Books
Brains...
Zone One is a zombie novel. Sure, it’s a “literary” zombie novel, with better writing and more complex characterization than your typical tale of the undead. But it is still a zombie novel, through and through, and Whitehead, one of the most critically respected writers of his generation, is unashamed to embrace the genre in all its pulpy glory.
Deconstructed
Jeffrey Eugenides wants readers to think about how the marriage plot must complicate itself in the twentieth-century novel; but the book’s end seems too cleverly rigged and self-delighting.
An Ignatian Spirit
To write a biography of Avery Dulles is to enter the vitriolic conflict over interpretations of the legacy of Vatican II, the current state and future prospects of Catholicism in the United States, and the health of Catholic theology. There is much to be said for Carey’s way of organizing the myriad events and scholarly works in the life of a very public intellectual. Yet it finally fails to capture the complexity of the figure that emerges in the pages of this book.
An Inconvenient Theology
William Stringfellow is one of the most intriguing modern American theologians, but you’re not alone if you haven’t heard of him. Rowan Williams, Stanley Hauerwas, and Daniel Berrigan have all been influenced by his work, yet since his death in 1985, Stringfellow’s legacy has been sorely under-appreciated and his writings far too little sought after.
Holiday Books
For the umpteenth straight year, the New York Times’s massive “Holiday Books” edition of the Sunday Book Review gives no attention to books about religion. This makes perfect sense. Isn’t the “Holiday Books” edition a very commercial effort oriented toward gift-giving? And doesn’t everyone know that the traditional holiday for giving people books is January 1, New Year’s Day?
Curator of the Fantastic
Steven Millhauser's new book, We Others: New and Selected Stories, shows that the author is neither difficult nor obscure, but rather a deeply American writer, working in some very old-fashioned veins of New England storytelling.
Shipwrecked?
What counts as authentically “Catholic,” and who gets to make that determination? That is the focus of this timely collection about the persistent problem of authority in contemporary Catholicism.
Duelling Dualisms
Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea is a big book with big aspirations. It expects its readers to know something about philosophy, science, and theology. For those who do, it proposes a way to integrate these bodies of knowledge into a single worldview.
Last Dance
A review of the late Wilfrid Sheed's The House that George Built
Christmas Critics
Our reviewers recommend books for the holiday season.
A Dive on Third Avenue
Auden's Age of Anxiety remains a remarkably interesting work. It will go on being a puzzle, of course, but one is glad to have it available again in this new critical edition, with such a helpful introduction by Alan Jacobs.
Imagine
Gregory Wolfe has written an engaging account of his own shift from a recent graduate of Hillsdale College and proud member of the Reagan revolution to the founder and editor of the excellent quarterly journal Image, which brings contemporary arts into conversation with Christianity.
A Growth Industry
Peacebuilding is the fruit of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, an affiliation of scholars, practitioners, and institutions. It is concrete, pastoral, conceptually challenging, and provides many practical suggestions.
America’s Oldest Problem
It’s too bad Michael Dawson isn’t a better writer. That, at least, might have made Not in Our Lifetimes less of a slog. Instead, the book is turgid, larded with the jargon of academic political science, and, in the end, not terribly enlightening.
‘Shew’ & Tell
Julian of Norwich, Theologian is the best theological exposition of Julian to appear so far. It doesn’t pretend to offer a comprehensive introduction to her thinking. Instead, it shows why her thinking is still of value and how one might critically engage with it.
Patriots & Vandals
Two recent books offer fresh views of the fateful action in Boston harbor on the night of December 16, 1773. What really happened at the Boston Tea Party?
Eurocentrist
Is modernity inherently secularizing? Do certain basic features of modern life implacably diminish the plausibility and power of religion?
A Natural
It is a rare book that can include casual allusions to both Walt Whitman and the sports agent Scott Boras, that can talk as intelligently about former second baseman Steve Sax as about Moby-Dick. Yet Harbach pulls it off. His writing displays the quiet confidence and agility of a veteran middle infielder.
All Clogs
Nicholson Baker’s Splendid Digressions
Lost Boy
Eire’s first memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, focused on his memories of life in Cuba. Learning to Die in Miami describes his life after emigrating. Welcome to America, Carlos. Or is it Charles?
Was He a Theologian?
Forty-three years after his death, Merton remains one of the most compelling U.S. Catholics of the 20th century. Numerous scholars have tried to show the theological merit of his work. Christopher Pramuk’s Sophia is an important contribution to this field.
