Saints and Sinners.

• Author: Gaillard, Rachel A.

When I began to read Lawrence Wright's Saint's and Sinners, a view of six contemporary religious leaders, I was troubled by two possibilities: that I would be subjected to the railings of assorted fanatics and learn little of their substance, or that I would grasp facts about their birthplaces and philosophies and learn little of their fire. Neither is true. The book outlines the six in a style that is informative and easy to read.

Saints and Sinners deals with character. It is sufficiently biographical, but at no point does it reduce itself to merely a timeline. There is interest in events but a focus on people, and Wright hands his readers the lives in full - a mass of facts interpreted with opinions, an engaging work. I do not, however, agree unreservedly with Wright's interpretations.

My first argument arose when I turned to the chapter featuring Will Campbell, the renegade Southern Baptist and civil-rights advocate, whom I have known almost literally since I was born and consider an ally.

While my own comments regarding Campbell would be overwhelmingly positive, Wright's oscillate. The same man he hails as a prophet and a legend is presented as unpredictable and irritating. The essay spills between opposites as it progresses, and I worry that it concentrates so fully on the perimeters that it neglects the crux. The preacher himself never loses sight of the crux.

I may be biased, but I considered it a stroke of magnificence when Campbell, speaking at my grandfather's funeral service before a numb and heartbroken family, instructed us to rise and applaud the life of the man he had come to bury. That's how Will Campbell operates. He has a knack for assessing any situation and selecting from the essential core, which is often quite simple. It troubles me, then, that Wright sees fit to attach polarized comments to Campbell's name; I have never known him as a member of an extreme. Although he has managed to provoke his share of controversy, he is a person who consistently extracts beauty from the middle ground.

The rest of the book has comparable swings in...