Book Review: Meet the Men and Women We Call Heroes

I love biographies because they’re true stories about relatable and yet inspirational people. But often I don’t have the time I’d like to delve into the details about the great men and women of history. And sometimes, I like to get a sense of who a person was before spending a few dozen hours of my life reading a 400-page book about them. That’s one of the reasons I’m grateful for my recent journey through Meet the Men and Women We Call Heroes, an anthology of 20 short biographies edited by Charles Turner and Ann Spangler.

 Heroes is unique in two ways: its subjects and their authors. Unlike other “hero” books, the people you’ll encounter in this volume are not particularly famous, but they were particularly impacting. There are a few headliners, like Mother Teresa and C.S. Lewis, but most are only moderately known (e.g. Catherine Marshall, Paul Brandt, Amy Carmichael), and many without any prior notoriety. They come from all points in history (the Middle Ages to modern times) and include scholars, politicians, authors, editors, poets, doctors, missionaries, fathers and mothers.

But even more unique than the collection of heroes this anthology contains is the collection of authors who describe them. Each author, 10 men and 10 women, was (and in most cases, still is) considered an influential Christian in 1985, the year of the book’s publishing. Readers then and now see them as modern “heroes of the faith,” and this puts an entirely new perspective on each contribution. Instead of simply reading about William Wilberforce, you'll read about the historical cultural activist from modern cultural activist Chuck Colson. Ever wonder who inspired people like R.C. Sproul, Elisabeth Elliot, J.I. Packer, or Philip Keller? Heroes will give you the answer. And like the subjects themselves, the contributors include lesser known (but just as effective) communicators.  

In each of the book’s 20 chapters, a contributor describes his or her hero in their own unique style. You’ll read Kitty Muggeridge’s straightforward life account of Mother Teresa, Elisabeth Sherrill’s dramatic portrayal of Adrienne de Lafayette (a.ka. the wife of the Marquis de Lafayette of American Revolution fame), and Harry Blamires’ reminisces of what it was like to be a student of C.S. Lewis. It’s true that some authors do the job better than others, but each piece gives special insight into both hero and admirer. In many instances, the chapter is a first hand account written by someone who knew the hero, sometimes quite personally.

Because it’s an unassuming paperback from 30 years ago, some might think Heroes is old enough to be considered dated, but recent enough to be considered unremarkable. But that’s a mistake. While there are a few chapters where the book’s age does leave some gaps (e.g. some of the heroes who were living have since passed on), the accounts are otherwise timeless, and the heroes just as worth learning about and emulating now as they were then.

Meet the Men and Women We Call Heroes, edited by Charles Turner and Ann Spangler, 368 pages, (Servant Publications, 1985 and other editions) is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble . Contributors (and their heroes) include Kitty Muggeridge (Mother Teresa), Elisabeth Elliot (Amy Carmichael), Kathryn Koob (Catherine Marshall), Elizabeth Sherrill (Adrienne de Lafayette), Ingrid Trobisch (Johanna Mathilda Lind Hult), Luci Shaw (Elizabeth Rooney), Gladys Hunt (Evelyn Harris Brand), Karen Burton Mains (Wilma Burton), Madeleine L’Engle (Mary McKenna O’Connell), Rebecca Manley Pippert (Ethel Renwick), Harry Blamires (C.S. Lewis), Philip Yancey (Paul Brand), Charles Colson (William Wilberforce), R.C. Sproul (Thomas Aquinas), W. Phillip Keller (Otto C. Keller), J.I. Packer (David Martyn-Lloyd Jones), Thomas Howard (Philip E. Howard Jr.), Robert E. Coleman (Blaise Pascal), Charles Turner (T. Stanley Soltau), and Malcom Muggeridge (Alexander Solzhenitsyn).