The War on Beige
Finding good resources for adult faith formation isn't easy. For years, the field has been wide open for someone who could combine actual substantive content with an engaging yet adult-worthy teaching style. Into this breach comes Catholicism.
Fertile Crescent?
Ryan recommends "this succinct book...to anyone faced with gloom-and-doom interlocutors who bloviate about the 'clash of civilizations' or mourn the passing of the civilized 'West,about to be overrun by prolific Muslims with multiple wives and dozens of children."
Minuet with Caesar
The chair of Fordham's Theology Dept. reviews Charles Mathewes's The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times and William T. Cavanaugh's Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church.
Deep Focus
Many moviemakers have dedicated themselves to living large, but John Huston was downright baronial not only in his acquisitiveness but his generosity, and it is to the credit of Jeffery Meyers’s new biography that the graciousness gets just as much attention as the self-indulgences.
Priestly Tales
It’s refreshing to encounter two novels about the lives of priests that feature not sex abuse or embezzlement, but rather the possibility of romance between consenting adults. A review of John Reimringer’s debut novel Vestments, set in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the decades after Vatican II, and Judith Rock's The Rhetoric of Death, about a Jesuit scholastic assigned to teach rhetoric and dance at the College of Louis le Grand in seventeenth-century Paris.
Follow the Losers
After the Revolutionary War, loyalist Americans left for other parts of the British Empire. Liberty’s Exiles focuses on these 60,000 -- including 10 thousand free blacks who left, as well as the 15,000 slaves departing loyalists took with them.
An Indispensable Nation?
The American raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound has laid bare the strained relationship between Pakistan & the United States. Anatol Lieven’s new book Pakistan: A Hard Country, published just before the raid, takes up many of the questions raised in the wake of bin Laden’s death.
We Hold Which Truths?
In his insightful and bracing book, Paul Horwitz calls for a “constitutional agnosticism,” urging judges, public officials, and citizens to confront openly the truth of religious claims.
Religion Booknotes
Reviews of Mercy without Borders: The Catholic Worker & Immigration, Garry Wills's "biography" of Augustine's Confessions, Martin Marty's study of Bonhoeffer's letters from prison, and a book about the Communion & Liberation movement.
Greased Palms
A review of Jason Berry's Render Unto Rome
Poetryland
Beautiful & Pointless, by the poet David Orr, is a short, lively guidebook that proposes to conduct the “general reader” about the landscape of contemporary poetry—what Orr refers to more than once as Poetryland.
Should They Stay or Should They Go?
Immigrants and the Right to Stay is a tiny book that raises a big question: Are undocumented immigrants who have managed to remain in the United States for an extended period of time—say, five to ten years—entitled to remain?
Death & Taxes
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, he left behind the fragments of this unfinished novel. What do the now-assembled pieces amount to?
Babbling Spirit
In his new book, The Social Animal, David Brooks argues that this simplistic individualism yields failed public policies because it fails as a theory of human nature.
Challenging Caesar
As the 2012 presidential campaign is about to begin, Cardinal Francis George offers his new book, God in Action, in which he attempts to limn a politics informed by the Catholic philosophical tradition.
It Wasn’t Cheap
Eric Metaxas’s biography focuses closely on the conflicts and drama of Bonhoeffer’s life, and succeeds in giving us a strong sense of his energy, persuasiveness, and courage.
One Big Thing
A review of Ronald Dworkin's book Justice for Hedgehogs
Liturgy by Committee
In Hull’s view, the revolution in the Catholic Church's liturgical practice was “the worst wound ever inflicted on the Mystical Body.”
Bin Laden’s Legacy
Befitting its subject, The Longest War is a very long book, a comprehensive examination of the struggle that began slowly and surreptitiously in the early 1990s and continued—at least until Osama bin Laden’s killing.
Wide Orbit
Richard Cohen's book Chasing the Sun is a perfect example of a book that should be grazed on, not read.
Guilt Trip
Sullivan's acclaimed novel Commencement focused on 4 college roommates working toward adulthood. Maine is also a portrait of 4 women, this time from different generations of a Boston Irish Catholic family.
What We’ve Lost
A review of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steven R. Weisman, and Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers
Anecdotes as Antidotes
U.S. democracy is stalled because powerful, unaccountable economic and political elites capable of domination are geared up, while those whom they would dominate are largely gearless.
