Although the Bush administration has been in a snit about The New York Times rsquo s recent revelations of government spying on Americans and the surveillance of the banking records of presumed terrorists the president has actually had an easy time of it with the Fourth Estate according to Eric Bo

Although it may be hard to imagine a volume on the construction of St Peter rsquo s Basilica as a beach book R A Scotti has produced an account gripping enough to be one The subtitle The Splendor and the Scandal hints at its focus This is not a dry account for the architectural journals but

This year Americans are hearing more and more about the environment and about climate change Al Gore rsquo s An Inconvenient Truth has brought to moviegoers the lecture he has given across the country A Newsweek cover asks Why Saving the Environment Is Suddenly Hot 7 17 a Nation cover proclaim

If Franz Kafka were to rewrite the British television comedy ldquo Yes Prime Minister rdquo the result might resemble Jos Saramago rsquo s new novel Seeing The Nobel Prize-winning novelist weaves wry sardonic humor into his dark parable of an unnamed nation locked down by fear of terrorism

Everybody wants a piece of Flaubert His contemporaries Victor Hugo Ivan Turgenev Emile Zola Guy de Maupassant and others hailed his genius Twentieth-century critics from Erich Auerbach to Lionel Trilling ushered him into the pantheon of modernism Jean-Paul Sartre ground out five massive vol

Among the signal achievements of the Second Vatican Council is the Roman Catholic Church rsquo s irreversible commitment to the cause of Christian unity How did the church come to change its preconciliar triumphalist insistence on the ldquo return rdquo of ldquo schismatics and heretics rdquo