The T S Eliot industryall those library shelves of dissertations and articles and book-length studieshas issued at last in a model biography In it Lyndall Gordon sharpens and expands two earlier volumes on Eliot Early Years 1977 and New Life 1988 She has drawn on much correspondence and mat

With his latest novel Roddy Doyle the laureate of Dublin rsquo s present quot lower middle classes quot moves down the social ladder a notch or two and a century back in time His sympathy remains however clearly with the proles and in Henry Smart he has found his ideal protagoniststreet-sma

Is there a more remarkable spiritual writer today than Kathleen Norris And how full of paradoxes she is quot containing multitudes quot to take a leaf from Walt Whitman Coming from what she calls a quot thoroughly Protestant background quot her meditations have been both widely read and grea

Martha Nussbaum a philosopher and professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago is a prolific and forceful writer with wide-ranging interests in the classics literature jurisprudence politics feminist theory economics and international development But her primary orientation is et

Doing Time 25 Years of Prison Writing is an anthology of short stories essays and poems written by incarcerated women and men over a 25-year period They were all prize winners in the yearly competition sponsored by the prison writing program of PEN Poets Playwrights Essayists Editors and Nove

Some books merit reading because they explain the past unusually well Some books deserve to be read because they clarify the present with uncommon perspective But there are few books that manage to do both Journey in Faith and Fidelity Women Shaping Religious Life for a Renewed Church is one of