Dorothy’s Days
Letters from a saint
Fetal Positions
A review of Ourselves Unborn, by Sara Dubow
Santo Subito?
If George Weigel had lived in nineteenth-century France, he would have been termed an ultramontane—one who looked beyond the Alps to Rome. Instead, he looks from Washington to Rome.
The Great Reversal
This book proposes a new narrative for understanding the past three decades of our democratic life, a “thirty-year war” in which a long slow struggle through much of the 20th century for greater equality of income and wealth has been reversed.
A Sensitive Head
A review of Peter Seewald's book-length interview with Pope Benedict XVI
Europe’s Darkest Hours
Bloodlands offers meticulous description of mass murder in restrained, almost clinical prose whose power comes from the gradual, relentless accumulation of horrific detail.
The Fundamentalist Moment
The Careers of Pat Robertson & Francis Schaeffer
Wills’s Testament
Garry Wills's 'Outside Looking In'
Seize This Book
More than once in this collection of vigorous letters, Bellow apologizes for his unsatisfactory epistolary habits: “I’ve never enjoyed writing letters,” he tells Ralph Ellison. “It’s part of some disagreeable reticence in me—laziness; worse; something very nasty.”
Single-issue Church?
A review of George Dennis O'Brien's book The Church and Abortion
Unabridged
This ambitious project represents the first attempt in decades by a major Anglophone historian of Christianity to craft a one-volume narrative of the faith from its origin to the present.
A World of False Choices
A review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
Ike Was Right
Andrew Bacevich is a prolific writer whose many books constitute one of the best accounts we have of the distortions brought to American life by our childlike dependence on the security war-making seems to offer but never quite delivers.
Apples & Oranges?
Stephen Prothero is a superb teacher, and I gladly put myself in his hands. But if we must keep an eye on the headlines in order to be effective teachers in today’s public square, let’s at least get our own headline right.
Caffeinated Realism
A review of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections.
Course Correction
What charter-school advocates don't want you to know
‘Credo in Newmanum’
This book is sensible, judicious, well written, and filled with aptly chosen quotations, from Newman himself, and from friends and foes alike.
Burned Down & Out
Stealing Fatima is memorably many things: a story of discovery and surprise, of friendship and love, of the intricate web that binds our personal and social lives with our lives of faith.
Conciliator-in-Chief
The Bridge is the latest entry in an already crowded field, the Obama biography sweepstakes. Remnick is editor of the New Yorker, and this unfailingly lucid narrative has the welcome feel of a leisurely magazine profile.
Last Testament
A review of Ill Fares the Land, the late Tony Judt's final book
Humane Society?
Andrew Linzey was among the first to open up the field of “animal theology." This book is neither his best nor his most original work, but it is still worth recommending to anyone unfamiliar with his arguments.
Fellow Travelers?
In The Flight of the Intellectuals, a study of the Swiss Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan and Ramadan's admirers in the Western press, Paul Berman shows he's in over his head.
For Worse
American couples’ ambitions for personally fulfilling marriages have never been higher nor—given the high rates of divorce—more elusive.
Ignatius for the Perplexed
In his new book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Fr. James Martin tries to introduce a new generation of spiritual seekers to the Jesuit tradition.
The Banality of Eagleton
A review of the book On Evil
But Greenspan Said So
A review of John Cassidy's book How Markets Fail
Continental Divide
Among elected officials, journalists, and average citizens, intensifying partisan polarization is thought to be one of the dominant political trends of our times. Yet it has proved remarkably controversial among political scientists.
The End Was Coming
The “Western world has never been richer, more secure, or more heavily armed in its history,” writes Overy. So relax.
Hard-wired for God?
For centuries we thought God was the source of our sense of God. It came as no surprise, therefore, when historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists discovered that even our remotest ancestors were religious. Isn’t the reality of God—or the presence of the sacred—enough to explain why human beings universally possess a 'faith instinct'? Not anymore. A review of Nicholas Wade's new book The Faith Instinct.
Not So Simple
A review of Cardinal Francis George's The Difference God Makes
Saint of Salvador
A review of the book 'Oscar Romero and the Communion of Saints'
The S-word
A review of the book Why Not Socialism?
Behind the Scenes
Fisher reveals how a Hollywood-born, bestselling Jewish novelist and a skeptical Greek Orthodox director came to a tell a story grounded in papal encyclicals and Catholic social teaching.
