Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World by Eric Metaxas GoodReads rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've heard and often repeated, "Never use a $10 word when a $1 word will do" in relation to writing. This is the first book by this author I've read, and it will be my last. His constant use of vocabulary that NO ONE uses is ridiculous and distracting. I read - a lot. But Metaxas writing style actually obscure what he's writing about.

He obviously did a lot of research on Luther, but I'll turn to another author to get more in-depth. Metaxas fails to give us a good picture of Luther's personality that others reveal easily. It doesn't take much reading about Luther (or of reading Luther's works themselves) to see how BIG a personality he was. And yet you walk away from this book (and it's large) knowing more about events you could read about on Wikipedia than you do about Luther himself.

The author takes a paragraph to say what others would in a sentence. The book just seems to dress up the history of Luther with a few scattered stories and rely more on prose and pontificating than on revealing Luther to us.

I'm going to move on to Roland Bainton's work, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther.

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