After the unexpected success that was his first book, Who we are, Dan Puric comes back to the attention of the literature and truth lovers with a new call to the hearts of all Romanians – about The Beautiful Man. This book, which is structured the same as the first, of interviews, conferences and texts, has as a central theme “the fact of being Romanian”. The author suggests the revelation of the beautiful in everything that surrounds us, but especially within ourselves, because this extraordinary quality, of being beautiful men, is deeply rooted within our soul, always ready to resist any ideology and to reveal itself with the help of the memory of the one that knows his history and religion.

The autobiographic character can be spotted from the first texts, Dan Puric beginning the revealing of the beautiful with his childhood memories, his father being his main model. From early childhood he lives in the heart of the Profound Romania (he often makes references to Ovidiu Hurduzeu and Mircea Platon’s book), which he understands more deeply in time. The Profound Romania are the peasants who don’t fear the wrath of nature, after the flood building their fences on the same spot near the river, but who remain terrified in front of the communists, humans just like them, humans who forgot their humanity.

As the author says, the communist regime created the ill man of our days. Annihilating the intellectuals, imprisoning and torturing valuable people, it revealed the cowards, the shallow people and the opportunists. These had left a hereditary inheritance that can be observed at the nowadays people and that can only be healed through the return to the martyrs of communism, men who are able to remind us of who we really are. The pure nature of the Romanians makes its way through our folklore, Dan Puric giving some examples: a Bucovinian cosmogonic story, the fairy tale Prâslea the Brave and the Golden Apples and Mihai Eminescu’s Third Epistle. These proofs of our spiritual origins tell us that for the Romanians God is alive and caring, and that our faith in Him is unlimited.

In a world ruled by the ugly man, the author tells us that all we have to do is to reveal the beautiful without trying to define it, which would be impossible. He begins with the ancient philosophers only to reach the first beautiful man that walked on earth, Jesus Christ. With the help of Plotin, he explains the way in which we should perceive ourselves: “… Plotin says: what I see is beautiful, what I hear is beautiful, but there is still something else. These are measurable things, but something still arises, something beyond measure, like the soul. How do we measure it? And then he says: we perceive the divine from the outside with the divine within us.” The revelation of the beautiful begins with the assuming of our real history and religion, this only being achieved through the return to martyrs and saints. He says that the saints are the steps which God uses to descend among the people, and that a country that has a lot of saints, like Romania, has many steps that God can use. This fact means that we have stronger hopes for a peaceful future, this meaning we should celebrate our saints and traditional holydays with piety, and not with indifference, out of an act of routine. The understanding of the historical facts, of the holydays and the symbolic objects helps us return to a purer state. Thus, the past represents the reality on which we should build our future, and more importantly, the future of our children.

The solution offered by this book to the Romanians that forgot how to be proud of their origin and their country, is the revelation of the history, of orthodoxy and of the beautiful. It is an easy and pleasant reading, among the interviews being inserted memories from Dan Puric’s childhood, as well as amusing stories that reveal the open spirit of the Profound Romania.