Reviews

""Rabble Rouser for Peace" connects the publicly political Tutu to the privately spiritual one, showing the seamless flow from one to the other...[Allen's] reporting is impeccable."-- "The Baltimore Sun"

"[W]ritten with the vividness of a novel...Allen...doesn't tell Tutu's story with the piousness of a press flack; just the opposite...[He] brings a figure of sometimes saintly proportions to human scale, revealing Tutu's hard-nosed, pragmatic, and wily sides."-- Ken Tucker, "Entertainment Weekly"

"Allen's wonderfully humanising biography offers plenty of cheerful anecdote and serious insight...Where [it] has an edge over previous and, most probably, future efforts to capture Tutu's life is that he tells us, with the intimacy only a trusted friend could glean, what was going on inside Tutu's head: his misgivings, his fears, his disappointments, his ambitions as he wrestled the apartheid beast." -- John Carlin, "The Observer"

"I am suffering from acute withdrawal symptoms. Never before has reading a book had this effect on me. This life of Desmond Tutu, which I could hardly put down, is not only the work of a sensitive and perceptive journalist but of a person so intuitive, so inside his subject, that this could almost be an autobiography -- almost, but not quite, for John Allen who has long worked closely with Desmond Tutu can also stand back and look at the man he admires with a critical eye. Authorised this portrait may be, but it is not hagiography." -- Paul Oestreicher, "The Friend," UK Quaker journal

"One might have expected a tame, worshipful "authorized" biography of Tutu, but this one really captures the full man. It will probably remain definitive."-- "The Christian Century"

"The definitive study of the life of one of South Africa's great heroes...A full, rich account of Tutu's life..."-- Organizers of South Africa's Alan Paton Award for Non-fiction (for which "Rabble-Rouser for Peace" was short-listed).