In future years when the history of our lagging environmental consciousness is written there may well be a special place devoted to the work of Thomas Berry.

These nine tales show sons no longer connecting with mothers, mothers no longer close to their sons. A grand storyteller, Colm Tóibín uncovers dark truths about family relationships in today’s Ireland and, in a long final story, in Spain’s Catalonia.

The cover for this delightful collection of interconnected essays is the famous photo taken in 1932 of 11 ironworkers enjoying a relaxed lunch break as they sit side by side perched on an I-beam a thousand feet up in open space overlooking mid-Manhattan their legs nonchalantly dangling from the sk

Comparing himself to Flannery O 8217 Connor the novelist Walker Percy describes himself as a writer of the Catholic perspective in the 20th century From a Catholic perspective at least Christianity underwrites those very properties of the novel without which there is no novel I am speaking of

De gustibus non est disputandum is a snippet of medieval wisdom mostly honored in the breach as evidenced by Michael Kammen 8217 s Visual Shock a cheerful history of more than a century and a half of arguments about art Kammen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of American culture and his re

Viktor Frankenstein created the Monster Walt Disney created Walt Disney but the outcome was pretty much the same The creation takes control of the creator Even more chilling in Neal Gabler rsquo s unspoken subtext is the suggestion that the Disney empire provides a cautionary tale for America M