Hitler’s Gospel
The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians & the Bible in Nazi Germany
Required Reading
Spiritual Classics, at a Bookstore Near You
He’s Got Rhythm
That this critic, at age ninety, should have produced such an extraordinarily packed, balanced, and wise book gives us heartening evidence of his staying power as well as E. M. Forster’s.
Salinger & His Critics
A defense of the anti-Hemingway
Saints, Pilgrims & Artists
The wounded souls of J. D. Salinger's stories
Grammar Lesson
A review of Nicholas Lash's Theology for Pilgrims
A Rabbi
A review of John Meier's landmark A Marginal Jew: Volume 4
How Tough Was He?
Knowledge of Calvin is of two kinds. There is knowledge of Calvin himself, as we know him in his life. And there is the knowledge of ourselves that we project onto this historical figure in the name of our many versions of Calvinism and anti-Calvinism.
Between Silence & Sound
A review of Marie Ponsot's new book of poems
Cloudy Crystal Ball
John L. Allen's The Future Church will disappoint some readers and exhaust others. It recapitulates much of what Allen has reported in recent years and offers an admittedly shaky premise on which to base a forecast.
Secular Sabbath
Unbelief in Ian McEwan's Fiction
Cutting Through the Cant
A review of Jackson Lears's 'Rebirth of a Nation'
Restrung
The many trials of Archbishop Rembert Weakland—a review of his autobiography
Summer Reading
Our critics’ recommendations
An Offer You Can Refuse
James Carroll’s Practicing Catholic is an ambitious book, but no bargain.
Stumbling Blocks
A review of two new books on the prospects for peace in the Middle East
A Friend in Hippo
The lasting influence of Augustine’s arguments on behalf of the Jews
Half Right
A review of ’Grand New Party,’ by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Unitarian Advice
A review of the late Ted Sorenson's 2008 memoir
Someone Else's Pain
A review of The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.
Catholic Answers
From the archives: a review of Archbishop Charles Chaput's Render unto Caesar
From Principle to Policy
Why Catholics shouldn’t fear faith-based arguments about economic policy
What Wills Misunderstood
A review of Garry Wills’s ’What Jesus Meant,’ ’What Paul Meant,’ and ’What the Gospels Meant’
The Lord & Taylor
A review of Mark C. Taylor’s latest book, ’After God’
Beyond Utterance
A review of Elizabeth A. Johnson's Quest for the Living God
Impressions of Eternity
A review of ’Do You Believe? Conversations on God & Religion’
Provocateurs
A review of the controversial new book ’The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy.’
The Silent Justice
Kevin Merida & Michael A. Fletcher’s biography of Clarence Thomas
Why Secularism Is the Exception
Mark Lilla’s "powerful, if often puzzling" The Stillborn God.
What Became of Wystan?
Auden early, late, and collected.
Not Well
A review of ’How Doctors Think’ by Jerome Groopman.
The Face of God
Another take on ’Jesus of Nazareth’
Between Theology & Exegesis
A review of the pope’s new book on Jesus.
This Book Is Not Good
All you need to know about the failure of Christopher Hitchens’s latest antireligious screed.
Europe at the Crossroads
A historian reviews Ian Buruma’s ’Murder in Amsterdam’ & Michael Burleigh’s ’Sacred Causes’
Competing Values
’Is democracy possible here?’ Ronald Dworkin’s new book asks. Is his answer correct?
The Puzzling Pope
A review of David Gibson’s ’The Rule of Benedict’
Be Not Afraid
What’s missing from Damon Linker’s controversial new book, ’The Theocons’?
Can We Say No to a Friend?
The trouble with Israel’s relationship to the United States.
Don't Worry, Be Happy
Finally, someone’s discovered the formula to avoid becoming wealthy.
Religion Booknotes
From the Maritains to the Catholic Worker, from icons to the sanctified vision, Cunningham reviews the latest in religious publishing.
Breaking the Spell
Daniel Dennett’s materialism is unlikely to win many converts.
Really?
