The basic idea of this book is a good one. There is much of value to be said about how Bonhoeffer's letters and papers were collected together by his devoted literary executor and editor and quite as much to be said about how such a book first won an audience in the world. For it remains a classic in the canon of twentieth-century Christian literature – one of a small handful of volumes which managed to crystallise something crucial in the Christian experience of dictatorship and war and still commend a vivid inspiration to a future age. Martin E. Marty is a distinguished and much-published American disciple. He writes in reflective, personable prose and he brings to the task of interpretation the perceptions of a theologian with a broad sympathy for the many intense themes of the source. He revels in literary techniques and neat distinctions, distinguishing between the work of a mere ‘editor’ and one who instead ‘fosters’ a text into something at least partly recognisable in his own image. Once the Letters and papers tumble out of Eberhard Bethge's study and into the rough-and-ready world of the later twentieth century the narrative promptly expands – into a Germany still reckoning with the tortured legacies of National Socialism; into a Europe divided by the harsh imperatives of the Cold War; into the provincial drama of an English bishop's polemic (Honest to God) and the abrasive rhetoric of the United States (The Death of God); into the strife of the apartheid years in South Africa; and so at last to South American and ‘even Asian’ controversies. Naturally, all of these crowded contexts would retrieve Bonhoeffer's example and ideas in different forms: he was appropriated, often creatively and valuably but sometimes almost mercilessly, by many constituencies for their own particular reasons. Perhaps the most tenacious of these were to be found in the theology faculties of the universities. Here some brief Bonhoefferian provocations were sufficiently vivid – and elusive – to keep earnest scholars busy with intricate, elongated theses for years and years. Marty observes all of this respectfully, even benignly, and is sufficiently gentle to avoid the intrusion of any stark perspectives. Finally, he offers his own mordant wisdom with a succession of personal observations. This book was a job worth doing and he has done it sensitively and well.