Something Beautiful For God, By Malcolm Muggeridge

“Let no one come to you without leaving better and happier.” stated Mother Teresa, wholly summing up the purpose of her life mission: to become poor to help the poor. Most would agree that this quote is uplifting, and yes inspiring. However, Something Beautiful for God, a biography relating Mother Teresa’s life written by Malcolm Muggeridge, could have been so much more inspiring if the author had restrained himself from adding his own personal insights and draining sentimentality. A biography should be written as impartially as is humanly possible in order to uphold the original facts of the subject’s life, to convey inspiration to whomever finds it himself, and to avoid cluttering or adding anything to the concise message of a remarkable person’s story.

Malcolm Muggeridge, instead of keeping history of Mother Teresa’s life, kept an assortment of his own feelings and consequently should not call his book, Something Beautiful for God, a biography about Mother Teresa, when truthfully it concerns his thoughts on her life, not the actual, plain facts. History, inspiring or not, should be kept meticulously accurate and free of embellishment for the reader’s purest benefit, and Muggeridge failed to do this by rendering two out of four sections in Mother Teresa’s “biography” with himself. A biography is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “an account of someone's life written by someone else.” An account, or the truthful sequence of events, does not include commentary, personal experience, or the impact of the subject’s life on the author. If Malcolm Muggeridge wished to share any of those things, he could have published them separately and thus spared the reader his jumbling additions to Mother Teresa’s