Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography

Navin Chawla's Mother Teresa, The Authorized Biography, published by Sinclair-Stevenson in 1992, is a biography written with Mother Teresa's own cooperation and the Missionaries of Charity's access, drawing on interviews with her and with sisters in the order. Its strength is exactly that access, letting the book document details of her life and the order's early history that an unauthorized account could not easily obtain. Its limit is the standard limit of an authorized biography, that cooperation with its subject shapes what material is available and how it is framed, generally toward a sympathetic account, so a claim about controversies later raised about the Missionaries of Charity's medical practices or fundraising, most prominently by critics writing after this biography's publication, needs a source independent of the order rather than this authorized account, which predates and does not address that later criticism.