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

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

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

I first met John McGahern in the 1990 rsquo s when I was teaching a summer course in contemporary Irish literature for Georgetown students at Trinity College in Dublin where John was then residing He was one of the people I was hoping to entice to come to my class and when I asked him he agreed

Next year will mark 50 years since John S Dunne C S C fresh from writing a dissertation on Thomas Aquinas under the direction of Bernard Lonergan S J at the Gregorian University in Rome joined the theology faculty at the University of Notre Dame In those five decades he has published 16 boo