate traveled to Yugoslavia, and then to Ireland, and then to India, where she remained based as a Catholic missionary for four-and-a-half decades. The characterization Hitchens offers of Mother Teresa in this book...