"George Weigel has chosen a risky title for his book on the election of Pope Benedict XVI. The claim that Joseph Ratzinger was ’God’s choice’ for pope is a judgment that needs the long perspective of time to warrant or to test it," writes historian Eamon Duffy. "In any case, Pope Benedict himself has expressed reservations about attributing papal elections too readily to the direct action of the Holy Spirit-as he has pointed out, dubious or incompetent popes have been elected too often for the process to be considered routinely inspired. And famously, when the late Cardinal Basil Hume of Westminster ventured the opinion that the newly elected John Paul I had been ’God’s candidate,’ he was to be rudely confounded by the sudden death of that candidate just one month later. Absit omen."
Anchorwoman
Does Raymond Arroyo’s biography of his one-time employer make for compelling reading, or is it little more than hagiography? Michael O. Garvey reviews Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles.
You Can Look It Up
A review of Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations
A Tale of Two Cities
A review of Peter Quinn's novel Hour of the Cat
Squandered Victory
When a final accounting of the U.S. war in Iraq is toted up, we may learn why so many things went wrong. How did the best-equipped, most powerful army in the world sweep to victory and then so quickly lose control? How did astute politicians from Donald Rumsfeld to Colin Powell to John Kerry to Hillary Clinton so systematically miscalculate the consequences of going to war against a country so religiously complex and ethnically divided?
Memory and Identity
John Paul’s last book raises but does not answer the question of God. Bernard G. Prusak reviews.
Torture
David McCabe reviews a collection of essays on torture.
The Ratzinger File
Reviews of The Ratzinger Report (1987)
On Apology
Who’s sorry now? Sidney Callahan on the growing importance of private and public apologies.
The Pontiff in Winter
John Paul II, like Superman, tried to do everything. And in doing so, he may have harmed the church. Luke Timothy Johnson on JPII’s legacy.
The Catholic Thing
Robert Orsi’s writing has limned the devotional world of twentieth-century Catholicism. John McGreevy reviews his latest book.
There Is a Balm
Valerie Sayers reviews Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
American Ghosts
In his new memoir, writer David Plante offers a strange, mysterious, and deeply hopeful sense of spiritual possibility. Valerie Sayers reviews.
Chronicles
"So vividly written and deeply engaging is Bob Dylan’s memoir that it would be memorable and valuable even if it were by someone less famous and fascinating."
Young Catholics
"In her book ’The New Faithful,’ Colleen Carroll asserts that young Catholics take a more conservative approach to matters of faith than their elders do. According to James Davidson and Dean Hoge, that assertion is not supported by the empirical data produced in their study and earlier studies they have conducted."
What a Mess
The Missing Peace is a chronicle of the ups and downs (mostly downs) of U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross’s efforts to end the conflict in the Middle East. Margaret O’Brien Steinfels reviews.
Graham Greene at 100
The third installment of Norman Sherry’s epic biography of Graham Greene is long on, well, length, but short on insights. By Bernard Bergonzi.
Father Joe
Is there a Catholic news story today that’s not related to sexual abuse? Tony Hendra’s bestselling spiritual memoir Father Joe has garnered its share of controversy, but is it any good, as a piece of writing? Grant Gallicho reviews.
Faith-Based Initiator
A review of 'Performing the Faith' by Stanley Hauerwas.
Why Lincoln Matters by Mario MCuomo
In his new book, Mario Cuomo compares our sixteenth president to our current one. Alan Wolfe reviews.
Pull Me Up
New York Times columnist Dan Barry delivers more than "just another Irish-Catholic kitchen-sink drama" in his poignant new memoir. David Gibson reviews.
Two Catholics in the Public Square
A review of Sargent Shriver's biography & Joseph Califano's memoir
Navigating the Future
A review of Peter Steinfels's A People Adrift
The Reformation
Brad S. Gregory reviews: "An enormously ambitious book, precisely because it seeks to do so much, is bound to draw criticisms of various kinds. In its own way, that is a tribute of a very high order."
Napoleon
Why the new Napoleon biography by Steven Englund deserves a place on your bookshelves. James J. Sheehan explains.
One nation, including God
Michael Novak is an intellectual paladin, ingenious and learned, contentiously empyreal and remarkably prolific, with some twenty titles in print on American public life and Catholic social thought. Wilson Carey McWilliams reviews his latest.
Our Fathers
"Reading Our Fathers, a sprawling narrative history of the sexual-abuse crisis by David France, is like watching a bad movie all over again. You know how this is one is going to end." Maurice Timothy Reidy reviews.
Martin Luther
Who was Martin Luther? Renowned historian Martin Marty has an answer. William C. Placher reviews Marty’s latest excellence.
